Sunday, July 23, 2017

Borneo Function

Borneo Function is named after what I think is actually a "fictional song" in Peep Show. I don't think we ever hear the song in the show.
  I'm being amused by the electric piano Vita instrument in Samplitude. The bass line is a thing I woke up with one morning.

Ghost Lover of Station 13

I've been on a tear doing some new music. Most of it is clearly under the umbrella of Pleasure for the Empire.
I've been enjoying my Allen Woody bass (with TI flatwound strings) a great deal. And it's been amusing me to play flute, er, badly. Sometimes I get it in tune, other times not so much (and the Melodyne pitch-correction built into Samplitude comes in super handy in that case.)

It's a bit odd to me that I seem to be doing this record all alone. I'd kind of stopped doing that over the last several years.
I'm doing a number of things. My go-to limiter is an emulation of an LA-2A by Waves. There's never any compression as I'm recording because, er, I have no outboard compressors. But the Advanced Dynamics in Samplitude has some magical properties.
On the master 2-buss I have Advanced Dynamics just to give the lower level stuff a bit of a "lift." Then I go into an LA-2A just lightly. Then into the Waves emulation of a Fairchild 670. But here's the trick -- I throw it into Lat/Vert mode which is a weird way to say "Mid-Side" mode and I compress the center a bit more than the outsides and this seems to really tighten up bass and kick drums. Then I do one last bit of compression with another Advanced Dynamics -- mostly just to prevent overloads.
The drums. Actually the drums are all internal instruments to Samplitude. I'm really surprised at how often I reach for those sounds before, say, Native Instruments sounds.
All the acoustic instruments are being recorded with the AKG C12A microphone into a Lindell preamp. I... I like the Lindells more (now) than I do the Neve 1272's. I find that (especially considering the price difference) er, disturbing.

Monday, July 17, 2017

The Barbarian Queen

The Barbarian Queen started with that bass-line and then I just kept adding stuff to it. The bass is my custom "fish" bass, going through the profile of my custom Deluxe-front-end/Champ-back-end amp on my Kemper but with a lot of compression. And then through Lindell preamp. And then more compression. And then more compression. I'm amused by my flute part on it.

Monday, July 10, 2017

Phoebe's Pillow

This song was recorded with Squire J-bass and flatwound TI's going into the Kemper and then hitting Lindell preamp Bellacaster baritone, same signal path (but different sound) Flute and vocals with the AKG C12A into a Lindell (I'm really digging the Lindell's these days) I thought this was more of a Night Gods song than a Pleasure for the Empire song. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. But it amuses me nonetheless.

Moving the Blags

I'm re-consolodating my blogs.  I know, you wanted them separate. But my little mind just doesn't work that way. All my blogging -- ...