You are looking at posts that were written in the month of October in the year 2008.
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I hooked my old turntable/radio up to my Grendel Dead Room and I have been playing easy listening through it for three days. It is a sort of torture test.
Speakers need to be broken in. It doesn’t really matter what you play through them, they just need to keep moving for a while to free up the driver.
So I’ve had my Dead Room for a few months and have had very little time to break it in. I pulled the ol’ stereo out of the basement and problem solved …
I took shot some timelapse of some colorful trees today. We are not known for our deciduous trees here in the Northwest, but some neighborhoods in Portland have some nice looking leaves this time of year.
It has been unseasonably warm for the last few days. I keep pretending it is still summer.
I do like seasonal changes though. I guess I won’t be retiring in Florida.
The film was shot in about 6 minutes with my Canon A640, slapped together in After Effects CS3, and scored in Sonar 8PE.
I had some computer revenge today. Yesterday I had some application mishaps and lost a days work. Today , Autosave is my new best friend. He saved me from computer induced violence many, many times. Sonar 8PE has a few bugs right now. I used the Cakewalk Problem Reporter 6 times yesterday.
To their credit, they actually emailed me back. They have recognized and solved 4 of the 6 issues and will release an update “soon”.
Sooooo … I tracked away tonight and managed to get through to the end of the song “Atlantis”. I’m not finished and I feel a little like I did when I got to the end of the song “Kaboom!” the first time. There will be a fair amount of correction to do.
I’ll probably hit up some guitar tracks for the song tomorrow. I’ve been breaking in the speaker for the past few days, but that’s another story …
Like my old pal Q-Bert would say:
“@!#?@!”
I recorded a whole mess of vocals for “Atlantis” tonight and then my application crashed. My heart sank like that little orange cheese puff man sailing off the side of the light pyramid.
Q-Bert falls off the edge and dies (original arcade sound from the 1980’s)
I tried to grab the .wav files and drop them back into the project and line them up, but it was too hard to figure out which take went where.
Oh well. They were just backing harmonies. I did lose a work day. That sucks.
Today, I played around with various guitar tracking methods. I recently upgraded my audio recording application to Sonar 8PE. It came with a limited edition (read stripped down) version of Guitar Rig 3. I decided to test it out and see where the current state of guitar amp emulation was at.
Guitar Rig 3
It was pretty cool. Sounded kind of real. A little fizzy maybe. It only came with two amp models so it was quite limited. You can unlock the full version for a mere $300. No thanks.
Nothing really screamed “awesome” or “horrible” so I cloned the track and compared it to the limited edition version of Revalver that came with previous versions of Sonar. The amp models weren’t as full sounding to me, but Revalver produced some blocky midrange that I couldn’t achieve with the amp models from Guitar Rig 3.
Revalver
Revalver doesn’t sound bad, but it sure doesn’t sound good. Especially on its own. It does sit in a mix pretty well due to its midrange presence.
I ended up just plugging my modded Blackheart 5 watt tube amp into my Grendel Dead Room isolation cab. I put a 57 and a Blue Ball in there and it sounded good. I think I’ll stick with my real amp.
Bitmo/Blackheart/Dead Room
The “real” guitar tracks could use a little better mic placement and some preamp tweaking, but it doesn’t have the low end murk of Guitar Rig 3 and it definitely has more life than Revalver. I might try throwing my 414 in there with a Cardiod pattern to get a little low end prximity effect and beef it up a bit.
Viva la Reality!
I am still recording the vocal tracks for the song “Atlantis”. The end of the song starts with a single vocal melody that builds at each repeat by adding another layer of harmony. Each part of the harmony is tracked four times and panned throughout the stereo field. The vocal line ends up as a four part harmony, so 16 parts are combined to create the final vocal mix.
On top of that, I repeat a slightly altered version of the first verse of the song split into two octaves. This brings the total vocal count at the end of the song to 18 tracks. There are a few sliding lines I might add in the end for the final chordal switch that leads into the outro … so I might be looking at 20-22 vocal tracks by the time it is all done.
I think my neighbors are getting a little concerned that I have some kind of mental problem. I apparently enjoy singing the same phrase over and over and over and over all day long.
These are not “Copy/Paste” vocal cuts. I am not using pitch correction. If I was going that route, I would have been done months ago. I’m doing this the old fashioned way … you know … on a modified MOTU 828Mkii with an SCA N72 preamp on the front end going straight into Sonar 8PE at 24/44.1.
Yup … just doing some more vocal work on the song “Atlantis” today. I should have it done by tomorrow. I figured out the end of the song.
After this, I just need to re-record a couple guitar tracks.
Probably Delta 210 into the Grendel Deadroom.
