Getting Creepy Again

I had a little quiet time this afternoon. The plan was to record guitar parts for Creepy Doll, but I decided to try a vocal track. That quickly became five or six vocal tracks. I didn't get around to the electric guitar part yet, but did a couple quick tracks using the Babicz acoustic. All the tracks were recorded with the ribbon mic. I recorded the vocals using the back side of the mic -- ribbon microphones tend to have a different frequency response from the back (they usually have a figure-8 pickup pattern). The result was interesting! I may never record vocals with a condenser mic again. I'm not really any better at singing tightly on key, and I didn't apply pitch correction, but layering the tracks seem to help this a bit. (And, after all, it is supposed to be creepy).

Video clip here.

My Monkey

This is the Mandelbrot Set's final mix of Jonathan Coulton's tune "My Monkey" -- on box.net. I have several tracks in here: fretless Steinberger Synapse bass, finger-picked electric guitar, and some layers of acoustic guitar. The gang is getting better! I did not mix or master this one. I put some concentrated effort into the guitar part quite some time ago -- I think it was back around the beginning of 2009.

I've put together a track of just my contributions, mixed and mastered, including an unused synth track I recorded (which, in the final, I think was replaced by a recorder part). When recording these tracks, I made an effort to clone Jonathan Coulton's source tracks as closely as possible, just to see how good a job I could do. I think my completed parts actually sound more polished, but I had an advantage: I wasn't trying to finish recording for a Thing a Week deadline. The only part that is really different is that I decided to use a fretless bass. The part is basically the same, just with that fretless feel. While I think I got the intonation reasonably good, using quite a few takes and a lot of editing, I'm still pretty much a beginner on the fretless and have a lot to learn yet.

So what's in the track? There are 3 separate complete takes of the entire electric guitar part, recorded direct into Logic via my Ensemble. I can't remember for certain which guitar I played, but I think it may have been the T-60. The guitar part goes into an amp modeler, an EQ, a Logic plugin called Ringshifter which provides the phaser effect, and then a compressor. There are two acoustic guitar lines: one is basically the same chords as the finger-picked part, and the other is the same chords played with a capo seven frets higher, or a perfect 5th up. The acoustic is my Ovation acoustic-electric, also directly into the Ensemble, through EQ, compressor, a sample delay plug-in, and Space Designer, using a room model called "Slap Chamber" for that slap echo. The synth parts I recorded by using my DX-7 as a MIDI controller rather than an audio source, doing a little editing of the resulting piano roll data in Logic, and then playing it back using a software instrument synth pad called "Glassy Ascent."

If you are interested, you can see a sloppy YouTube clip of the bass part here, and a mini-lesson for the finger-picked electric guitar part here.

Listening to it almost a year after recording these parts, I can hear some timing flaws; there's an issue where the chord changes at the end don't match the original song perfectly. However, I still am proud of the finished product!

I Am Not Dead, and Here is Skullcrusher Mountain

Please forgive my lack of blogging. Things have gotten just slightly crazier since baby Joshua came home from the hospital, and I have just that much less free time. I have also been distracted by a little thing called Twitter, and some of the time I might have spent blogging has been spent Twittering instead. I don't ultimately want to be only a twit, though, thinking only in 140-character squirts, and so I will endeavor to blog more often.

Meanwhile, I finally got fed up with making any more changes to the Skullcrusher Mountain mix, and so called it final. Here is the MP3 file (link to box.net, where you can download the file, or play it directly). If anyone would like it in FLAC, let me know.

Jonathan Coulton was kind enough to write about us in this blog entry where he commented "It sounds like a party is what it sounds like, a big internet party." That's exactly what it was, just in slow motion, with people I've never met in person, and involving a lot of endless debate over how to mix the finished product. But it was a great experience! I have continued to record parts for future mixes including two guitar parts and a bass part for "My Monkey," which is being mixed by someone else, and I am playing around with parts for "Creepy Doll" and "Shop Vac" as time allows -- that is, very, very intermittently.

Credits for this particular mix of "Skullcrusher Mountain:"

Bry: Instigator

Joe "Covenant" Lamb: Spoken and Sung Lead Vocals, Ego, White Gold

Charlotte McIntosh: "Miley Cyrus-Style" Bridge Duet and Backing Vocals

Ian "Bigcambridge" Schwartz: Unison and Harmony Backing Vocals

Colleen "Colleenky" Kennedy: Unison and Harmony Backing Vocals, Geek Wrangler

Caleb "voidptr": Soprano, Tenor, and Bass Recorders, LaLa Chorus and Unison Backing Vocals

Dave "H4WK" Scheck: Octave Electric Guitar, Lead Wisperer

Mick "Lunacy" Bordet: Theremin, Electric Bass

Jarrett "SpaceParanoids" Heather: Stylophone

"bobsmitt": Digital Drums

Paul R. Potts: Drone Electric Guitar, Nylon-String Guitars, Additional Electric Bass, Editing, Mixing