The first track for my new CD....a 'teaser' of sorts...
Solo.....with technology and other musicians as needed, or who want to contribute!
All the songs from The JCS Projects "Middle Of The Storm" and "Scattered Showers" albums are posted for use under a Creative Commons license. If you would like to use any commercially please contact me.
All Logo's, Image's & Titles â„ Â The JCS Project
Story behind the song
The song is a pretty simple progression in Dropped D tuning using mostly 3-Finger Triad type chords & a standard strum pattern.
Acoustic Guitar is the 'ol Rogue Dreadnought with the new Artec HT-TBL pickup installed. It was strung with Musicians Friends 12's that were 2 days old.
The Bass was recorded to two tracks, and is a Dean EAB Acoustic, strung with Fender Lite Flatwound's that are a week old. It was mic'd with a MXL990 Condenser, and also had a Duncan Performer Maverick Soundhole Pickup installed.
The Mandolin is a Rough A-Style, mic'd with the MXL990 also. All the Mandolin parts were double tracked and panned a little different for each section. I moved around the mic slightly for each take, just to give it a different tone, tho I tried to keep the same distance from it.
The various other tones are from another new addition to the studio, an iMac Snow. This is a G3 600 system is running Tiger 10.4.11 and Garage Band V2. I am using it as a "sound module" at the moment, and have loaded close to 5000 Soundfonts onto it, along with the 1200 sounds and loops that come with it. The sounds used was the Apple Grand Piano that came with GB, and "Sonic Implants Ambient" (for the Bell) and "Cambells Pan Pipes" Soundfonts.
Since I have had 2 bum M-Audio "refurbished" 49e keyboards sent to me the last month, I had to play all the parts in using the QWERTY keyboard.......what fun! The Mac was run straight into Kristal using a 1/8" stereo cable from the speaker out on the Mac to the Line In on the soundcard. All the sounds were left "as-is".
And finally, the Drums and Percussion are from the Smartloops Acoustic Collection, and the tracks were created in TrakAx, using around 23 loops, percussion, and cymbal hits, taking up 11 tracks total. These were exported as a 44.1 16bit .wav. Then I used Switch to convert the track to a 48kHz file and imported it in Kristal. Everything else was recorded in Kristal using the trusty old SB PCI512 card, and all editing, if any, was done in Wavosaur.
The following is for all the "tech-heads" on here.....
Guitar
On Board Controls
EQ
Bass - Flat
Mid - Cut 3db
High - Flat
Master Volume - 50%
Mic Volume - Around +65%
Mic Sharpness - Around +65%
The guitar was powered from the UB802 mixer thur the XLR Input, and all Channel and Master Controls on the mixer were left Flat.
Bass - Dean EAB - 2 Tracks
Track 1 - MXL990 Mic about a foot out from the lower front bout of the body, below the neck. Ran thru the UB802, everything left flat except for Bass on the channel, cut 2db.
Track 2 - Duncan Maverick Soundhole Pickup ran thru the UB802, everything left flat except for Bass on the channel, cut 2db.
Kristal EQ for Track 2 - Only the Mid On - Gain 17db, Freq 3200Hz, Q 0.300
Master FX Slots
Top Slot - Antress Modern Deep Purple Master EQ using the Master 6 Preset with Gain 3 dialed back to 3:00
Bottom Slot - Antress Modern Spacer using the Drums Room Preset, with the Width dialed back to 12:00
Total Tracks Used
11 Tracks for drums, sub-mixed down to Stereo
18 Tracks in Kristal, having to mix the Piano parts down to a Stereo file.
No Compression, Limiting, Extra EQ or Effects was used anywhere in the recording except where noted above. All the "peaks and valleys" of each waveform was manually adjusted using Wavosaur. I tried to use as little " post tweaking" as I could, relying on mic placement, attack, and mixing as much as possible to get the results I was looking for.
Overall this first attempt at using all of my instruments together (instead of recording other folks) turned out better than I thought it would, and a lot better than it would have last year!
Hope you enjoy!
