Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Happy New Year!

Well, it looks like I post about one to four times a year in this blog. Not too impressive. I suppose I should up my game a bit here. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

Recorded a bit this morning. I re-recorded an acoustic guitar track for an old song of mine called "New Face On The World". I wrote it a million years ago and have been playing it live ever since. I actually recorded and "released" it once before, on a 1996 cassette-only release called "All Dressed Up And All Stressed Out", which got excellent reviews I might add (a couple anyway). But "All Dressed Up..." was recorded on a Tascam Portastudio, just so I would have something to pedal at live gigs, and I always felt that "New Face..." deserved a better recording. So I am trying to give it the treatment it deserves.

So I set up an X-Y stereo pair with my Rode C5 mics. It sounded OK, but I thought "what if I add a direct feed from my pickup, through my Body Rez pedal?" So I created another track and recorded the stereo pair plus another track for the pickup. This sounded pretty good!

Once I had a good performance recorded I got another idea. There's a couple of spots in the recording where I always feel like clapping along. So I decided to record four tracks of that clapping, using the stereo pair I had already set up. That turned out pretty good as well, and it added a bit of rhythmic stability. I may run it through a doubler when I mix it to see if I can get it to sound like even more hands clapping. We'll see.

This song will be released on a new acoustic EP that I want to have finished before I go off to Kansas City in February for Folk Alliance. I think it will be an EP anyway; it will depend on how much I can get done in January. Maybe it will be a full-length CD. Again, we'll see.

Oh yeah, Happy New Year!