Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City/Fly Me To Hecuba – 270511

Sponsored by the letter R.

Swings and roundabouts, dear boy…

If yesterday was an awful day, project-wise, today was excellent.

I did a quick remix of …EVONY in CE5. Very little tweaking required and the mastering went well in Cubase VST/24 and AA3.

Flushed with success, I had a go at mixing/mastering …HECUBA. Sorted in 90 minutes – delighted with the results.

I’ve devised a workaround for the low signal output issue I mentioned yesterday - chuck everything into a group channel and use that to bring the signal up. And if that doesn’t work, chuck the group channel into a second group channel. Max the first group channel and make fine adjustments with the second. I’m sure audio engineering purists would choke at this suggestion, but it seems to work for me and that’s all that matters.

Regards,

djp

Rough mixing – 050511

Sponsored by the letter R.

Did very rough MP3 mixes of the following tracks:-

1. A Truth You Can Happily Accept
2. Braille For The Feet (sadly, this track ain’t going to make the final cut – destined for B-side “glory”)
3. Flood Plain
4. Fly Me To Hecuba
5. Future Plans For Yesterday
6. Hosanna In The Hiace
7. King Fidget
8. No Position To Argue
9. On The Lake Beneath The Shoreline
10. People Who Look Like Other People
11. Perp Walk

Five more to do after that over the course of the weekend. Then it’s time to make me minds up…;-)

Regards,

djp

Fly Me To Hecuba – 120411

Sponsored by the letter S.

Edited the Tele parts in CE5. After much to-ing and quite a bit of fro-ing, I isolated two alternating loops which I pasted throughout the track. Judicious use of the Chopper VST plugin (essentially, a tremolo/vibrato thingy – I could never tell the difference…) neatly covers up any guitar playing deficiencies on the part of moi.

Shortened the beats and the Reaktor 5 part.

All nice and cushtee (sp?). Time to move on…

Regards,

djp

Fly Me To Hecuba – 110411

Sponsored by the letter R.

Last night I had to download my Native Instruments VST plugins (including Reaktor 5) onto my laptop. This was in between watching Lewis on ITV and poor Rory Mc.Ilroy imploding at the Masters on the Beeb. Didn’t have time to set the plugins up last night – waaaay too late.

Took me about an hour to work out what to do with them this evening (the acronym RTFM springs to mind), but I eventually got it sorted and started editing the bass parts in CE5. Experimented with a few loops from the first and second parts and eventually got a loop together that was pretty damn tight. The loop repeats itself all the way through the track apart from an end section which I had to edit together from various scraps of bass. Works rather well, if I do say so my self (and I doooo…).

Tomorrow, I’ll have a go at the Tele parts. Hopefully should be handy enough to do.

Regards,

djp

Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City?/Fly Me To Hecuba – 100411

Sponsored by the letters N, O and P.

Finished off editing …EVONY in CE5. Did a bit of tweaking on the keyboard parts to make them tie in with the completed bass loop. Sorted out the Ebow Strat parts as well. Got a nice little ping-pong delay thing going on with the Strat. Should sound grand in the finished mix.

Set up …HECUBA  on the laptop, only to realise that the various Native Instruments VST plugins (including Reaktor 5, which is required for this track) need to be installed on the laptop. Minor bummer, but a necessary thing to get sorted, so I didn’t get much done with this track, editing-wise.

Better luck tomorrow, eh?

I also tried to re-install CE4 and CE5 on my PC, everything worked fine, but there’s some weirdness going on with the eLicenser key which is preventing the software from working on the PC. Odd, considering it’s working perfectly on the laptop.

Who’d be me…?;-).

Regards,

djp

Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City?/Fly Me To Hecuba/Braille For The Feet/Private Sector Weather Forecast Service/Hosanna In The Hiace

Sponsored by the letters I and J.

Did audio cleanup on the wavs in Cool Edit Pro. Tedious work to be sure, but the quicker I get through this part of the process, the quicker I can proceed to the editing stage.

Roadtrip tomorrow and Friday. Catch youze later…

Regards,

djp

Fly Me To Hecuba/Perp Walk – 020311

Sponsored by the letter C.

Another day, another toy…

*Not* going to smash my Telecaster through the television screen...

 

…HECUBA

Recorded 4 similar guitar parts on the Tascam 2488 using my Fender Telecaster and the Pod 2.0. Nice simple arpeggios (is that the correct plural form?). Should edit out nicely.

PERP WALK

Recorded 8 crunchy Tele parts. Sounds really good. I may have to edit the MIDI parts to fit around the guitar parts, but that’s not a problem.

Wasn’t expecting to do two tracks in one day. Well pleased!  But getting ahead of myself, perhaps?

More work tomorrow…

Regards,

djp

On The Lake Beneath The Shoreline/Fly Me To Hecuba/Perp Walk

Sponsored by the letter S.

…LAKE…

Programmed two solo sections in  CE5, using the 4Front Rhodes VST plugin. Chucked a bit of tremolo on top and things now sound pretty good.

Attempted to sort out the Strat solo for the middle section. I had 6 working parts to work with (a seventh part was just buzzing). I started sliding the various parts around and, completely by accident, came up with a solo that sounds reasonably accurate. The finished version resembles, in no way, what it was I was attempting to achieve. So that’s alright then…;-)

The track sounds much better now, but probably won’t make the album. It depends on what the competition is like…

…HECUBA…

This track will  definitely make the cut. Sounds wonderful, even in unfinished form. Put together a rough mix for recording guitar parts next week.

…PERP…

Started re-arranging the various bass parts. Nearly there but not quite. More work required tomorrow.

Regards,

djp

Whatever Happened To the Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City?/Fly Me To Hecuba/Braille For The Feet – 130111

Sponsored by the letter P.

Keeping this brief, I recorded the various MIDI parts off the D-110, JV-880 and Juno-D to audio on CE5 via the Behringer mixer and the Phonic Firefly. No need to bore you with the details. Everything went tickety-boo…

Regards,

djp

In Heaven For A Conference/Fly Me To Hecuba – 060111

Sponsored by the letter F.

Today, I decided to record some bass parts, and in order to do that, I brought my Fender Jazz Bass back from retirement:-

I could perhaps have used this guitar as an alternative…

…but there were certain…er… technical problems which were insurmountable…;-)

Anyway, I recorded four bass takes each for …HEAVEN… and …HECUBA on to the Tascam 2488, using my Bass Pod XT. I haven’t played a bass part straight through in years and my fretting hand was aching like mad after a few minutes. But I persevered and eventually got some half-decent takes down which should edit out nicely.

The bass parts for …HECUBA were unusual in that they were the first ever bass parts that I recorded using my fingers rather than a plectrum. I remember my old buddy Peter Fitzpatrick tearing his hair out trying to get me to play finger-style years and years ago. Not successful, and have you seen Peter lately…? Mind you, I have been practising rather a lot with the fingers over the last few years, and for …HECUBA a Wobble-esque bass part came rather easily to hand. The idea here was to record a tight loop which will be repeated throughout the track.

CE5 has been acting rather strangely. For some bizarre reason, the floating transport panel had disappeared and couldn’t be retrieved, regardless of what it said in the operational manual.  I thought I’d be clever and try to open the relevant project files in CE4, but CE5 project files won’t open in CE4. Quel bummer. I don’t know what inspired me to open the project file for FUTURE…, but there was the transport panel, bold as brass. Once it was visible for FUTURE… it was visible for the other project files. Baffled. Totally.

More bass parts tomorrow. I may well start a brand new track which will be based around a bass riff I haven’t come up with yet. Everyday an adventure, eh?

Regards,

djp