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I think that's a lesson I'm really slow in learning but you're totally right. The best sounding acoustic records are imo the ones where the recording process is as transparent as possible - you make the fewest decisions and you make as many of them as you can correctly.
It's hard in my thing where I'm trying to blend acoustic with digital / processed sounds, which has almost the exact opposite philosophy - usually the harder you graft on a processed track the better it sounds. But if you do that on an acoustic take it almost invariably ends up sounding unnatural and sucky. I listen to my last record and cringe at the overly boosted top end in the percussion. Always learning.
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Have you considered roping in someone to engineer/produce things? Might help keep your momentum/focus up if someone else can manage the DAW wrangling during the session and offer a bit of feedback between takes.
Otherwise sounds like you’re doing things right with the pre-production work and trying to get things right at source. One thing I would say is that most domestic environments are pretty terrible acoustically (especially once recorded) and that ‘natural’ sounding stuff on record isn’t necessarily produced ‘naturally’. Some close-micing in a dead room with subtle verbs applied afterwards can work very nicely and prevent that boxy sound. -
Good call. The room i’m In isn’t ideal but it doesn’t have any obvious unpleasant attributes like a flutter echo or boxy mids. It’s two rooms knocked through in a Victorian terrace. upper ground floor, no traffic noise, wood floor, high-ish ceiling, lots of rugs and soft furnishings in the front side and plenty of odd shapes to break up reflections without making it too dead. I’ve hit upon a mic set up of a close sm57 on the guitar (condensers let too much vocal spill through) and a nice valve condenser on the vocal about a foot away. Am working on getting the source sounding how I like without needing too much treatment. A big, actually, huge part of that for me was learning to sing quietly. I’m still working in it but the urge to add passion and character by hollering is hard to resist. I need to tho as for me anyway, it actually has the opposite effect.
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Sounds good! Something that might be worth trying is hanging thick duvets/rugs/etc in a V shape directly behind you (and to the sides if you have enough) - should improve vocal clarity and might even kill enough back wall reflections to let you use a condenser on the guitar as well.
I'd probably try and aim everything down the long axis if possible too. -
I have minor problem with coming up with lyrics that don't sound (written) by a maudlin complaining adolescent or a bitter complaining non adolescent. Not twee - not Richard Stilgoe 'funny' but I often need some verse to actually hold together a song track in some sort of structure.
I find anything over 3 minutes is just self indulgent.
Its an art to know when to stop - leave it and move on - warts and all. -
Fucking hell dude, you’ve just described my lifelong (actually I didn’t start writing lyrics till I was in my late 20s, but you get the point) struggle with finding the sweet spot between exactly what I also think of as “maudlin sixth form poet” and “clever-clever Stilgoe comedy awful”.
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Yeah I'm using the fuck it /like it or not approach which is quite liberating while trying to avoid being misinterpreted if you know what I mean.
I'm not trying to change the world - wouldn't even want that burden :)
Its not poetry set to music its just words that sit sweet ... sometimes. -
Looks amazing. Wouldn't know where to start. *ahmish
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That’s where it starts...
This is where it ends:
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No idea of room treatment etc but I think I’ve seen a photo with speakers in it - it’s Martin Gore’s (Depeche Mode) studio if you fancy a google!
I’d say it’s probably unusably large, even if it has bus/tunnelling patchbays built in. -
I know, my son is really into this guy’s Youtube videos.He loves the building stuff as well as the noise making.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw
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Nice!
How old is he/does he have access to proper diagnostic gear at school/college yet? There are so many amazing synth kits to build if you have the time to solder them and the gear to calibrate them properly. -
He’s just turned 8. We home educate, so this is ‘school’.
We’ve got a little digital multimeter, which we mainly use to check the resistors before soldering because i’m colour blind so can’t work out their stripes.
My father-in-law is an electronics engineer so he can help if we decide to tackle anything that’s beyond my capabilities. Although it’s amazing what you can learn just watching videos on Youtube! -
The little kit on the right in the photo, with the 9v battery, is an Atari Punk Console, he built that. It makes a nice noise but he wants to be able to sequence it or trigger it from one of the other things. So that will probably be the next project for us. Also we want to build a little case for it but we’ll do that once we work out the sequencing bit (any suggestions for this are appreciated as I’m learning as we go too).
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Oh ok cool! If it's something you carry on with, there are PC based scopes/signal generators etc that might help. Or wait for old 'obsolete' stuff to turn up on ebay.
Dream synth builds with enough time/decent soldering iron/scope:
http://www.deckardsdream.com/build
http://build.thehumancomparator.net/A friend of mine is building a modular synth all from DIY modules, which is probably a lot more accessible than the above though!
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That stuff looks cool but definitely falls into the ‘beyond my capabilities’ catagory.
Do you have any suggestions for how we can trigger the Atari Punk Console with what he’s already using? Or if there’s some sort of DIY kit that could do it? I thought we could build a baby-8 sequencer but he likes using the Volca and Pocket Operator together as you can just dial in the same BPM and hit play at the same time and it syncs. -
Yeah me too really, I'd need to get good at soldering again at the very least.
The baby8 has a clock input so you should be able to send clock from volca/PO to the sequencer and control the APC with that.
I know volca clock is a bit weird (double/half time maybe?), so you'll need some sort of clock-divider/multiplier but that should be ok to do DIY. -
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About
We are the music makers - producers?
Posted by
@mattty
In terms of material, the stuff I have written falls into some kind of uncanny valley between folky pop and an approximation of sentimental singer-songwriter country pop of the 70s. I never claimed to be cool.
The acts I look to the most in terms of influencing songwriting would be the likes of Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Neil Young as well as folkier stuff like Nic Jones, Nick Drake Martin Carthy and newer indie folkies like Joanna Newsom and the Decemberists.
It's musically simple stuff. Usually just picked or strummed on acoustic guitars and only a handful of chords. I want the focus of these songs to be on the vocal and the lyrics. I'm spending a fair bit of time in "pre-production" at the moment working and re-working lyrics though several drafts until i'm happy. I basically spend every spare minute of the day for a month or so with a notebook in front of me. I fall asleep with problematic lines going round and round and write endless lists of possible rhymes running through the alphabet in search of the right word.
Once I've got a lyric and a melody I'm happy with, I like to strike while the iron's hot and record it while it's still fresh. In terms of performance I find that multi-tracking what is essentially a solo performance loses more in feel than it gains in after-the-fact flexibility so I'm going for a live end-to end take of vocal and guitar in one pass on these tunes. I'm sure i'll come back to more complex arrangements soon but for now this live solo thing is where my head's at.
In terms of hopefully capturing a bit of spontaneity and spark I like to get a sound happening then just start running though takes till i'm fairly certain I've nailed at least one. I don't have a set method but the last couple of tunes I've done like this, I've sat down and knocked out 8 or 9 full takes then saved them and gone away for a few hours before coming back to listen. Somewhere around that amount seems to be the sweet spot for me at the moment. It seems to work in terms of still feeling the excitement of the new and being familiar enough with the material that I can play about with phrasing and maybe improvise a little bit . The main thing for me by doing this though, is that my voice gets warmed up and I learn how to sing it. By take 8 or 9 I sound totally different from the breathy choirboy with horrible plummy vowels of take 1. Hopefully after 45 minutes of consecutive takes, hot tea and maybe even a nip of whiskey the voice is working, warmed up and has a bit of character to it. Also (hopefully) by then my control of vibrato and pitch have woken up a bit too and the overall result should be a vocal that I can stand to listen to without wincing.
That's the plan anyway.