As a way of playing around with, and getting used to Reaper, I'm currently remixing an old favourite of mine. "Amethyst Dawn" was recorded on 4-track cassette in 2004. One by one I am transferring each track of tape into the DAW. Originally I had mixed down to 2-track tape and then made a digital copy.

Today I signed up for PodcastMachine.com. This is my first upload. My daughter and I wrote a song together. She was 8 at the time. I recorded this version with no lead vocal track so that she can practice with her karaoke machine. So far, the best-sounding recording I've made. Also it's my first all digital recording, though some of the drum samples are from analog sources (hence the vinyl crackle).

I'm enjoying a bit of a vacation at the moment.  My wife is in Mexico until the 10th, and so while the kids are asleep or absent, I can spend all my time in my studio if I want to.  And believe me, I want to.  I'm not playing guitar or writing music, or recording anything I've written; I'm getting some Digilog™ vinyl ready to take on the road.  I'm thinking an 80-minute metal compilation is a good idea.  i'm ripping a few Manowar tunes as I type this.  There are only a couple of really epic tunes on their first album; other than that, I'm going to use the best songs from other metal compilations.

I haven't blogged for quite some time, so I've got plenty to talk about.  First of all, my studio has gone from Digilog™, to all analog, and back to Digilog™ again; I've dabbled with DAWs, but so far nothing serious.  The biggest change in my life right now is that I've put in my notice at the café and will be starting my career as an Electrical Apprentice next month.  I'll be on the road a lot, so I intend to get as many Digilog™ LPs burned as I can before then.  Today I started and finished Scorpions' Blackout, and at this very moment I'm ripping Thin LIzzy's Black Rose: A Rock Legend, though it may need a bit more treble. 

Thanks to a generous donation from a good ol' friend, I now have a computer again.  He gave be his old motherboard, CPU, a little extra RAM, and a graphics card.  Now that I'm using my TASCAM 564*as an EQ, my Digilog™ LPs sound better than ever.


*I still haven't gotten it repaired. :(

Did I mention my "drums"?
So, years ago I bought one of those toy electronic drum pad things at a thrift shop.  My intention then was to take out the loudspeaker and replace it with a 1/4" mono jack, so I could use a guitar cable to run it into the four-track.  I finally got around to doing this a couple weeks ago.  It works, but it's noisy and some of the drum sounds are far louder than others.  So I plugged it into the Digitech pedal, and played around with the compression and noise gate, so I can get a decent input level.  There's still a slight noise problem, but other instrument sounds should probably mask it in the mix.  Besides, these "drums" are a supplement to the Digitech's built in patterns, not a flat-out replacement.  If I want to say, switch to half-time, I'll just play along on the drum pad, and then take out the Digitech pattern during mixdown.  Any step towards increasing the dynamic range of my recordings is a good one, even for the lowest-fi.

Okay, so that experiment from last night?  I tried it again, using a reference CD, and I mixed it down to a lossy digital format.  I'll use it to practice along with to avoid extra wear on the tape, as I have one more track to record on this tape before I mix it down for real.

More Experimentation (with mixdown)
A moment ago, I did a quick experiment to see if I could improve the mix of an extremely lo-fi four-track cassette recording (of an absolutely epic new song by The Anderson Council).  First I plugged my headset into the TASCAM Porta07 on which it was recorded, and dialed in the best mix I could get with no processing of any kind.  Then I ran the line out into two of the mic/line inputs of the TASCAM 244, and did some additional EQ.  I patched the Digitech RP300 guitar processor into the effect send of the 244.  I set up some compression and a noise gate*, and just for fun I threw in a little reverb.  Not surprisingly (to me, anyway), the mix sounded far better this way than by just running the processor through the Porta07.  This was just a quick experiment to see how it sounded.  I did not record the mix to two-track, because I'm too tired tonight.  Besides, I wasn't using a audio reference.

By the way, I know that a guitar effects pedal is not the greatest thing to use for mixes, but this is lo-fi.  Besides, I 'm using the best gear that I have right now.


*I leave the DBX turned off, or else it sounds like crap.  A gate is the way to go.

Wikipedia,org's article on Lo-Fi recording.

Which leads to this one on Cassette Culture.

Recording, Planning, Re-recording

A favourite recording blog of mine has advised against the "write as you record" approach.  I however, must defend this way of doing things.  You see, I know that anything I write as I record is not going to be a usable, final product; nor is it a waste of tape (I've mentioned I still use tape, right?).  This is what I call a "pre-demo", and is absolutely critical to my creative methods at this point in time.  I need mistakes to learn from, and I need to get the idea down on tape in order to plan a re-recording of the same song.  

Once I have my pre-demo tape, I can take a step back and think about how I'm going to arrange the next recording.  During my break at work today, I took out my notebook, and drew a flow chart depicting which tracks would be on the first tape, then bounced to the second and so on.

One advantage of having a 4-track running at standard tape speed is that once I bounce to another tape (standard 2-track deck), I don't need to bounce  back; I just move the 2-track tape into 4-track and top it up.  Lately though, I have come to realize that my decks need to be cleaned and demagnetized.  I have ordered a demagnetizer and some cleaning fluid online, but I still wish to record in the meantime, at least just for practice.  I'll still get a nasty-sounding tape in the end, but it's all to gain experience points. 

Stuff happens.

After four weeks of anxious waiting, I finally received my TASCAM 564 Digital Portastudio.  Exciting!!!  But alas, it does not work.  It is an expensive piece of garbage.  Well, the mixer works, but it will not record; the same problem I have with my old TASCAM 244 Portastudio.  Basically I replaced my old junk with newer junk.  Hopefully someone in town can repair the darn thing, as I had big, ambitious plans for that thing.  I want my recordings to sound as good as they can with my low budget, and until it was delivered I had thought the 564 to be my own personal saviour.  Grrrr...

Now, the bright side:  The 564 mixer has a much cleaner sound than the dirty old 244.  Also, I have opened a Paypal dispute which will escalate to a claim if not settled soon.  I want my money back, so maybe I can put it towards a repair job, or different gear, or whatever. 

Perhaps The Anderson Council (The Greatest Band I Have Ever Played In) is destined for low-fi.  If so, I will not stop striving for greatness.

Despite my short sleep last night, today was a very good day. After work, I came home and had quite some time to myself. I got cleaned up, got some chores done, listened to Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies CD (while copying it to tape just to check whether or not the input level was suitable), and even constructed a Snowbot. After that, I sat in front of the computer and sampled some rökken drumbeats while my hot wife cooked my dinner. Later on, I grabbed a 2-for-1 deal on some DQ Blizzards. As if that wasn't enough fun for one day, I then set up a myspace accountfor the purpose of uploading some of my recordings.

http://www.myspace.com/villainsdeeds

Gratitude Helps, but Something's Got to Give

When there's no time to actually be in the studio, I have a chance to brainstorm ideas to put into practice when I do get around to it. That's the nice thing about working a mindless job. And, if household chores are getting done, nobody really complains.

That being said, it gets frustrating when a few days (or more) go by in which I don't have time, or am just too tired to enjoy my hobby. Eventually, I have to pull an all-nighter just to get my latest project halfway done. I'm not complaining, of course. I've had nearly four solid hours of sleep, and my tape doesn't sound too bad.

Sleep is for wimps! At least that's what I tell myself when I've had a lot of coffee, and keep myself occupied in the studio. Anyone who has both a family and a home studio knows that you get your best results when everyone is either asleep or out of the house (the latter is preferred if you don't want to wake them up). It's about 2:00am, and I just finished laying down some tracks.

The Song
Several years ago I composed and recorded an instrumetal piece entitled "Amethyst Dawn". It's sort of a power ballad without words, all dynamic and stuff. Everyone who's heard this tune has said nice things about it, and it is a good composition. However, the tape (recorded on the modified TASCAM Porta07 in the previous post) sounds like crap. I'm re-recording it right now (working title: "A.D. 2010") on the same 4-track machine as the original version, and it sounds much better now; it just goes to show how much I've learned in the last few years.

The Gear
On the original recording (done in a different house than the one I live in now), I recorded the first track, an acoustic guitar, by taping a mic to the inside of the instrument (Jimmy Page once told an interviewer that he tried this on one track but didn't like the result; I tried it anyway). The mic was plugged into my Digitech RP300 guitar processor with delay and chorus. On the new version I still use the mic inside the guitar (though I've upgraded from duct tape to velcro). Additionally I use 2 external mics, one close, and one for room sound (which means sometimes having to wait for the furnace to stop blowing here in the Great White North). All of these were plugged into the TASCAM 244 Portastudio, which is the best mixer I have, though the tape deck no longer works. I patched in the RP300 through the mixer, and ran the deck's line out to the Porta07, and recorded the part onto 2 tracks with stereo delay. As a lark, I added another stereo track of percussive sounds by tapping my guitar with fingers and a pick (the original had no percussion). The original was the complete song on just 4 tracks, all guitar parts. Since All 4 tracks are spoken for, I will have to do some bouncing next. Since my computer died, I'm going to bounce to tape this time, though I might try it with the line-in recording feature on my mp3 player (quite lossy). For the song "Eternal" which I wrote and recorded for my wife during the summer of 2007, I bounced to .wav file, then back to tape to add more tracks.

The Future
I've purchased a TASCAM 564 Digital Portastudio (made in the 90s, uses minidisc) online recently, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. Until then, I'm practicing with my crappy little tape deck (which sounds a lot less crappy running the other mixer into it). Maybe I'll rerecord the same stuff again from scratch, or maybe I'll bounce this latest tape to disc and finish the song in a digital format. Either way, here's to the future: May 2010 be my best year yet.