mikegrosshandler.com » Recording

Nearing completion

mike — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:41:28 +0000

So I’ve been sitting on the mixes for my new album for two weeks or so now, listening for things that still bother me, and getting feedback from some friends. So far, the feedback has been good!

Of course, it would figure that now would be when Avid/Digidesign finally releases a version of Pro Tools (8.0.4) that officially supports 64-bit Windows 7! I’d been dual-booting back and forth, depending on the song, between the version (3.0.1) that was stable in 32-bit XP (which worked quite well, save for the songs with so many plugins that I would run out of RAM and Windows would crash), and the version (3.0.3 with beta 3.0.4 hardware drivers) that “mostly” worked okay in Win7x64, but would randomly freeze up on me, requiring a reboot. Either option was a compromise at some level: limited RAM vs. instability. I’ve only done a couple of hours of work so far in the new version, but I’ve had no problems with it yet! That’s a very good sign. It looks like Windows is still an important platform to Avid after all.

But the good news is that it’s looking more and more like this album is approaching “done”, and whatever changes I have left to make, I’ll be able to do them with far less drama (read: crashes) than before. This album would probably have been done months ago if the 64-bit Win7 support were out much sooner.

It’s coming together…

mike — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:31:44 +0000

So, the album is coming together nicely. All of the vocals are sung, and I’ve been working on comping them and picking out the best parts. I found a great horn player, Bill Scholl, and we got together a while ago and recorded some ideas for the song “Drive Me”. After listening to the parts we laid down, we decided they might work a little better played less staccato than they were, so we’re getting back together soon to try that out. They sound awesome so far though! I’ll also be visiting Chris Fisher’s studio again to re-amp all the electric guitar tracks. I recorded them all direct using amp emulators (Amplitube 2 and Eleven), and while they sound pretty good, they’re not quite as good as I’d like. So I’ll run each guitar part that I’ve already recorded out from the computer into a real amp, throw a mic in front of a real speaker cabinet, and record that back in. It’ll be awesome, if not tedious for 12 songs, each of which has between 6 and 20 or so tracks… I also added some tambourines to a few songs, and still might throw some more on a few others. They have a way of taking a song up a level and giving it a nice rhythmic groove. Once all that is finished, I’ll focus on getting good drum sounds and putting together the final mixes, or maybe even bringing in someone to help at that point. But really, it’s starting to sound like an album for real now. I can’t wait to be done and get this out for the world to hear it!

Now I just need to come up with a name. Two actually – one for the album and maybe even one for the “band”… Any ideas?

In other news, I’m looking forward to upgrading to the latest version of Pro Tools that includes actual support for Windows 7 (maybe it’ll run without crashing every 20 minutes!), but that’s gonna have to wait ’til I finish this album since it also drops support for my MBox! Not cool. The preamps in that thing sound pretty good and I’m not happy about the prospect of an otherwise perfectly good piece of hardware becoming obsolete just like that. But I suppose that’s how things work in this world, unfortunately.

What’s new?

mike — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:02:48 +0000

I was making good progress, recording at a (relatively) good pace through the end of the summer. Vocals are done for 7 of the 12 songs, and that’s more than half. But then it went and got cooler outside and I went and caught a cold. I don’t think it was the pig flu or anything, but it knocked me for a loop for a few days and I’m still coughing now, almost two weeks later. So recording vocals is on the back burner.

I looked at this as a setback for a few days, wallowing in self-pity about how I’ll never finish this album at this rate, blah blah blah, but then I realized this was a good opportunity. Since I started in earnest on this album of mine just about a year ago (eek), I’ve been neglecting writing and working on new songs for the most part. (I wrote a few tunes on vacations, but that’s not as much as I’d like.) So I started working on some demos for songs I wrote over the summer, and on Sunday I even wrote a new one. With my computer out of commission from some driver issues (again), I busted out my trusty iPhone and the 4-Track app and laid down some ideas. That’s one of the most useful apps I’ve ever downloaded (if only the metronome would work from anywhere but the beginning of the song…), and with an iTunes gift card I had lying around, I still haven’t paid a single cent for an app for my phone. I imported the tracks into Pro Tools and whipped up a quick drum part in BFD and added some bass and electric guitar and now I’ve got a shiny new demo to listen to and try to come up with lyrics for. Good times.

I also came to the decision that, while the samples I’m using for a few horn parts in some of the songs (Garritan Personal Orchestra) sound decent, they’re not as good as I’d like. So I set out to find a good horn player to play them for me. I’ve got a few leads, but if anyone out there knows someone who can play trumpet, and maybe trombone and french horn as well, hit me up. If you’re gonna do something, do it right, right?

I just recorded a Michael Jackson tribute

mike — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:45:53 +0000

I just put together this Michael Jackson tribute. It’s an acoustic cover of Thriller, with some self-recorded backing vocals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyA-80k9lAQ&fmt=18

Check it out and let me know what you think! RIP, MJ!

Update

mike — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:15:34 +0000

Quick update. I’ve found myself using Twitter (which in turn updates my Facebook page) a whole lot lately, as it’s easier to write a 140-character “what I’m working on now” update than to write a full blog entry. And more people tend to read Twitter and Facebook than my blog here. But to recap, for those not on Twitter or whatever, I’m still working on this solo album! I’ve got guitars recorded for just about 10 of the 12 songs now, and then it’s on to vocals from there. Still hoping to get this thing done and released before the end of ’09.

For the computer/recording geeks, I wound up setting up a dual-boot system on my PC, since Pro Tools is just not stable enough yet on 64-bit Windows 7. I couldn’t handle the instability and the pops and clicks. So I’m now using 32-bit XP for Pro Tools again and 64-bit Win7 for everything else, and it’s working out pretty good for me. Only issue I’m having with XP is that it doesn’t seem to recognize more than 2.99GB of the 9GB of RAM installed now, and I use that up pretty quickly in some of these sessions with lots of plug-ins. But for tracking, I just disable some of them and get by. I haven’t even come close to maxing out the processing power, which is great. Official 64-bit PT support can’t come soon enough!

Guitars, guitars, and more guitars. And computers.

mike — Sat, 16 May 2009 05:50:38 +0000

Over the last two weeks, I’ve recorded the guitars for just about half the songs for the new album. It’s quite the process. I’d done fairly fully-fleshed out demos for most of these songs, and so started out the “real” versions by importing the demo parts as a road map once the drums were tracked. So all I needed to do was to re-record each part in place, like color-by-number for some of them. But as I’m going, I’m coming up with some new ideas and changing things around, so it’s still quite the creative process.

That is, when my computer is working right… I’d have a lot more done by now if I wasn’t spending half my time troubleshooting computer issues. Pro Tools ran great on Windows Vista 32-bit, but I needed more than 3.2GB of ram for some of these sessions. (32-bit operating systems only let you access between 3 and 4GB of ram…) So, I’ve been running Windows 7 64-bit. Win7 is running awesome for the most part, and I quite like the way it works, but Pro Tools doesn’t officially support 64-bit operating systems, so it’s been an experiment, to say the least.

For example, a few times now I’ve recorded a guitar part and gotten it just right, but then on listening back, I found pops and clicks in the audio, so I had to redo it. Or I’d be adjusting an edit, and PT would just stop responding, forcing me to restart it and wait several minutes as it re-loads the session. Or I’d change the hardware buffer size and PT would just crash and take down Windows with a BSOD in the process. That’s always fun.

Somehow though, through it all, I’m still making progress. I recorded 6 electric guitar tracks and 11 acoustic guitar tracks for a song called “The Words” tonight and yesterday. I used two mics on the acoustic for each part (a 414 and a 57), so there are actually 28 guitar tracks in this song currently. I’m gonna have to figure out a way to whittle those down, though; I think I might have done too much this time around. But it is much easier to remove tracks than to record more later, so away I went!

I’m still optimistic, and listening to the new mixes as I get more and more parts recorded is still a thrill. And yes, part of me is wondering if getting a Mac would make this go much more smoothly… I feel dirty.

Back in the saddle

mike — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:51:01 +0000

I finally got my Pro Tools setup stable on the new computer and got some work done on the solo album over the last couple of days. I decided to start with the guitars in “Everything’s Fine”. I re-recorded over the imported demo tracks (which were time-shifted as I imported them to fit the song’s new tempo) and added another track to beef it up a bit.

Multitasking as ever, between takes I watched an interview with Butch Vig where he showed some of the techniques that went into recording Nirvana’s Nevermind. I’d been meaning to find that stuff for a long time and it was awesome to hear some of the tracks from that album soloed to hear the pieces that came together to make that amazing album. I’d also love to find out more details like how they mic’d up the guitars, what settings they used, etc., but who knows if that’s available…

(As a side note, it’s really hard to explain the feeling I get when I hear that stuff from Nevermind… “Amazing ” doesn’t even come close. I think this tweet was well-phrased:

this must be what it feels like to go to church for some people: http://tinyurl.com/c65jpx

It’s definitely a natural high that’s hard to reproduce otherwise. Nearly 20 years later, that music hasn’t lost any of its effect on me.)

Anyway, after watching that, I listened again to the guitars I’d recorded so far for Everything’s Fine (even though the song is nothing like Drain You, but still), and decided I needed to add some more guitar tracks. So I might add one or two more to see how that sounds. The more the merrier!

After that, next up is to redo the lead slide guitar stuff I did. That’ll be a bit harder as I haven’t touched my slide since I recorded these demos and I’ll have to re-learn the parts as I go. But it’s coming together finally and it’s a real relief to be making progress again. Maybe I’ll shoot some video of me doing the slide stuff so you guys can hear a little bit of this tune I’m talking about.

This is not good.

mike — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:27:59 +0000

For those of you wondering why I haven’t posted about my progress on the new album lately… I decided to get a new computer recently. The one I had was pretty fast, but not quite powerful enough to do everything I wanted to do on my songs. So I got a newer, faster one.

I’m not sure what happened exactly, but at some point the other day, it died. I was installing photoshop, and it died. Something about the MBR. Not only did Windows crap the bed, but it somehow took out my data drive. What’s that mean? It means that the work I’ve been doing on my album since early February is apparently *gone*. Early Feb. was the last time I made a backup of my files, like an idiot.

Luckily, I hadn’t done any new recording the last few weeks; I’d just been consolidating my demo guitar/vocal/keyboard tracks and adding those to the “real” sessions so I’d have a roadmap to finish it more quickly. But now it looks like I’ll have to do all of that over again, unless one of these data recovery programs I’m finding online can help me fix this. I really hope I’d finished all the bass guitar tracks before that last backup… Oh boy.

I also lost 2 new Hairband Fistfight episodes that I hadn’t yet edited or backed up. And I just formatted my camera’s memory card like 3 days ago, so there goes that thought.

Current mood: morose

*edited to add*

Ok, so a lot can happen in 4 hours. In the most recent 4 hours since I posted this depressing entry, I found a few data recovery programs online, and one in particular (the 3rd one I tried) seems to actually be working and is recovering everything I needed! This is absolutely amazing. “GetDataBack for NTFS” saved my sanity.

Experiencing technical problems

mike — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:48:32 +0000

On Friday, I thought it was a good time to finally upgrade Pro Tools from 7.4 to 8.0. 8 has some cool new plug-ins and it seemed like as good a time as any to go for it. Or so I thought. I haven’t been able to get any work done since Friday.

Upgrading PT broke my amp emulator plug-ins (Amplitube2, Ampeg SVX Uno) and a synth that I might use (Analog Factory). It also forced me to upgrade Auto Tune (not free…) since the version I was using (4) was finally not supported any more by PT. Gotta love forced paid upgrades. It still isn’t working, but at least Digi’s tech support is trying to help me figure it out.

And no, Seth, I’m not going Mac to fix this.

Finally have the drums all recorded

mike — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:50:51 +0000

Went back down to Chris Fisher’s studio in Coxsackie on Sunday, this time to track drums with John Brodeur for the last two songs for this album. I always enjoyed John’s songwriting and singing with his various bands (The Suggestions, Maggie Mayday, Hector On Stilts, Five Alpha Beatdown, etc.), but then I found out he plays drums too, and quite well at that! Somehow with his playing in about 900 bands, he was up for helping me out with a couple tunes on drums. We had one quick rehearsal this fall to go over the two songs he played on – “The Words” and “Everything’s Fine”. After finally getting our schedules to line up again, all of the drum tracks for my CD are now recorded.

We were a little bit late to start the session. Who wants to get up early on a Sunday, right? But just as we finished setting up the mics and getting sounds, the power went out. Just like that. I guess a transformer down the street blew. Luckily, Chris had just saved the settings before we lost juice. We waited around a little bit, hoping it would come back on soon. A while later, he went out to the garage and came back with a generator. The session was saved! Or so we thought. All that gear draws a lot of power, and apparently 5000 watts wasn’t quite enough. So we tried shutting off all the unessential pieces, but it still wasn’t quite cutting it. Chris had another backup plan though; he had another generator he could borrow. He set that one up, and we were good to go. I forget the exact timeline, but it seemed like just as we got settled in with that, the power came back on. Gotta love it.

This is a big landmark in recording this solo project. Now the only person I’m waiting on is myself. The pressure is on! I’ve got to comp these 2 new songs of drums, then record 3 more songs on bass, and then I begin guitars.

And I still haven’t decided whether or not to throw in a cover tune to complicate matters more…