My recording booth is in my studio…my studio is in my office…my office is in my living room: if you follow the logic carefully, you’ll see that I’m doing my recording in my living room. With two children under the age of ten, in our 1400 square foot house, this is a  huge challenge: sound carries, and the living room is the pathway from the family room to the bathroom.

For a long time, I would produce a song like this:

1. Record a scratch track. Me, singing along with my guitar with one microphone. Do the whole song. Two, maybe three tries.

2. Record the guitar track. Play along with the scratch track’s volume turned way down so I could hear myself. This would typically take six or more tries, depending on the song.

3. Record the lead vocal track. Could take a few tries, but easier than the guitar part.

4. Record each harmony track. Just like #3.

5. Add a bassline or piano.

6. Mix, mix, mix, equalize, reverb, compress, mix some more, get a song.

Between day-job, kids, household duties, it would take about a week, if I was lucky. Usually more like two.

I don’t remember the day the “click” happened, when that particular set of synapses fired up and the realization dawned: you can produce small pieces successfully with little effort…small successes chained together equal larger success…and so on. I tried it. It worked. I was hooked.

Typically, I’ll record two or three verses and two or three refrains, an intro, and an out-tro¹. In my software, then, I take each of the pieces and assemble them, copying and pasting as needed, until the musical base of the song is complete. Having more than one version of each verse and each refrain allows me to mix and match and provide some randomness to the performance. Unless there’s some quirk in the performance, like a particular fret buzz or breath or an errant note, you’d never know.

I don’t usually loop my vocals; as there’s no need for it. Usually. We’ll get to that in a moment.

To my mind, it’s no different from a musician recording and combining several tracks for several instruments, a guitar, piano, and bassline for instance, or going back and punching in a few seconds of correction to a mistake made on the last recording.  To this solo musician producing his own CD, it gives several benefits.

First is a more consistent performance. By the time I’m able to record on any given day, I’m pretty wiped out; playing an up-tempo song with seven verses is tough even when I’m in top form.

Second is faster results in less time. If you’ve ever tried to record your own music – or had someone record it for you – you know that performing in front of a microphone is different than sitting on your couch just running through a song. On my couch, I can do a song a dozen times flawlessly. In front of a mic, I can barely get past the intro on the first several tries.  Somehow, I can produce one or two verses without mistakes much easier than I can the aforementioned seven verse song, and not having to start all over when I make a mistake on the last verse is a real time-saver.

Third: I can fit in a recorded verse between commercial breaks, when my children are occupied with whatever episode of Sponge Bob they’re watching for the eighty-third time and are therefore unlikely to move into audible range.

I said before I don’t usually loop my vocals, and that’s true. There are times when it becomes a real benefit, though. Wayyy back in October, 2009, I had a run-in with H1N1 that eventually made it into my lungs. I got over the flu part pretty quick, but the cough – even now, three months later – lingers.

I have pretty good breath control – years of acting and singing helps, eh? – and can usually work my around most issues, but at one point when I was recording South Australia, a cough tried to work its way out on one of the “heave away, haul away”s, and the phrase came out sounding rather bad – like I was drunk, actually. I would have punched in a correction, but just as I was getting up to turn on the mic and get that done, the kids came blasting through in the throes of some life-or-death struggle over a toy helicopter, and the opportunity was lost.

Did I despair? No sir. I grabbed a previously successful “heave away, haul away” and plugged it in.

There’s another instance where looping comes in real handy: if you have a song with pauses – Jamie Raeburn, for instance – coming in with the vocal at the precise moment when the guitar starts up can be frustrating as hell if you’re doing instrument and vocals separately. Being able to…okay, I’ll use the word… “cheat” the opening phrase so it enters at the right moment solves that problem handily.

So, is looping appropriate for every circumstance? Probably not, though in my body of work I’ve not found that circumstance yet.  When I do, I’ll let you know.

Oh, and the errant “heave away, haul away”? Don’t bother listening for it: you’ll never find it.

¹ Is that even a word? Heh…it is now.

For my part, I’m recording the cd in my basement. I have good quality mics (as detailed in an earlier post); a reasonably powerful computer; good software; a comfortable space in which to work; and friends with experience willing to help me create the best product possible.

I like my house. It is the only house I can remember living in. It’s about ninety years old, subject to all the aches and pains that such a house is heir to, though for the purposes of this post the one I’m most concerned with is squeaky floors.

The house was never well built to begin with. The original builder worked with what he could get his hands on: this was just after WW1 when there were shortages of…well, almost nothing, but apparently measuring tapes and decent wood were very hard to come by. In the same way as the accuracy of satellite imagery is measured in meters, so also the accuracy of the measurements in this house: anything less than the builder’s outstretched arms is probably measurably inaccurate.

Case in point: from where I’m sitting at this moment, in my basement office, I can see 2″x6″ floor joists¹ on 18″, 6″, 20″, and 24″ centers; single, double with a gap, single, doubled with no gap, and so on. The variety of spacing is remarkable, and I consider myself lucky that I wasn’t stuck with boring ol’ 16″ centers².

The short of it is that it makes recording very hard: every footstep is heard, every squeak transmitted like a telegraph, and every dropped crayon or lego sounds like a bowling ball. I can only work when the family is gone (which is almost never) or in bed, which during the summer time doesn’t happen until after 9:00 in the evening, and when the furnace/ac isn’t running. In late July into August, that is likewise, almost never. I can turn off the unit from my office, but that leaves the upper floor of the house sweltering until I’m done. Such action makes me unpopular, and so is to be avoided.

Progress is slow.

¹ For the record, floor joists should be at least 2″x8″.

² Yeah, that was sarcasm.

I’ve finally got Jamie Raeburn to a point where there’s a few places that can use some touch-up, but overall it’s good and if push came to shove I could release it as is. I’m going to try to have Brett Gibson come and lay down an accordion track for it.

Next step is sometime in the next week or so to build a portable sound booth. The floors in our eighty year old house are just too damn noisy! I hung some acoustic foam behind my microphones (amazing what you can do with a queen-size, $10 Craig’s List egg crate mattress pad) and even that small – admittedly jerry-rigged – touch made a difference.

I was there to purchase a MIDI workstation, which I still have: a Roland XP80. 512 on-board sounds (of which I’ve only ever used about 10), 64 note polyphony, weighted keys…not the best money could buy, but still, $2500 back in 1990 was nothing to sneeze at, and bought quite a lot of keyboard.

While I was there I bought two mics and a mixer. The mics I still have, and they still work well: A Peavey Diamond Series PVM22 (still a good vocal mic) and a Peavey PVM480: both good equipment.

The mixer, not so much. It’s a Peavey Unity 300 12 channel, in its day a good mixer. Hell, a very good mixer. At the time I think it was something like $250.

Over the years, though, it developed an annoying zzzzzzzzzz on the output channel – a 600Hz buzz*, very quiet but also very noticeable. I was able to use a gate and filter it out, but even so it left an uncomfortable ambiance to the recorded sound.

One day, the wife and I stopped at Guitar Center here in Independence to buy cables for my St. Patrick’s day concert. While there, I was pricing the mixers, trying to get a handle on what we’d need to work into the budget. Michelle asked for the price, was told, then asked me, “Will this help you make your CD?” “Yes,” says I. She turns to the salesperson and says, “Go get it for him.”

He just stood there, a goldfish expiring on the kitchen counter. I broke him out of his trance with, “Do you see? See what I have to put up with? Now, go get the nice lady her mixer.”

In reality, there’s more to the story, but I’ll spare you the worst of it. The “bullet points” work like this:

First I bought an Alesis MultiTrack8 USB. Didn’t work with Sonar.
My New Mixer

Next, I bought an Alesis MultiTrack8 Firewire. Didn’t work with Sonar, Cubase or Premiere. Or, more accurately, Windows wouldn’t work with the mixer.

Finally, I bought this. It’s a Behringer Xenyx 1622. I could have made the Alesis work using the analog outputs, but why? I paid $250 for a Firewire interface only to not use it?

No, I don’t think so.

Besides, the Alesis was short an output, using the digital connection for the computer, meaning there weren’t enough outputs left to monitor what I was doing and feed the computer.

In the end, I spent about $60 less, got a bit more mixer (4 more tracks!), a somewhat better interface (I think), and with the money I saved bought a guitar humidifier and dinner from Olive Garden for me and Michelle**.

You could argue that I could have just futzed with the drivers until I got them to work. True, but it just wouldn’t have been worth the time.

I’ve already done some recording with it, and the difference is astonishing. I didn’t realize just how noisy the old mixer was.

* I’m guessing, of course, but that seems right.
** Please don’t correct the grammar, because you won’t be. It’s not “Michelle and I.” How do you know? Take “Michelle” out, and try it both ways: “dinner from Olive Garden for I.” Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? How about, “dinner from Olive Garden for me.” Ahhhh, better. Of course, I could use “myself”, but that’d just be pretentious. I’m not that kind of guy.

At the end of the video, there is the inscription, “To Lezlie.” Of course, there isn’t a lot of room to expound at the end of a YouTube video, so I’ll do it here.

The “Lezlie” in question is a dear friend of mine. We met – really met, as opposed to just being acquaintances at a renaissance festival – on the set of an independent film we were both cast in. We share a love of music and on the set one day (while we were waiting for the director to get his act together) we brought out our guitars and traded songs. It became an impromptu concert that lasted nearly two hours (we have it on DVD!) . The song on the video, “Jamie Raeburn”, was one of the first songs I played, and is one that I am most proud of.

In the summer of 2007, Lezlie moved very far away. She, like so many others, traveled to find her answers, and in the meantime here’s a video…a sort of “Ok, now it’s YOUR turn” message. We still keep in mostly regular touch, and the next time she’s in town we’re going to try to record a CD’s worth of music – and maybe some video while we’re at it.