Week 8, Glitter and Stone

The eighth song out is called Glitter and Stone. YouTube link for iPhone

This was a fun one.

It’s another song written in the good old standard tuning. It’s a simple song and I kept it pretty simple. There is one guitar track throughout, and then a second guitar track comes in at the first break. The two guitar tracks and the bass track were recorded onto the iPhone using the custom break-out cable and an Audix dynamic mic. I wanted a bigger drum sound for this song so I went back to recording the drums straight into Reaper on the laptop. I found myself backed against the wall again this week, having not been able to get the drum takes in by Sunday evening, so I had to throw together a three-mic setup using one Audio Technica overhead mic, the AKG D112 on the kick drum, and I moved the Rode NTK tube condenser out about four feet in front of the kit just a little higher than the top of the kick. I think the drums ended up sounding all right considering the time crunch. There are two vocal tracks, recorded using just the iPhone’s internal mic.

Last week, Fred asked if I used a pop filter when I use the iPhone mic to record vocals. I don’t, even though I have a perfectly expensive Stedman pop filter collecting dust upstairs. It took some trial and error though to avoid the air-related issues that are pretty exaggerated when you sing straight into the iPhone like you would a normal dynamic mic. The trick is to treat the mic the way it was made to work: I usually hold the phone in my hand to one side of my face with the mic pointing toward my voice about six inches away. I try to play around with it and it’s tricky to make sure that you keep a consistent location throughout. The mic is a really sensitive condenser that seems to maintain a good amount of gain at around a foot or so. I’ve also had good results holding the phone around my chin pointing up toward my mouth. It’s the same concept, but a little harder to train yourself to not point your mouth down toward the mic.

All of the tracks minus the drums were again recorded on the iPhone using the MultiTrack iPhone app. It’s a very stable 16-track recorder developed by Harmonicdog. As always, everything was mixed and tweaked using Reaper.

I hope everyone has a fantastic Halloween. No fancy parties for me this year. I’ll be happily hanging with the wife and the two-year-old who has a perfectly good elephant costume…we’ll see if he agrees to wear it, it’s day-to-day. I may be required to be an elephant too.

Tags: Cockos, Corey Layman, developer, FourTrack, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, low-fi, MultiTrack, Pittsburgh, Reaper, Recording

Week 7, For No One

This week’s song is called For No One. YouTube link for iPhone

I wanted to save myself from exhaustion and tried to get back to the low-fi concept that I started with. Well, with 14 tracks recorded I only partially achieved that goal.

Here’s how it breaks down:

I started out with two acoustic guitar tracks panned wide that I recorded using the Blue Mikey. There are two electric guitar tracks – both were recorded using the custom break-out cable to mic my Orange practice amp. I added three silly rhythm tracks with the Mikey and whatever I could find laying around. Those are pretty low in the mix now, but if you listen for them you can pick them up.

Next I took a shot at recording drums using the Mikey. I’d read that people were having mixed results using it for high-volume live music, but I’m not the loudest drummer in the world and I figured I’d give it a go and see how it turned out. It worked well enough for what was supposed to be a low-fi song. I’m happy to know that it works because it saves me precious time. I actually have two mostly identical drum takes running on this song for no good reason. They’re panned just a little bit and you can pick out the different tracks as everything falls apart at the end. I’ll keep messing around with drums through the Mikey and see if I can’t find a way to get a great drum sound using the iPhone. I’d be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts on how this one came out.

Finally, I added four vocal tracks using just the iPhone mic. The bass track was the usual setup – micing my practice amp with a dynamic mic through the break-out cable. Mixing and production was done using Reaper.

The song itself was written in good old drop-D tuning. It looks like maybe next week will mark my first song using standard tuning. I’m really not that much of a tuning geek, but for some reason it took me two months to get back to basics.

For the second week I recorded everything into MultiTrack, the 16-track iPhone app by Harmonicdog that is really great and is only going to get better. I managed to pull this one off without a metronome, which is promised to be forthcoming, but that’s not something I’ll be able to get away with too often.

Anyway, not a whole lot more to say about this one. Keep the comments coming. One from Chris last week was inquiring about a way to play the songs on your iPhone. I’ve been looking, but since phones are unable to use flash players, it really limits my options other than making the songs available as downloads. I’m not ready yet to post the songs up for download because I haven’t decided for sure what I want to do with the entire project when it’s all said and done. At minimum, I will look into having the mp3’s available for purchase, and maybe have a free mp3 of the month feature or something like that – I could even put up some stuff from my old bands and projects over the years…well thankfully I still have 45 weeks left to figure this all out. I would really like to release the entire collection in three or four volumes on a hard format as well. I have a lot of planning to do and would be happy to hear your thoughts on all of this stuff. Oh, and if anyone knows of a player out there that I could embed or use through WordPress that would work for the iPhone, let me know.

Tags: Blue Mikey, Cockos, Corey Layman, developer, FourTrack, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, low-fi, MultiTrack, Pittsburgh, Reaper, Recording