Wednesday 28 November 2012

Writing and recording a three track EP.

So I thought people might like to know the story of how I went about creating Harmonic Distortion.
 

  This article may come in useful for those of you thinking of doing something similar or anyone who's just generally interested in this sort of thing.

 
01: Background



From the age of 15 I messed around a lot with a free music editing program called Garageband, something that you get free with apple macs.

With this software I learned the basics of recording, using an old microphone I owned and a friends mixing board that he left round my house.

I spent a very long time recording each track and actually managed to get something like an EP out of it.


Now jump ahead to 2011

Last year I was in Derby and had a house of my own, so I decided to offer a service recording demo songs for singer/songwriters so that they can get a gist of what they sound like. I called this small business Blackbird Recording and recorded a couple of local artists.



 I charged very little and people seem to be fairly happy with my work. Doing this helped me to hone my skills and finally develop an 'ear' for mixing tracks and getting all of the parts to sit well with each other in the mix.

Here's one of the tracks, a cover I did with singer/songwriter Tim Gough, if you're at all interested:



This period was a major turning point in my life, when I decided to drop out of uni and pursue a career in music.

It's at this time, where I seemed to be floating in a strange form of limbo, neither at uni nor at work, that I decide to record some music. I have the skills, I can play a couple of instruments, I can sing, and there's nothing else to do; so why not?



 02: Recording the tracks

1st Stage - Writing 


So I set up all my equipment in the front room of my shared house (a space that no-one seemed to be using) and got to work on writing some songs.

 I found for me the best way to do this was to grab my acoustic and record some riffs, getting down the main body of the song before writing the lyrics or 'filling it out' with other parts.

Here's a photo of what the room looked like in that first stage:


It took me around two weeks to get five songs that I was happy with, all totally written and with lyrics.

It seemed like the hard part was over, and I felt like the work was almost done, all I needed to do now was re-record the guitar and add bass and drums. Easy peasy right? Right?


2nd Stage - 'filling out' the tracks

Guitar 



So after messing around with a couple of different sounds I settled on the one that I have now. I played the riff on my acoustic guitar and ran it into a distorted amplifier with a clip on pickup (you can see this set-up on the cover of the EP).

 I recorded the riff separately, once on the left channel (meaning it plays only in the left ear) and then on the right, this, I hope, gave it a full sound that sort of fills your mind with distortion.

I then recorded the riff on the center channel (Both left and right ears equally) with a clean sounding acoustic guitar, and turned the volume right up. This I found gave the riff a punchy edge that cut through the sound of the distortion and gave it the kick that I felt it needed.

I thought this would be fairly easy and not too time consuming, but when you're recording using garageband it's not so easy to 'fix it in the mix' and I really didn't want the robotic sound of looping, so every take I did had to be without too many obvious mistakes.

Now, if you worry too much about making mistakes, you will make them, and so you have to get yourself into a sort of 'zen' state of mind where you're not worrying too much but still concentrating hard.

One of the main things I learned from this experience is that you need to know when to take breaks. You may not feel physically tired but you're concentrating hard, and when you start to make lots of mistakes it's time to take a break and get a cup of tea.

 If you don't keep an eye on this it's easy to get frustrated with what you're doing and you end up putting yourself even further back; or giving up entirely.

Solo Guitar



Although my tracks were starting to come together now I felt there were parts where there was nothing going on and where people could get bored of the music, this was something I was keen to stop from happening, the songs were designed to grab the listeners attention and retain it till the end, hopefully.

Because of this I asked a friend who I knew to be a fantastic guitarist to some over and record some solos for me.

I simply played him the song, told him which part I wanted the solo in and he did the whole thing in one take.

Tim Gough it turns out is pretty good at busting out the crunchy rock solos that I wanted and I'd just like to take a second here to say cheers.

Vocals

When all of this was over the time had come to re-record the vocals. This is a whole different kettle of fish because, just as you hate the sound of your voice played back to you, so singers hate the sound of theirs. So when recording your own vocals you have to stop yourself from becoming too self concious and giving up entirely.

I helped myself somewhat by double-tracking the vocal line (singing the same thing twice and putting it slightly to the left and the right) in the same way that John Lennon did in most of the Beatles tracks. This gives it a slightly softer edge and made me feel a bit better. I didn't use this technique in Twisted Ditty however, as I wanted a slightly rawer sound.

 Drums

So I had some fairly solid sounding tracks and the time had come to get a beat behind them. So I lugged all of my equipment (Mixing board, four microphones, laptop and cables) in a huge rucksack on a bus back home. And set them up on my drum kit in the garage.

I could've got a much better sound out of the drums if my fire-wire had worked (not sure if it was the wire or my very old laptop). The plan was to set the two overheads to come out left and right, with the bass and snare in the middle. This worked for all of about half a minute, and I got very excited for a short space of time.

Unfortunately my software didn't allow for multi-track recording and so the whole thing had to come out mono, I did my best to mix it before hand on my board but in the end the drums had to sit fairly low in the mix.

But hey, at least they're there.

Bass

The last thing that needed doing was the bass line. I'd already tried beforehand to add bass just by plugging the guitar straight into the board and using that as an amplifier, but this didn't sound very good. I was particularly lucky however to have a friend with a house free and another friends bass and amp already set up.

And so I pounced upon the opportunity and set up my little portable studio in his house, thumping away at the bass while he played civilization on his computer next to me.

Recording the Bass was probably the most enjoyable part for me as the tracks were starting to come together at this point and I'd done a bit of tweaking in between. I recorded them from the amp and used a pick to give it a more punchy sound, you can hear this best in Sweetheart. I also used a lot of slides to give the tracks a feeling of movement, you can hear this most prominently in the chorus of Devils Maiden and the verse of Twisted Ditty.

3rd Stage - Mixing

Putting the final touches to the mixing took a lot longer than I first anticipated.

This was, mainly, due to me being a horribly lazy procrastinator. But the other reason was, and this may not be something that happens to anyone else, I was just sick and tired of hearing the songs. After listening to them over and over again and trying desperately to get every little thing into place I'd lost all passion for them.

In the end I had to just say I was happy with how they were because I just couldn't sit at the computer any longer.

And so I exported the Mp3 Files, and those are the ones you can hear today.

If you'd like you can download the whole thing free here.

Cheers for reading.



Monday 19 November 2012

A Story About Snow Men



Last Christmas I was living in Derby and it just so happened to snow, here's some photos of what the street looked like outside:




Oooo, snowy!

At the time I was fairly into Calvin and Hobbes, a comic written by a guy called Bill Watterson, I'd find the comic strips online and spend hours browsing them; if you don't already know of Calvin and Hobbes I would seriously suggest checking them out here.

Anyway, I was browsing through them when I came across a strip much like this one:

Om nom nom!

 Taking this as inspiration I decided to try and do something similar.

So I began messing around and produced something like this:

 It's behind you!


 See the resemblance?
 
Obviously it's not as grand as the Calvin and Hobbes version, but I tried my very best.

 Also, here's a pair of photos of another little snow sculpture I did that fateful night.

It was intended to greet people as they walked past, but unfortunately didn't last more than half an hour before the head fell off.


It may well have come across as a mad little gremlin.
 
Unfortunately that's all I've got to show to you.

I hope you enjoyed my snowy playthings and let's hope it snows again this winter so that I might try my hand at it second time!

<centre> New Live Lounge video on Youtube! </centre>

  Check out this first in a collection of Live Lounge videos I'm planning for Youtube.  Fresh from my new little studio in The Clock House!