And back to it

[solarbird]

Good day in studio today. Not revelatory like Thursday, but still, seriously, the second best day in studio I've had. (I wasn't able to do much Friday or over the weekend, in no small part because of Anna's birthday but also a little from being totally wiped out Friday morning.) This actually did kind of all fall together last week, and it fell together in a way that's sticking around. I like it, a lot.

Right, so, Outbirds today got a pretty decent version of its mandolin track recorded. It's not perfect; the mandolin part consists of a series of high-speed accent notes played at about, hum, around 410 notes per minute? Just under 7 notes per second. And that's at or near the top of my current ability to play, speed-wise, so the timing's a little sloppy here and there. But it's not bad.

I also figured out a much better way to record the bodhran with the SM-57s, and a former studio jockey I know in Florida has told me how to record bodhran safely with the Novas, which I'll probably take back and apply when re-recording the bodhran part in Artefacts. (I like what I have now on the drum in Outbirds, so I won't re-record it unless I discover I have a reason.)

Oh, and new vocals. They're a lot better than what I had, but I'm still re-recording them tomorrow. I can do better.

Basically, I want to have a few copies of a three (or, if I get very, very productive and lucky, four) song EP by this weekend called Sketchy Characters. See, this weekend, there's a local filk convention called Conflikt nearby, and I'm going. It's not something where I'm going to do SRS SALES OMG; I'm not a scheduled performer there, my stuff isn't really filk because it's mostly not F&SF related, and besides, none of the tracks will be final, and any copies I have of the CD will be burned on Anna's laptop. But it will be a CD, and the recordings will all be complete, in that all the instruments will be there, with polish and such to follow. With Artefacts, that's a seven-track arrangement; with Outbirds, it's four with the strong possibility of a fifth; with Cascadia, How I Have Missed You, it's, um, one. Which is totally cheating, I admit, but hello, Crime and the Forces of Evil. We cheat.

(And if I'm very lucky and very productive, When You Leave will make at least a minimal appearance on the disc in probably the least complete state of anything. But still.)

Anyway, it's mostly just to have something I can hand to people. A sneak preview, and in a couple of cases something I can show to people I know who will be there so they can say, "okay, this is totally wrong, fix it." Later, they can become unbelievably valuable bootlegs! Which I'll counterfeit and sell on eBay! And most importantly, something I can start handing to venue managers saying, "j0. Book me." Even if I have to punt down to one-instrument-and-voice arrangements for the live show demos. Once I have the full songs, that shit's easy.

Comments

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Have you found you like the sound the 57's are giving you for the bodhran ?

I had to work really hard in postprocessing to get a decent sound for the bodhran using my condenser mics. (Have a listen to Sooj's "Were-Owl" (http://music.skinnywhitechick.com/track/were-owl) for what I came up with... although the low-resolution preview at that link is severely overcompressed and filled with compression artifacts so try to ignore those.)

I wonder if I should have some 57s available for my studio. Hm.

[solarbird]

Have you found you like the sound the 57's are giving you for the bodhran?
I kinda do, at this point. It's a pretty naturalistic sound, which is what I want, tho' I want even more of that than I have right now, so I'm still experimenting. The best arrangement of 57 I've found so far is a standard X-Y pair right the fuck up against the back of the drum, maybe 4-5cm away. I have the X-Y pair sitting horizontally in my shock mounts, with a towel as sound insulator against the metal struts of the shock mount. (Check my facebook page if you need a pic, I uploaded one a few days ago captioned some variation of doin' it wrong.) I tried single mics and front-miking and other distances but those were much worse.

I've been playing with the SM-57s again because I was under the impression the large-can caps were more fragile than they are. Russ says what I should be doing is backing a couple of large-can caps way off, like five feet off, and recording from there. He thinks drums need space to develop their sound. I'll be trying this later. Russ also thinks the only thing I should really use the 57s for are things like kick drums, and anything that generates a lot of air movement directly at the microphone.

I'll send you a temporary URL, so you can hear what I'm getting off of Kimi with the SMs right now. Kimi is a pretty small bodhran - barely wider than my MacBook, so I guess 14"? And simple - no tuning ring, skin bolted on permanently, and so on.

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

Sounds pretty good. As you can hear from what I did with Were-Owl, I went to a lot of trouble to alter the tone to make it deeper and more powerful than what I heard directly off the mics. I might just take Russ' advice for my next attempt at recording something like that; it seems worth the experimental time.

[solarbird]

I take anything Russ says pretty seriously; he knows his stuff.

The problem I did solve with this close proximity micing was an artificially abrupt cutoff of sound that I was getting and which I quite disliked; the difference is spectacularly clear in the waveform view of the tracks, where you can see the solid, sustained decay curve in the waveform amplitude. And stereo micing helped keep some of the complexity of the sound that I was losing in the monophonic recording. Getting Kimi to put out a deeper sound... well... water helped... a little... ^_^

[solarbird]

Idly, I gave the four-feet-away thing a shot and at least with the mics I have... it didn't work so well. But it was much better than the first attempt with the 57s. So.