It's Time to lay Down some Guitar Down.

It's week 7 and it's time to hustle to get all the guitar parts recorded by the end of the week. Checking out our milestone planner on the recording progress for Nick J Holmer, we are a couple of weeks behind.

We are into week 7 at the moment.

I've talked to Phil about how we can make up the time to get back on track. One way for me to help out is to keep the tracks down to a minimum and make sure the levels are spot on. I also will be editing the tracks as l go along, plus once l am happy with the edit l will render the track to indicate that transient clip is completed. l still have some guitar and bass guitar recording to do.

l am constantly sending guitar demos to Phil to keep him up to date with want l am doing. I will get the songs done this week, but that will all depend on whether l get the song demo's with keys and vocals to learn from this week. Next week will be multitasking to get everything tied together and we also need to record the main vocals asap.

With the vocals, we were going to do them in the Neve Studio, but that all depends on if SAE and if the Neve studio is available for when we need to record the vocals. The coronavirus (covid 19) has left us with a day to day situation for everyone at SAE, so it's all up in the air. It looks like Nick will be doing his vocals at home and emailing them to Phil and myself. Social distance and everyone's health comes before anything now.

Each trimester I like to try a new recording process, and this time I'm trying a new recording technique with an amplifier. This technique will be experimenting with and instead of recording straight into the DAW, l have decided to conduct some research into using the line output on an amplifier. The only problem with my cheap amplifier is it only has a headphone output.

Head Phones Output

So l went digging for a guitar lead that l knew l had in a box some wear, which has a stereo 1/4 inch guitar jack on one end and is split into 2 mono 1/4 inch guitar jacks on the other end. I could use a normal guitar lead and that would have given me a mono signal, but l thought to myself, let's try stereo.

I attempted routing the guitar signal a couple of different ways into ProTools.

The first way I tried, was going from the headphone output into a Preamp, compressor, MD8 mixer and then into the interface. It sounded ok, but I notice there was a little bit of hiss occurring if l increased the volume on the interface too much. So I decided to convert the High impedance signal into a low impedance microphone signal by using a couple of DI Boxes. The Fisherman Pro-EQ Platimun (an acoustic preamp, Equalizer & DI) has an active DI Box section in it and the other DI Box was passive. This worked a lot better, but l had to adjust the volume level a fair bit to get the meters to read the same.

The Fisherman uses a battery so that makes it an active DI Box and EDB is a passive Di Box. Really need 2 passive DI Boxes

Cheap practice amplifier to try a recording technique with.

1/4 inch guitar jacks creating high impedance signal.

Cheap preamp and compressor - Behringer.

Yamaha MD8 recorder.

Focusrite interface.

Using Pro Tools guitar tuner for the first to see how it performs.

I only used a slight bit of compression as l didn't want the transients squashed too much that it stripped the natural dynamics out of the guitar.

Stereo Tracks edited and rendered before I sent the clip wav's to Phil

This is how l set my guitar effect pedals to color the guitar sound for the recording.

Some of my sound design equipment. The TS9 is set for an edge distortion sound and the TS 808 is set for heavy distortion.

The Aesthetics guitar sounds l wanted to create for this Project.

The guitar sound was going to depend on what genre the original song was influenced by. If it was a reggae sounding song then l would use a clean tone that would complement the feel of the song. Nick has a large collection of genres in his bag of tricks to create from.

EP songs

Chosen

• Thought this song had the feel of a pop ballad. Nick asked if l could compliment his song by accompanying him with my acoustic guitar. Well, my poor old D28/32 Shenandoah Martin really needs some tender loving care and could do with the intonation being fixed as it has some fret buzz happening. I like the Martin guitar sound for this song because of the tonal quality of the strings, the definition you can hear between each string is top-notch. The Martins in general usually have a crisper sound than the usual middle muddy sounds produced by cheap acoustic guitars. It was a bit of a challenge for me to play an acoustic guitar at the moment as l haven't had the time to practice on a regular base, so l was struggling a little bit with the tips of my fingers getting sore after a half-hour.

• I wanted to create a muddy garage sound that could sit in the background. The distortion texture l was after, was more of an overdrive soft edgy feel that could be non-offensive and would blend into the song more as a filler instrument than the main instrument.

Dream

• I wanted to create a muddy garage sound that could sit in the background. The distortion texture l was after, was more of an overdrive soft edgy feel that could be non-effencive and would blend into the song more as a filler instrument than the main instrument.

My Heritage

• The guitar sound for this song I was after was a Reggae feel. I used a clean sound and the tone l was after was a middle to treble sound that added and made a connection to the aesthetics of the Reggae genre.

• I played bass guitar on this song as well and used the same tone with the song 'Chosen', just middle to mellow tone and for it to sit in the background.

Tribute (Thank You)

• I used the edgy overdrive distortion vibe for this song. I just wanted to have the feel of a rock sounding genre with 'edgy' aesthetics based on how hard l picked and hit the strings or hit a chord, the harder I hit l would get more distortion. however, I don't think it works very well by using an output jack, from an amplifier. I wanted to create middle to full sound but still have some treble coming through. For what it is it doesn't sound too bad. I overdubbed a really distorted guitar for the chorus and bridge to create some energy.

• On the bass guitar, I used a mellow mid tonality sound as this song reminds me of a rock anthem feel. If l had a fretless bass guitar, l would have used that for sure.

This Must Be Our Dream.

• With this song, Nick has given us a sort of 80's 'funk-pop' vibe song. I used a clean sound for this and was aiming for a treble to mid sonic vibe. I think it turned out ok.

• For the bass guitar, l kept it at the same tone l virtually used through this project so far. The mellow mid sound that would sit well in the background.

Conclusion

The session went pretty good, for the time that l had allocated to get the guitar and bass guitar recording done. If l had more time to learn the songs thoroughly, l would've been able to sync even better in time with Phil's feel on the keyboards. Remembering l had to learn the songs without any charts provide (so learning the songs by ear) and using what l was given to create the guitar and bass guitar work from. I did all of this work in a week and I'm really happy its done. I know its not brilliant but that part is finished. Now I'm looking forward to recording Nick's voice, which I'm hoping is this week. Then we can start week 9 doing the mixing.

YouTube - Using an amp's Speaker Voiced Direct Out

References

Pawn Shop To Jaw Drop. (2017, November 1). Using an amps Speaker Voiced Direct Out - YouTube. Retrieved March 18, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsGrH2KAE0g