Week 9, Solace

The ninth song is called Solace. YouTube link for iPhone

Officially the longest song so far – it also has the fewest lyrics coming in at three lines.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Seam lately, and though this song probably sounds a little bit more like a Bedhead or The New Year song, I would attribute it to my recent Seam obsession. If you’re not already a fan of Seam, Bedhead, or The New Year, then I would recommend checking them out. Seam and Bedhead have been defunct for a good while, but The New Year is still alive, well, and cutting records.

Speaking of Seam, I have a couple degrees of separation from Seam’s last drummer, Chris Manfrin. Chris is my wife’s second cousin, and happens to be the current drummer in Bottomless Pit. Bottomless Pit is the completely amazing band of former Silkworm frontmen Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett. Chris and I have crossed paths as Bottomless Pit and the Karl Hedricks Trio have played several shows together here in Pittsburgh and on the road. The reason I bring it up is because the Trio will be playing a show with Bottomless Pit in Chicago in a couple of weeks at the Hideout on November 14. We’ll also be playing in Bloomington, IN on the 13th, Columbus, OH on the 12th, and right here in Pittsburgh this Thursday. The Kyle Sowashes, another fantastic band, are kind enough to play all of these shows with us (and book them, thanks Kyle). I hope to catch up with some of my Pittsburgh friends at Howler’s for this week’s show, and would love to see anyone else who is in reasonable proximity to the other shows.

Enough about that stuff, here’s the deal with the song:

It gets pretty huge-sounding thanks to seven guitar tracks. The vocal tracks and the three main guitar tracks were recorded into the iPhone using the Blue Mikey. I really wanted to capture the clean tone of my Fender Twin – you can hear that the Mikey captured the Twin + Telecaster sound pretty well as illustrated in the first section of the song. I added a couple more guitar tracks using my Rode NTK tube condenser straight into the laptop since I already had everything set up to record the drums. The next day I added a couple more guitar tracks and the bass track using the custom break-out cable (from Week 2) to mic my Orange practice amp. I wanted a nice full drum sound for this song, so I went back to the four mic arrangement from weeks 4 through 7 but with the Rode NTK out in front of the drum set. I like how they ended up sounding, and for once I’m not miserable about my performance (I don’t fancy myself a drummer). I also managed to work in another DopplerPad track. I created a 16-beat loop which I wanted to sit lightly in the mix and then imported it into Reaper. The loop plays throughout the song, but you can only really hear it during the first and last sections. DopplerPad is really a great iPhone app. I’m looking forward to what they have planned for the next update. I used the fantastic MultiTrack iPhone app again to record everything with the exception of the drums and a couple guitar tracks.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week. Don’t forget to come out and see Bottomless Pit, The Kyle Sowashes, and The Karl Hendricks Trio on our tiny whirlwind tour (which is about the right size for us dudes with kids).

Tags: Bedhead, Blue Mikey, Bottomless Pit, Chris Manfrin, Cockos, Corey Layman, developer, DopplerPad, FourTrack, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, Pittsburgh, Reaper, Recording, Retronyms, RocketDog, Seam, Silkworm, The Kyle Sowashes, The New Year

Week 6, Pushing It

The sixth song is called Pushing It. YouTube link for iPhone

I’m finding out that these songs have lives of their own. Last week I set out to write a short acoustic song. I wanted to experiment with the Blue Mikey, and since we had my mom and step-dad coming in from New Mexico on Thursday, I knew that I only had a little time to work with. So what started out  as a short and simple acoustic song, ended up as not so much, but it worked out all right. The production was definitely rushed, and I would have been happy to have retaken some of the guitar tracks, and don’t get me started on the drums… but then that’s the deal with this project. I like how the song came out, and it worked out as a nice chance to use DopplerPad in one of my songs. DopplerPad is another great iPhone app, developed by Retronyms, co-developer of FourTrack. Here’s a video of DopplerPad in action. It’s super-fun, but could easily eat up all of your free time.

Anyway, here’s how the song breaks down: The tuning is D-A-D-G-B-D. There’s one vocal track and three acoustic guitar tracks recorded with the Blue Mikey, one acoustic track of the entire song and the other two are just during the break, hard panned. I wanted the break to sound huge.  I added two electric guitar tracks of the same take – after getting a drum take that I could live with, I tracked the electric part on my Fender Twin using the overhead mic and the Rode NTK further back in the room. I added a bass track using the custom break-out cable on my practice amp, and the drums were the same four-mic setup from the last two weeks. I recorded the drums and the electric guitar tracks using Reaper onto my laptop. I recorded the rest of the tracks onto the iPhone using a new app, MultiTrack. MultiTrack is a fantastic piece of iPhone software developed by Harmonicdog. Believe it or not, it’s a fully functioning 16-track with input gain and input monitoring, two features that no one else that I’ve seen has pulled off well or even at all. It was just released in September and is relatively bare-bones, but due to having complete access to the developer on Harmonicdog’s forum, I can tell you that there are many more great features on the way (including a metronome, which is the one thing keeping me from using this app more often).

When everything else was done I added two tracks of DopplerPad which creep into the mix gradually. I used a 1/8″ cable plugged directly between the iPhone headphone jack and the mic input jack on my laptop and used the iPhone and DopplerPad like an instrument. It ended up having just about the effect that I was looking for. I don’t know how much I will end up using DopplerPad again on this project, if at all. But it’s super-fun to play with, so I’ll get my money’s worth.

One last thing. You may have noticed a new addition to the website. I’ve added a subscribe feature on the main page so that, if you’d like,  you can get a heads up of when I post my weekly song. You can use RSS, Twitter, or simply have an email sent. Thanks again to everyone for listening. Have a great week.

Tags: Blue Mikey, Corey Layman, developer, DopplerPad, FourTrack, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, MultiTrack, Pittsburgh, Reaper, Retronyms