Pawn Takes Pawn

One thing i need to remember about this whole cassette recording thing, which sadly i just realized.

I often complain about not getting a "huge" sound, a "tight" sound, and such, but i dont take into consideration that im *not* going to get the hugest sound, the tightest sound, the most "radio" sound out of my cassette 8track.

Thats no.1. I wont get it. BUT thats not to say that im not going to come up with something that sounds incredible!. Most recently ive been exciting my self more and more, and its basicly due to the amount of time that ive been spending with it. experience.

Back in december i spent a few weeks recording the Riff Randals. I was surprised at the sound i got, but thats part due to the girls. They know their stuff and their songs, so they played well. Thats No.2. You wont get a good performance from a crappy one.

Things to think about when your 'cordin...

So Dougs got this Tascam Digital mixing board and an adat that we are going to practice tracking drums with tommorrow. Set up those drums in the living room and run the snake to the back bedroom. I want to try all sorts of things. i have this mail slot by the front door that we could put a small mic into, its metal too, so maybe it'll be reverby.
What about putting a mic outside? Today its raining, that'd be bad to get rain all over a mic...

Called up Morgan to see if he's gonna come over and maybe play some guitar to help me along, otherwise i'll be drummin off the top of my head. We actualy have some songs that could use a good recording.

The reason for this practice sesh is for the Frenchmen. If this works out pretty well i figure we will be able to get a decent recording for them, and who knows. They have a release already and maybe these new songs will be even better? Still, I can't wait.

Off topic, Im gearing up for an art show that'll be up at MU&U Salon 1025 19th St Suite 8 all month, along side Danny and Tim. House paint on fence boards with some sumi ink and left over oil paint/stain water. more faces, and such.

Looks like the Frenchmen are interested in recording in Feb. that'll be fun. Munia has vocals left to do, Sunshine Smile also has vocals to do. I want to record the Helper Monkeys sometime soon too.

Black Dahlias are playin this weekend, hope to get a good recording out of that...

Cassette to Digital-

A small trip out to the 'burbs for a digital experience proved to be rewarding. Doug is building an impresive recording setup in his home.
A nice little room, that is going to be converted into a small studio.
He's got some nice gear too! Nice microphones, a nice pre, a huge tascam digital board, mackie hr824 monitors, a beast of a computer....

anyways its funny for me to do it, cause im still new at all of this and i love this whole analouge thing, dare i go through the digital realm? hey why not, its there for me to use, and it'll sound fine. a nice breed of A/D.

So on with it. The portastudio 488 i have only does 4 groups out. Luckily it has two efx sends that i can use for 6 out at once. not bad. we decide to test each track out, to make sure the signal isnt too messed up, and everything sounds fine so we go ahead and start to dump the tracks in. one song has 7 tracks so we have to figure out how to do that. we decide to "overdub" the extra track and slide it into place so it fits in time, and we also think ahead to dump in a track that will be easy to match visualy, since we can see those cool waveforms in samplitude. the stereo drum tracks are perfect for this and we go ahead and proceed. we dump in the first 6 tracks and then go back to dump in the Rightside of the drums. After that we go back to align them in place. wait, they arent matching. are they? Ok, we line up the drum stick clicks at the begining of the song and they are in time with the Lefside of the drums,.....at the begining of the song, but not near the end. they slowly get further and further out of time.(which now that i think of it sounds like a cool idea).

What must've happened is that the tape speed chagned a little, some sort of wear and tear to the tape motor, or some other fluxuation.
Great, so for now we decide to go with mono drums for this song, and just copy and paste a second track to "beef" it up. Maybe we will try it again and dump in a diferent part...

This brings us to date, where we have vocals left to do out at the dig-doug studio and then on to mixing.

Overdubs -

After tracking the basic tracks (which included one songs worth of piano instead of a guitar) we decided to move onto overdubs. Every song has two guitars and at least one piano/organ and on one song two organs.

The second guitar was provided by Leon. We set him up in the bedroom where the bass guitar was earlier. Used the real 57 for his guitar since it was free'd up and mic'd it good n close. He plays an older fender combo with two 12's. He likes to play with tons of verb, which is fine, but i'll say it does make recordin a little tougher when the guitar is *soaked* in verb. At one point i turned it down and gave it a good listen and it sounded so fine when it was clean and all, but Leon is firm about where he wants his reverb and that pleases me. I like it when dudes know where they want their sound. Most dudes say, "i dont know what sounds good", yikes!

Anyways he had some hard times with one song, but after awhile (and some Zeldas pizza) we got it all done up.

I decided to pick up a headphone amp for this session which was a pain in itself to pick up. The dudes out at guitar center had one for 70$, but i was looking for super cheapo 30$ one. Off to skipps. they had one for 49$, so i picked it up and headed back home. Later, i looked at it closer to play with it, and i realized i grabbed a 4in,1out box. they look sooo similar and the box even said "headphone amp", so the product inside the box was wrong.

Went back out to skipps to show them what was up and they laughed and went off looking for the right one. It had appeared that they didnt have the one i was looking for (Rolls) at that price, so i went to get my money back and the guy at the cashbox got the manager to approve the return and he said, "Oh i got one over here, hang on!" and sure enough it was in the guiar book section. Perfect place for it. But i was happy that i got it and headed home.

Ok so did some organs next. The two organs and electric piano were run through the amp in the bathroom, since it was all setup and ready to go. But i wanted to try the big organ direct. Bad idea, cause the line was realy dirty sounding. some of the keys didnt sound hot at all. So we scrapped that idea and just used the amp which sorta leveled it all out.

Got the overdubs all finished up and we decided to call it a night. there were some mistakes to fix up that was easy enough. An extra guitar part to cover up a missed ending. I think thats about it for the recording session. Oh a brand new snake takes years to roll back up. The next step was to dump these tracks into Dougs computer.....

Guitar Cab in the Bathroom -

...pointed away from the tub, sorta at an angle towards the wall under the sink. close mic'd with some AudioTechnica 625 "bargain" model. I call it an At-yellow. supposed to be close to a 57(and i guess the dude who sold it to the dude who gave it to me said he liked it better than a 57...not me though..). huh. the amp is a little fender combo thing. it sounded
good nice-n-loud.

the bass is a peavy combo amp. one big 15. very 80's looking. sounds like a bass though, used an at "Hi-energy" mic. this i call the at-red.(its got a red band around it.) pushed that mic right up at the speaker cone. the bass sound was fun. we put it in the bedroom, next to the bed with a blanket covering it a little. (oh! we had a blanket covering the kick drum too, now that i think of it. keeps that snare and stuff out of there..)

So we got our basic tracks all set up. each song we had to tweak the amps here and there, cuz they used different pedals sometimes, but i think we got some good tones.

The fun part was the snake. i havent had the chance to use a snake for
recording before, so this was a great oppurunity. ran the snake all the way to the back of the Appt where i set up all my stuff.

the 488(8 track, NOT the 488 mkII..), the two little mixing boards (one for the drums, one for the gutiars and talk back) the compressor, the ffx, and these cheapo little computer monitors. i didnt end up usin' them too much, just my headphones.

So after we got all the songs recorded (which was 5) and were happy with those takes and such, we moved on to the overdubs.......

The idea of music on cd is incredible.
people can catch audio, capture it,
and place it inside cds.

So here is a run down of the recording session for munia. This all took place inside Chris' midtown 2nd floor appt. Before hand, he made sure all the neighbors knew what we were doing. His appt is a long one
and part of an older victorian i belive. alltogether its a huge house.

In the main living room, there is a round window spot where we put the drums. kick:akg d112, snare sm57, overheads oktava mk219's. The drums them selves are an old ludwig set.(if my memory is working right). i had Mike set up the drums there and got my levels. i noticed the kick drum didnt sound great though, so he opted to remove the drum head, which realy made a difference. ive used a beta52 on that same drum with the head on and it sounded fine, so im pretty sure it was the d112. it just sounds better in the drum. great. now we have a punchy kick sound.

the snare couldve used some tuning, but im happy witht he sound we got. those 57s can be pushed hard and still sound good. gotta find the right spot for it though. straight across the snare sometimes dosent sound all that good. i had mine pointed more down at the drum, but not extremely.

the over heads were too high now that i think about it. i had one on each side, trying to keep them the same distance from the snare, but if i had to do it again right now, id put them in front of the kit in an xy pattern. those toms wouldve come out better. i'll have to do that next time. but they didnt sound bad as they were, just a little buried.

ran the stereo drum mix through a light compression to tighten it up a little and put them to tape.

oh yeah. im using a cassette multitracker. 8tracks total, 4 at once. its a little limiting, but its fun. the sound quality isnt bad at all. and im diggin it.

so we put the guitar cab in the bathroom......

Ok, got the hang of this. Based out of Sacramento, CA, The Audio Calendar is an audio journal that should come out Monthly. There will be songs that we've recorded, audio journal of the recording process, and interviews with the monthly band and such. Seems that ideas like this seem to come and go, and I've always been the procrastinating type, so this will be a good project to keep public to keep me going.

Munia is an indie rock band with loud organs and guitars. We've already recorded the basic tracks for the January 2004 cd-r. The cool thing about this is that I'm still learning about recording and have
had good luck getting fun sounds and such. I'll go into detail about the Munia recording session soon.

Looks like the Audio Calendar is forming quite nicely. Munia has joined on as January. more soon.....