Another vocal editing session at Keith’s house. I also swung by to pick up the other Keith (KC) – the guitar player so he can be part of the process. I wish Dave (drummer) could be there too, but he is super busy lately – he and his wife are expecting a new baby soon. Congrats Dave!
We got through another song that evening. Here is an excerpt from that session:
I met up with Keith at his house, and brought a drive with all of the tracks and the logic projects – I have each song we recorded as a separate project. Keith has an iMac and he also has Logic, as well as some nice Adams A7 monitors. The goal for us was to sit together and edit the vocal tracks to get a final result we liked, before diving deep into the mixing process. After several hours of tedious editing, we arrived at what we think was a better end result than any one given vocal track… and that was for one so song so far. Bottom line, we have a lot left to do, just in editing the vocals. But I think it’s worth it in the end.
Here is an excerpt form this process:
The last couple of days I have been organizing the project in Logic. I have all of the recorded files from the Alesis ADAT on my Macbook Pro, and I already had all of the main tracks and some of the lead guitar tracks in and rough mixed, but I also added the new tracks from all the vocal sessions. Man,we sure have a lot of tracks, and the way the Alesis names tracks is generic – Track_1, Track_2…etc. So I took the better part of a day and renamed all of the tracks exactly what they were, for example Lead Guitar_Take1_SM57… Then when I brought them into Logic, I knew exactly what they were. This made it a lot easier to bring in and set up the tracks in Logic, not to mention when we did multiple takes on the Alesis on the same track but say a later session, I would have more than one Track_17 or Track_21 so to speak, and if I were to put them all in the same folder, the ones with the same generic track names would overwrite the other. Not good! Some I can’t stress enough the importance of giving the tracks a unique name and it sure helps to name them what they are.
Another Vocal session with Keith. We finished all of the main vocal tracks in this session.
Another Vocal session with Keith.
Keith came over to start the vocal sessions. He brought a Digitech vocal processor of some sort to use for monitoring. I guess he couldn’t find the NanoVerb in stock at the local music store. We worked through as many songs as we could before his voice gave out. For each song we did several takes knowing that we could pick and choose in the post process. We used Keith’s Blue Bluebird condenser mic on his voice. This is a great mic for a great price, sturdy and well made, and comes with the shock mount and pop filter. I have not had a chance to try it out on other sources yet, but I look forward to trying it on some guitar cabs. I have read that this mic is fairly versatile, and as with all the Blue mics, it just looks cool.
Compared to the vocal scratch tracks we did with the Shure Sm58, the Bluebird was an amazing improvement in sound quality, but then again I think most condensers sound better than dynamic mics.
Wow! It’s been a while since I updated this blog. Stuff has been happening but it seems like a lot time lapses between events. All our schedules have been crazy. KC was called in to work several weekends in a row due to the GA flooding during a time we had scheduled to do his lead tracks, I’ve been on vacation twice since the last entry, and Ron and I have both been out of town on business a few times, and you know, life happens – beautiful fall days for being outside instead of inside – you know how that works… Sometime back in August we put down the basic tracks. It took a couple of sessions, they went well enough, but there were a few hiccups that we needed to address in an overdub session.
Here are a couple of track excerpts from that session:
In October we finally got to doing the lead guitar tracks, and some second guitar parts. The first session didn’t go so well, and we decided to scrap those tracks and have a do over. During the do over session KC brought a different guitar (a 335) for some different texture. Things felt more relaxed and went smoother at this point. We didn’t get to all of the songs, so we needed to have another session. The next session we had Keith (the vocalist) come over to lay down some scratch vocal tracks so we had a better idea for the leads to come in and out for the remainder of the songs. And finally in yet another session KC finished up the lead tracks.
Here is an excerpt from the first lead session:
Now all we have left is for me to do some bass overdubs, where I had some mistakes, and then we’ll finish the tracking process with the vocal sessions. Sometime this week Keith is coming over to do some of the tracks. During the scratch take, we realized quickly that we need a reverb unit to put on his voice while tracking. Having a wet effect on there tends to give him more confidence, and I can totally relate. Only once did I ever do my own vocal for a song, and I definitely needed something on my voice to get through the tracking process. And NO you will never hear that song, it was quite embarrassing, reverb and all.
Keith plans to pick up a NanoVerb to bring to the session. Ron and I will have to figure out the best way to use the NanoVerb as an effect for monitoring only while recording the signal to disk dry. I want the recorded vocal dry so I can start fresh in the mixing process. Again the beauty of digital recording is the non destructive editing process. You don’t have to commit to anything. You can experiment and change things, and that I am sure we will be doing.
Keith, the vocalist in the band was going out of town for a long weekend, so we instrumentalists thought we would get together and work on parts and arrangements, the more mundane things that would bore Keith, so we took advantage and man was that session productive. Again we didn’t roll. But we are thinking it’s time to finally move onto the recording, now that we have a lot of the bugs worked out – and Ron needs his recording rig back to record his band.
Dave is back from vacation and we rehearsed tonight. What a disaster night. We broke a pair of headphones, KC broke a string on his guitar twice, I was sore from being in a car wreck which involved the totaling of my car (not my fault) and we all seemed a little impatient that night. We played like crap. We didn’t roll on this night. Good thing.
Dave also brought another snare to try – his DW. I think this is going to do the trick. It cut’s through the mix nicely, has a good crack and just enough resonance to keep it lively sounding. It fact it was perfect to my ears. We’ll see how it sits in the mix next week when we roll some (virtual) tape.
I opened the files in Logic to do some listening of our session and some rough mixes. I didn’t spend a lot of time with the mixing, just added some preset EQ and compression to some of the tracks and some reverb and a little delay on the vocals as well, just to get a feel for how it could sound. Not bad at all. I think the first thing that stood out to me was even though the Bearing Edge snare was punchier and drier, meaning less resonant, it didn’t cut through with a nice crack as well as the Supraphonic did. We have to go back to square one and try to make the Supraphonic work. I may try to retune it or put different heads on it to see if that makes an improvement.
Another thing I noticed was how dynamic the vocal track was. I think next time we’ll be tracking through a compressor to knock to keep the levels more manageable for mixing in post. I don’t want to over do it though, just enough to keep the level workable for the mix. The goal is to try to keep the dynamics and energy but without clipping or working with ultra quiet levels.
So bottom line so far, the drums and the vocals are the hardest to mix. I knew drums would be a challenge. I am quite content with the guitar and bass sounds. I think I will experiment further with mic placement on my bass amp, to see if I can make it even better, but I am quite happy with what I am getting for now.
Song file (cover tune):