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This week I’ve mostly been mixing.

Clearly these aren’t final mixes but I needed to do this to get the tracks a bit more streamlined, bouncing MIDI virtual instrument parts down to real audio, all in preparation for moving the logic project files over to the portable hard drive.

This is so that I can easily move between the studio iMac and the Macbook Pro (which now is fully ‘Logiced-Up’ ) for the big drum recording session which is tomorrow. Yay!

Along the way, I’ve taken the time to do some editing and mixing following the last two sessions with Andy and Adam, and I am really happy with the Acoustic parts in Together and A Day by the Sea, and the new bass parts in ADBTS have really lifted the feel, particularly in the 6/8 instrumental.

Also coming under scrutiny were the big multi-tracked vocal harmonies in Children of a Forgotten Sun, Don’t Give Up on Love and ADBTS . I have created vocal groups in each case and used Logic’s Focusrite compressor model in each case.  This has helped to blend the vocals together in a really lovely way.

So the tracks are now all on the portable firewire drive, the MacBook has had the Alesis mixer drivers installed. I have all the mics ready and cabling up together.  So hopefully my next entry will be all about drums.

A somewhat action packed edition of the blog today folks.

First off: Guitars.  Andy came over the other Friday and brought his rather nice Yamaha acoustic, and his even nicer American Stratocaster.  I miked up the Yamaha with a Samson CO2 Small Diameter Condenser mic set about 18″ (45cm) from the soundboard pointing at about the 12th fret.  Got a really nice sound.  Anyway, we tracked the acoustic guitar parts for A Day by the Sea and Together on the Shores of Time.  Then we moved to the Strat, which I DI’d directly into the DAW, and then using Logic’s Amp Designer I selected the Large Tweed Combo which is modelled from a classic Fender Tweed amp.  This was used to great effect on the rock section of A Day by the Sea.  I’m really pleased with it.

Also on the Guitar front Nick has agreed to do me another solo, this time the guitar solo in the 6/8 instrumental section of A Day by the Sea.  I  sent him links to the section in question, and the whole song, and he’s going to get to work on it.

Next up: Bass.Adam was in Tracking some alternative bass parts for A Day by the Sea, because we agreed that what we had worked out last time could be improved on.  This time we came up with some really outstanding bass parts, and it has lifted the arrangement to another level.  We also tracked about 70% of the bass for Children of a Forgotten Sun before we ran out of time.  We have another session booked for this coming Friday so that should see all the bass in the can.

Finally for today: Drums. Paul is booked in for an all day session on the first Saturday in March.  This will be a fun day.  I’ve booked a Church building for the day, which has some killer acoustics – It’s a large vaulted ceiling building which would seat up to 300 people but it is carpeted and the chairs are upholstered.  This gives a space which has a nice  reverb tail but isn’t overly lively.  I reckon that we can get a great drum sound in there.  I also have access to a fair selection of mics – D112 Kick mic, Audio Technica AT4021 overheads, Shure SM57 for the Snare, Rode M3 for the hi-hat and another for the floor tom.  and my Samson C02 pair for the rack toms.  I’ll also take my Groove Tubes GT57 Large Capsule condenser for the ambience mic.

I have installed Logic onto the Macbook pro, and I’ll be taking the Alesis Multimix to interface it all to the computer.  I’ve recorded a drum kit in that space before and was please with the results, but this will be the first time with my own gear, so it’s all going to be a bit of an adventure.

This is the big push to get the final bits of tracking done.  I still have Sue’s electric violin part to get for Ode to Joy, but I can now see the end in sight for the tracking.

Sometimes, you can just find yourself going around in circles, and getting more and more frustrated.  Especially when mixing music.  Take Together on the Shores of Time. This song starts as a simple guitar and vocal ballad.  Then the bass and mellotron come in, and it’s still pretty laid back.  And then for the chorus, there are big guitar power chords, four part harmonies, Taurus sub-bass, and huge stadium drums. Before it all breaks down to the vocal/bass/mellotron for the second verse.

And nothing I did would really make the choruses pop. Sure, they were louder.  The meters showed me that, the verses were peaking down at around 7-8dB and the choruses up around 2-3dB, but it just didn’t have the punchiness I was after.  I added compressors here, I tweaked EQ there, and just got more annoyed with it.

So at the weekend, I deleted every FX bus, zeroed all the EQs and started again.  And it all started to come together.  I had the light and shade, the choruses were loud and punchy, I have half the FX I did, I have way less EQ, and it all sounds so much better.

So it will be interesting to see what happens when Andy, a guitar playing friend comes over this Friday and lays down a real acoustic guitar part to replace the MIDI guitar part.

I’ll let you know.

Well, Fantasy Bridge Land has been rather quiet of late. I felt I was a bit too close to all the tunes to retain any objectivity, so I decided to leave it all alone for a week or two.  Pretty much all the keyboard parts, and the vocals are done now, only one track is awaiting bass, and we’re still trying to organise the drum tracking sessions, so I just found myself tinkering, and I didn’t want to fall into that old artist’s trap of not knowing when to stop, and potentially overworking things.

So I just put things on hold for a while. To get some space from the songs, listen to some other music, and hopefully regain some perspective.

And I think, it might have worked.  I had a listen through the latest mixes in the car the other night and immediately  decided that the chorus in Together on the Shores of Time needed a high harmony part.  So last night I put on my best falsetto voice, and went for it.  I’m really happy with the results.

In other news, I have been unhappy with the studio layout for a while now, with the sofa down the side wall opposite the keyboards.  I mentioned this to Sue and she confessed similar feelings about her study.  We worked out if we swapped around some of the furniture between us I could get the sofa at the back of the room, and lay things out a bit more ergonomically.  That agreed, I went off for a week travelling in Paris and London.  And the brilliant thing was, while I was a away Adam came around and helped Sue move everything.  I came home to a completely tidy and re-arranged studio.

And it’s brilliant.  I’ll try to put some pics up so you can all see.

I’m also thinking about filming some of the studio sessions, so you can see the working process first hand.

So, watch this space!

Or.. that big grey thing behind the microphone…

The second studio toy that santa brought was a Vicoustic Flexiscreen, which is a gadget that sits atop your mic stand and absorbs reflected sound energy, giving a much deader acoustic environment around the mic.

It’s a bit like having your own personal vocal booth.  Many home recordings suffer from the fact that they are recorded in less than optimum acoustic conditions.  You might think your room isn’t imparting any character to the sound, but in all likelihood, untamed reflections from walls and ceiling are interfering with the sound in a most unflattering way.

I had already invested in some large absorption panels made from rockwool, and these have gone a long way towards a more neutral recording space, but vocals could still be a little boxy in character.  But the flexiscreen appears to have tamed a lot of that now.  Which is excellent.

So, onward with the work!

As I mentioned in the last post, I got a couple of toys for the studio under the Christmas tree, and this is the first of two posts to tell you all about them.  So, first up we have a new MIDI interface from Mark Of The Unicorn: The MOTU Micro Lite.  For those of you that don’t know, MIDI – The Musical Instrument Digital Interface – was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association back in 1983, to standardise the way electronic instruments (primarily keyboards) talked to each other, allowing one synth to control another, or another device entirely, like a sequencer to take control of the instrument.  Since then MIDI has become ubiquitous on keyboards, and anyone who has spent any time with electronic keyboards will be familiar with the three DIN connectors on the back – MIDI IN, MIDI OUT and MIDI THRU.  Anyway, the Micro Lite is a device that allows a computer to interface from it’s USB bus to MIDI equipped equipment. To quote the MOTU blurb:

micro lite is a 5-in/5-out MIDI interface (compatible with Macintosh and Windows).

Built from the same technology found in MOTU’s flagship MIDI Timepiece, the micro lite is a professional MIDI interface that provides portable, plug-and-play connectivity to any USB-equipped Macintosh or Windows computer.  The micro lite takes full advantage of USB, giving you high-speed MIDI throughput, sub-millisecond timing accuracy, support for “hot-swapping” and plug-and-play expansion.

Computer MIDI interfaces used to be a common sight in studios, and everyone and their dog made one, but as the  software instrument revolution took hold, everyone gave up on their MIDI controlled hardware in favour of software plug-ins.  Now as any regular reader might know, I like software instruments as much as the next guy, and they afford someone like me the opportunity to include the sounds of a classic Hammond organ, or a Moog modular synth into their projects.  However I still like real synths, real hardware with keys, knobs, and of course, for the most part a MIDI socket or three to allow them to be controlled by a sequencer, or DAW.

Up until now I have been using an Edirol 2 channel interface, which was fine, except that a) I have 5 external instruments which meant that I had to daisy-chain them via the MIDI THRU socket, which causes problems when you have multitimberal instruments capable of receiving multiple signals on different MIDI channels, and b) for whatever reason, the mac didn’t like the Edirol driver and the interface would regularly become unavailable for no good reason, which was annoying. To say the least.  Now while little one or two channel interfaces are still to be had, MOTU are pretty much the only game in town when bigger more pro devices are required.  This thing is great.  It’s built like a tank, and device driver is stable and solid.  Nice

As I type, I have the keys and modules all cabled up to their own dedicated interface, and from Logic, I can just call up, for instance, the little Prophecy, select a sound and play.  Which means that I’m having fun trying out all sorts of new lead sounds, and new pads.  Ahhhh!

Well, here we are…  It’s 2010!  No flying cars, no space bubble habitats and no silver lycra suits for everyone.  (OK that last bit is good!) However, hopefully we can look forward to the culmination of the Fantasy Bridge Project and it release onto an unsuspecting public.

Let me wish you all a fantastic new year.

Christmas in Fantasy Bridge Land was great, there were new studio toys, which I’ll tell you about over the next few days, and lots of opportunities to try them out. Got a bass tracking session in with Adam too, and got a rough cut mix of the whole album together for Paul to look at from a drumming perspective.  That was interesting to do in its own right, because it was the first time I sat down with a CD of all the tracks in the right running order and listened through on the big speakers downstairs.  I made copious mixing notes and highlighted some areas that needed attention in the tracking and editing department.

And so with lots of things to do in 2010, it’s on with the show…

Not much has been going on over the last couple of weeks, hence the silence on my part.  This hasn’t been helped by the real job meaning I’ve spent all week in London… And this time no portable kit to hand.  However, in a few spare moments last week I was looking at the lead sounds I originally chose for A Day by the Sea, and I decided that a stock lead from the old EMU Proteus Rompler weren’t that interesting.  So I popped open the Arturia Moog Modular and developed a couple of interesting leads based on three triangle oscillators, two filters and two VCAs with different LFOs driving the filters and panning the VCAs to the left and the right. The sound has the same whistle -like quality of the original sound, but are far more individual interesting and, of course unique.

I love the immediacy of this synth.

Gosh, I can’t believe it’s December already.  And I can’t believe that the Fantasy Bridge project is in it’s 6th month already. Perhaps it’s time for something of a round-up of progress so far.

The observant readers out there might have noticed that progress at MarkOneMusic is rarely linear.  In fact the image of a butterfly hopping between flowers probably comes to mind.  This is partly because work proceeds in quite small chunks in evenings and at weekends, and it is rare that I will get a whole day on the project, so it necessitates a mindset of: what can I usefully get done in the next hour and a half. The other reason is, because, by not getting bogged down in any particular song, all of them are remaining pretty fresh, and my enthusiasm, likewise.

Right now I am tracking the remaining vocals for A Day by the Sea, and once that is done, pretty much all my keys and vocals are in the can. The outstanding tracking will be bass on four tracks, if Adam is able to fit in the time, guitars on three tracks – I have guitarists who are keen to do the sessions, but sorting out people’s availability is not going to be easy.

Which leaves the big unanswered question of drums… I’m keen to see if my old bandmate Paul can add real drums, but he has his own business and is mega-busy, and although he’s said yes in principal, I don’t want the project to flounder while we try to organise  both his time and a venue with good acoustics.  We’re due to get together over Christmas, so one way or another the question of drums is going to be resolved.

As I reported a few days ago, mixing is complete on the one track with no drums, bass or guitars, and Dawn, now has a mix that seems to translate pretty well to different systems, so I do have one track in the can (Only 9 more to go!).  I also have a completed test mix of Fantasy Bridge to see what the result will be, if I go with sequenced drums, and I’ve had some good feedback on that, so if the live drumming thing doesn’t pan out there is a plan B.

So, progress, will, I suspect slow down from now until Christmas, Adam is looking at a day tracking session over the holidays and in the next week or so I’ll be trying to cajole guitarists into committing to dates.

Other non-music related progress.  I have the front cover artwork and back cover done.  I need to decide what the inlay will be, a single sheet, or a 4 or 8 page booklet.  Note to self, look at the difference in costs with some duplication companies.

That leaves me to try and define a target for project completion, if it is not to drag on through much of 2010, and I guess in my own mind, I’m now kind of looking at a Spring release date.

But, as always, watch this space.

There are a number of keyboards that define prog rock.  And of course amongst their number are the giants: The Hammond B3/C3, the Minimoog, the almost mythical Yamaha GX1 and the Mellotron.  Now, I have to confess a kind of love-hate relationship with the mellotron, I can’t deny the impact it had on music in general, and the prog rock genre in particular.  It’s use by Tony Banks on those Gabriel era Genesis songs such as Watcher of the Skies and by Rick Wakeman on the Fragile and Close to the Edge albums, these sounds defined my musical upbringing.  More often than not the Mellotron was associated with those somewhat plaintive string sounds (Think: The Moody Blues Knights in White Satin) But Mellotrons were capable of flute sounds, brass, and choir sounds)

But on the flip-side to this, I always thought that it’s very nature was it’s weakness.  An electromechanical keyboard that worked by dragging lengths of tape across multiple tape heads each containing a recording of an instrument, or ensemble playing a note, in effect the first sample replay device. You could only play 8 second notes, because then the tape ran out. If you played a big chord the pitch dropped due to all the friction, and they were prone to tape flutter, breaking down or even on the odd occasion, catching fire!

The tape frames wore out and consequently the sound became more muffled with time, and Messers Wakeman, and Banks have written or spoken about their dreadful Mellotron experiences. (The story goes that Rick once took one out, poured petrol over it and ceremoniously set fire to it!) And while you can’t deny the melancholic slightly fluttery, slightly detuned sounds that define many early prog tracks, I was always more drawn to the shimmering, albeit more artifical sound of devices like the Eminent String synth and its ilk. OK, prog purists, please don’t hate me!

Despite all that, I decided that Home by the Sea was the sort of song that lent itself to that old school sound. I decided that in the 6/8 synth solo I could just imagine someone like Tony Banks playing a string part with his left hand, on a keyboard behind him while he noodled out the solo part. Who am I to deny my imagination?

So although I’m not Tony Banks and I don’t have a Mellotron, I decided to add the part anyway.  My Alesis Fusion 8HD is, I suspect the most underrated keyboard in the world.  It contains a rather amazing powerful sampler and is capable of some incredible sounds.  One of the sound design companies that worked on this keyboard on behalf of Alesis was  Hollow Sun and Steve Howell from HS provided his NewTron Bomb samples for the Fusion.  This is about as authentic as you can get, samples directly from an original with nothing added or taken away other than being seamlessly looped so they play for more than 8 seconds.  I decided on the rather excellently named Tape Watcher program (Apparently for the intro for Watcher of the Skies, Tony Banks set switch on his tron to somewhere between the Strings and Brass settings, which made the machine play a bit of each tape)

And so despite my ambivalence towards the venerable ‘Tron’ it is nonetheless going to find its way onto the album after all.