Saturday, April 28, 2007
Above It All part 7 (The newest final version)
Given permission by this song's author to exploit it, commercially, I revisited Above It All and found some things I wasn't comfortable with. Most notably, my voice. So I decided to polish it up a bit, along with a bunch of other songs from the past couple of years or so, for a new album. If I was gonna charge money for it, I might as well make it sound as good as I'm able, right? The original mix will remain free, as well as the separate instrument tracks, should anyone else want to tackle this tune, either for covers, remixes, or whatever.
Those tracks, which are found on Archive.org, were the basis for the new mix, since I couldn't locate the disc I thought I burned (they may actually be on my hard drive, somewhere on the Agnula partition). I downloaded those and imported them into Sonar. I'd normally blog the same day I record or work on a song, but I hadn't felt like it over the last couple of weeks. I did take the following notes, though...
April 14th, 2007
Recorded new lead vocal. Didn't care for the old one. Recorded harmonized "oohs" for the
choruses. One set, then cut and pasted two more times.
April 17th 2007
Cakewalk FX Reverb into an effects send bus. For bass acoustic, 1 electric guitar track, and vocals. BlockFish Compressor and SpitFish de-essor onto new lead vocal track.
Eq'd a bass boost on the bass itself.
April 20th 2007
Spitfish on one of the background vocal tracks. Cakewalk FX Expander/Gate on lead vocal. Cut out silences on various tracks. Almost finished.
April 27th 2007
Lowered volume a little. Added Sonitus: FX Gate to a harmony track on the first chorus to
reduce some hiss. Did the same to the bass and acoustic guitars, but also used Sonitus FX:
Equalizer to remove hiss from the instrument sounds themselves.
Currently, this song can be purchased from the PsychoVoyager Music Store at the top of this page. It won't be submitted to any of the major music e-tailers until a full album is put together.
As of this writing, you can listen to the whole song on MySpace. It can also be streamed at the Podsafe Music Network. Due to it's being recorded at 48000kh or whatever it is, and a bug in Flash, the song plays slower than it should at Podsafe. I actually like how it sounds, so I'm not changing it yet. Plus I don't feel like re-encoding it. The Myspace and PsychoVoyager Store version play at the proper 80bpm.
Those tracks, which are found on Archive.org, were the basis for the new mix, since I couldn't locate the disc I thought I burned (they may actually be on my hard drive, somewhere on the Agnula partition). I downloaded those and imported them into Sonar. I'd normally blog the same day I record or work on a song, but I hadn't felt like it over the last couple of weeks. I did take the following notes, though...
April 14th, 2007
Recorded new lead vocal. Didn't care for the old one. Recorded harmonized "oohs" for the
choruses. One set, then cut and pasted two more times.
April 17th 2007
Cakewalk FX Reverb into an effects send bus. For bass acoustic, 1 electric guitar track, and vocals. BlockFish Compressor and SpitFish de-essor onto new lead vocal track.
Eq'd a bass boost on the bass itself.
April 20th 2007
Spitfish on one of the background vocal tracks. Cakewalk FX Expander/Gate on lead vocal. Cut out silences on various tracks. Almost finished.
April 27th 2007
Lowered volume a little. Added Sonitus: FX Gate to a harmony track on the first chorus to
reduce some hiss. Did the same to the bass and acoustic guitars, but also used Sonitus FX:
Equalizer to remove hiss from the instrument sounds themselves.
Currently, this song can be purchased from the PsychoVoyager Music Store at the top of this page. It won't be submitted to any of the major music e-tailers until a full album is put together.
As of this writing, you can listen to the whole song on MySpace. It can also be streamed at the Podsafe Music Network. Due to it's being recorded at 48000kh or whatever it is, and a bug in Flash, the song plays slower than it should at Podsafe. I actually like how it sounds, so I'm not changing it yet. Plus I don't feel like re-encoding it. The Myspace and PsychoVoyager Store version play at the proper 80bpm.
Labels: Above It All, buy my stuff, covers, Crystal Walters, downloads, effects, Sonar
Saturday, March 24, 2007
April Fool's Day Part 6 (finished!)
Played around with various settings, levels, etc. Added automation to the fifth vocal track, so that it plays during the laughter at the beginning, fades out and re-appears during the final chorus through the end. Used the Classic Compressor and the Classic Phaser to punch up and then crazy up that track a little, and then played around with panning it back and forth, but decided to simply pan it far right.
I fixed the reversed conga and bongo sounds in Audacity. I didn't want to spend the time figuring how to do it in Sonar. The sounds end sharply with a click, so I removed the clicks by selecting the segment of the audio and then faded the sound out at the very end. It probably wasn't neccessary, but I also normalized the wav files (These were the original exported files from PSP Rhythm). I deleted the audio in the Sonar tracks, inported the altered wav files (drag and drop) and then split the tracks. When I fixed the audio, I only faded out one instance. The same notes play over and over throughout the song, so I took the fixed parts, split them apart from the clicky bits, and then Groove-clipped them (an Acid like feature where you can take a one bar phrase, drag and stretch it to loop as much as needed).
Muted the woodblock and closed high hat sounds. The high hat wasn't needed and the woodblock couldn't be heard and there was no need to force the issue.
Added one of Cakewalk's own reverbs to the snare, which isn't very snare like, but whatever.
Played some more with levels and whatnot till I was relatively happy and then mixed down the audio.
Opened up the audio in a new project. Might not have been necessary, but again, I was too lazy to find out. Applied Classic Compression (used the "mix down" pre-set) and Classic EQ for just a wee bit o' tweaking.
The finished song can be bought at my little store at the top o' the page. You can also listen to it at my Podsafe page which is a higher quality than the version on my Myspace page and closer in quality to the sold version.
I fixed the reversed conga and bongo sounds in Audacity. I didn't want to spend the time figuring how to do it in Sonar. The sounds end sharply with a click, so I removed the clicks by selecting the segment of the audio and then faded the sound out at the very end. It probably wasn't neccessary, but I also normalized the wav files (These were the original exported files from PSP Rhythm). I deleted the audio in the Sonar tracks, inported the altered wav files (drag and drop) and then split the tracks. When I fixed the audio, I only faded out one instance. The same notes play over and over throughout the song, so I took the fixed parts, split them apart from the clicky bits, and then Groove-clipped them (an Acid like feature where you can take a one bar phrase, drag and stretch it to loop as much as needed).
Muted the woodblock and closed high hat sounds. The high hat wasn't needed and the woodblock couldn't be heard and there was no need to force the issue.
Added one of Cakewalk's own reverbs to the snare, which isn't very snare like, but whatever.
Played some more with levels and whatnot till I was relatively happy and then mixed down the audio.
Opened up the audio in a new project. Might not have been necessary, but again, I was too lazy to find out. Applied Classic Compression (used the "mix down" pre-set) and Classic EQ for just a wee bit o' tweaking.
The finished song can be bought at my little store at the top o' the page. You can also listen to it at my Podsafe page which is a higher quality than the version on my Myspace page and closer in quality to the sold version.
Labels: April Fool's Day, buy my stuff, downloads, effects, online retailers, PSP Rhythm, Sonar
