The PsychoVoyager Journal

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.

Labels: Above It All, buy my stuff, covers, Crystal Walters, downloads, effects, Sonar

Well, so much for recording one cover song a month. I started this one back in April, and then stopped doing any recording for a while. Including my song of the week. Hopefully my dry spell is over for now.

Today I went back into Ardour and recorded a bunch of kazoos. 4 tracks during the bridge, one for the last verse and end of the song and two for the intro, which were cut and pasted into the ending of the song. I wonder if the kazoo voids the a cappella-ism of this song? Doesn't matter. It's just about done, save effects (if I so choose) and final mix.

I attempted to upload this to Archive.org, but the upload tool ccPublisher 2.2.1 is as screwed up as the last one I was using, 1. something or another. I'm gonna wait to see if it pops up within the next day or two, if so I'll post the link here, if not, I'll ftp it to the site and then post the link here. I don't want any more multiple posts showing up there. I still haven't cleaned up my eariler messes.

Edit: finally uploaded the song here. I'll be using the FTP option from now on with archive.org. Less headaches. 10/02/06

Labels: a cappella, Agnula, Ardour, covers, kazoo, Linux, Politikill, Richard O

Politikill is a tune originally written and performed by someone who calls himself Richard O. It's about eating facists. I'd wanted to cover this one for a little while, so here we are.

I made one minor change in the lyrics because I do eat meat. Even had some red meat over the last coupl'a Judeo-Christian holiday periods, and for the most part, liked it. Also "hold the feet" was easier to sing.


I wasn't sure what the "name of a cheese" thing was about, but found out there is a President brand cheese. That bit might've been neccesary, because threatening the President may be against the law. Found that out from an episode of The Jeffersons, a long time ago.

I thought I might combine my experiments with Dokaka-eque a cappella recording with PSP Rhythm beats. Naturally any mixture between voice and instrument would void the a cappella-isms, but that's not why (so far) I went with with straight vocals. It was faster. I may still add other stuff later, like guitar and maybe an automated beat. My rhythm is still a bit sloppy.

I recorded in Ardour, starting with the melody and words. Even though I used the click to keep the time, starting out this way could be a problem if I try to introduce a tuned instrument.

I added drum sounds next and then a bassline and two separate tracks kinda mimicing a rhythm guitar. After that, an extra vocal for the very last verse.

I'm not sure if I'm adding anything else. Maybe more harmony. maybe effects and/or instruments. In any case, I may get this done on time.

Here's what it sounds like so far.

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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Labels: a cappella, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Linux, Politikill, Richard O

Thought I'd be done with this by now, but, nooooooooo.

A couple of days ago I recorded some guitar onto two tracks. It was a single performance but divided into left and right. I plugged the Peavey into the SGX, using setting# A 048 (Semistort) with the left cable out going to the Tascam 688, which used to be a multitrack recorder. Now it's a mixer/patchbay thing. The right cable out from the SGX to the Zoom 505 (I forget what setting) and then into the Tascam which is connected to the soundcard inna computer. So anyway, I do that for the bridge and outro. I like the way it sounds and I won't have to do anything with the crap I recorded before because the mistakes are completely covered up. The major one's anyway.

I found a tutorial that showed how to use automation for volume gain (and a couple of other things related to Ardour) and played around with that as well as using Jamin. But that's getting ahead.

Recorded some reverb added to the vocals to a separate stereo track. Used the LADSPA Tap reverberator (warbler) on a post fader on a bus recorded to a stereo track. Don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what happened.

Decided I didn't care for the drum track so I ditched it and came up with something else. Soon I decided I didn't need a drum track and that's kinda where I am now.

Some efforts were made at mixing, using Jamin and then not. Had a few crashes from using Jamin with Ardour (with about twelve tracks of audio) and now there's some weird shit with the tracks not having any output connections. Too tired to fix it write now or talk anymore about it.

edit:
This version was announced as finished, but I came back to it here, to release a commercially available download single.

Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters, effects

Hooked up the electric guitar (Peavey Vortex 1) to the Zoom 505 FX pedal, used a couple of basic settings and recorded a few tracks starting at the chorus.

Sounds horrible so far. My head's not in this right now, so I stopped. I'll have another go in a day or so.



Based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters, guitar

Recorded a new lead vocal track in one take and then 4 tracks of harmony for the choruses and bridge. Used the MXL 990 microphone.

Most vocal and instrument tracks are recorded mono (in Ardour), but I usually edit the input to accept both left and right channels thru alsa_pcm:capture_1 and alsa_pcm:capture_2.

I think that's all for today. May add some 'lectric guitar tomorrow, and then it should be ready for some editing/mixing.

It goes a little something like this.

Based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters

Forgot to mention this yesterday, but the rhythm pattern created in Hydrogen was set in that program to 40 bpm, while the tempo in Ardour was set to 80. Ardour is in sync to Hydrogen, thanks to JACK, but the 80 bpm does not cancel out the 40 in Hydrogen. Hydrogen seems to automatically sync to JACK, so I haven't messed with anything there. Ardour was set to sync to JACK before I started recording. No biggie. Something else to look into, and so far I like the way it's worked out.

I spent a little time (an hour or so) trying to figure out why I couldn't split any tracks and found out that the edit cursor (blue) was different from the playback cursor (red). I also set the "snap to" properties to bar.

Before doing any more recording, I extended the bridge section by cutting and pasting the guitar and vocal tracks and then replced the ending chorus section with a previous guitar take.

Recorded three tracks of Bass with the Fender Jazz, with the third being the best of the bunch. I may still incorporate the earlier takes somehow.

Here's what I have so far.


Based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Crystal Walters, Hydrogen, Linux

I worked on this a little yesterday, but didn't post about it. I'd simply opened up Hydrogen and created a drum track using the HardElectro1 drumkit by ArtemioLabs. I also used LADSPA effects on a couple of instruments: Simple amplifier on Kick 2 & 3 & FX and TAP Flanger on FX.

Today I opened up Jack Control and set the sample rate to 88200 just because, however my soundcard may not support that as Ardour seems to indicate that I'm at 48 kHz. I'll look into that later. Hydrogen seems to stay at 44100 no matter what. Hmmm.

In Ardour I recorded a bunch of guitar takes, trying to get input levels right. Adjusted the levels via the Tascam 688 and then there was the issue of playing the song right. There were a couple of extra chords at the begining of verse two I wanted to cut out (easier than playing the whole song over again) which seemed tricky. Through right-clicking I tried to split the track, but no go for some reason. Instead I pressed the range button on the upper right hand side of the screen and was able to select the area I wanted to delete. Then I went and dragged the two pieces together. Not sure how accurate the placement was. Sounds okay, I think, as far as timing is concerned. This kinda thing would be much easier in Cakewalk. Also recorded a scratch vocal and then the Hydrogen output to a track so that I can mix it down and listen to it at my leisure.

I changed my mind about posting the in progress audio files. I'll continue to do that and then remove them from my server once the song is completed, and then post the miscelaneous tracks to archive.org.

So, here's Above It All, based on The World They Loved To Hate, written by Crystal Walters. Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Labels: Above It All, Agnula, Ardour, covers, Creative Commons, Crystal Walters, DAW, Hydrogen, Linux

My New Years Resolution included some musical promises. Among them is the recording of one cover song a month. While there are a number of "classics", I think I'd like to tackle, I've decided to select songs from the Internet Archive, licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licences. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs is a bit limiting and seems not to permit re-interpreting works, so I avoid those songs that don't allow for building on them. I don't have a problem with that licence. I use it on some of my own music as well as the previous two mentioned. The attribution-sharealike licences are suited for sampling, remixing, or in my case, covering and re-imagining these songs.

So, the first cover song of the year will be Above It All, originally titled The World They Loved To Hate by Cry For Life AKA Crystal Walters. I was struck by the unusual sentiment expressed in the lyrics. I'll send my apologies when I'm done.

I tweaked the lyrics just a little bit, changed the title, and simplified the chords so that I could create an arrangement of sorts. Then I opened up Audacity, and recorded a couple of quickie demos with guitar and voice.

Every cover I record this year has to be finished on the month I start it, so these projects won't be as open ended as my usual stuff. Of course I can always come back to them after they're "finished."

Instead of posting an audio link with every post, the finished song will be posted to archive.org along with the individual instrument and vocal tracks. I may also include examples of the song at various points of its' progress.

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Labels: Above It All, Audacity, covers, Creative Commons, Crystal Walters