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.