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Fire and Stone - Learning to Record

The Journey through
Amateur Composition, Recording, and Balancing

Before I made the decision to start taking my music seriously, I was a decent singer, a trained saxophonist, modestly competent with a guitar, and dabbled with many other instruments. One day following some serious musical inspiration, I decided to stop playing other peoples' songs and start writing my own.

The first 'real' song I wrote was "Shadows of You" off of the "Kokiri - Dare The Oblivion" album at the end of 2004 (or beginning of 2005). At some point between composing the music and playing/singing with my guitar, I started thinking about what it would take to record my music. Those thoughts quickly progressed into planning a whole album, and a plan began to form that would lead me through a journey of learning the skills needed to record, balance, and produce all aspects of my music on my own.

Over the years, and the two different phases of my life in which I've worked on my music, the equipment I've used to record, as well as the techniques I apply, have changed and evolved.

In the beginning, I started with my Celebrity Ovation Deluxe Acoustic/Electric guitar, and began buying a bunch of equipment from there. All of my songs recorded before 2012 feature that Ovation guitar, which I don't have anymore. (I upgraded to a nice Martin guitar somewhere around 2007, but I'll get to that.) Other instruments I purchased in the beginning for recording included a basic Peavey Bass guitar (which you can hear in "Brighter Day" and "Nameless"), and a variety of small miscellaneous instruments, including a tambourine, various percussion shakers, harmonicas, and flutes. I also employed an antique Hohner "Melodica" that has been in my family for years, which you can hear played in "Brighter Day", and in one of my newer songs, "Nowhere Love".

For a good microphone, I purchased a nice set of MXL mics, which included a large condenser mic, and a miniature Omni mic (intended for recording musical instruments). After studying effects pedals and the like, I ultimately ponied up a lot of dough for the top-of-the-line (back then) Digitech GNX-4 Processing Station, which is still a high quality tool today. The GNX-4 allowed me access to a hundred stock effects, gave me the ability to customize my own effects (I have a few custom effects that I use frequently as part of my band's 'sound'), the ability to lay several tracks onto an onboard recording unit (which I don't use much anymore, but it was great for experimenting with song ideas), and a central unit for receiving and processing all input, directing the output via USB into my computer. The GNX-4 also came with various software, including the program "Pro-Tracks", a derivative of "Pro-Tools", which I use for all of my recording. There are many other features and capabilities, of course, some of which I don't bother using, and probably a lot I don't even know about.

In the beginning, at the end of 2004, I was using a desktop computer I built years prior with Windows XP, a P4 processor, and 2 gb of memory, but I knew I'd need a special sound card for recording high-quality audio. After lots of research, I bought an EMU 1212 sound card, which was designed for professional music use. It required two whole PCI slots (that was an annoyance in 2004), and needed adapters to use for normal (gaming) computer stuff.

With this equipment, and several books about recording, balancing, etc., I began.

I had a plan.

Realizing that it would take a considerable amount of time to overcome the learning curve when it came to the technical aspects of recording and balancing, I knew that it would be a while before I was capable of 'professional quality sound'. So as I started recording, and continued writing the entire first album, I decided to record the entire album in two phases. The first phase was recording each song for the first time, the resulting songs I called 'Drafts'. With that in mind, I figured that by the time I made 'drafts' of the entire album, my skill would have increased to the point where I could then record with 'professional quality', and at that time I would restart the entire album, recording every song a second time to create the final product that would become a sellable album.

So if you wonder why I refer to all of my recorded songs as 'drafts'--that's why. They're all the product of my first time recording each song. And, of course, the quality gets better and better down the road.

Drums were 'fun'.

You may notice, listening to "Brighter Day" and "Nameless" that the drums are fake. Well that's because, in the beginning, I did not have any method to record drums, and used the canned drum tracks available on the GNX-4. After recording those first two songs (as well as some other previous versions of subsequent songs that have since been discarded), I started researching options: drum machines, software for programming my own drum tracks digitally, keyboard drums, etc. My book studies showed that using computerizing drums, via midi, etc., is not a good idea unless you apply certain techniques to 'muddy' the electronic perfection. Even with high quality and realistic electronic drums, programmed digitally, the human ear is capable of detecting that the accuracy if such percussion is 'too perfect', thus reducing the quality and enjoyment of the music. So when programming drums digitally (like with Cubasis or whatever), it's important to deviate your beats by a few milliseconds in random ways to emulate the natural sound of human error.

But you know what I found that was a lot easier and more natural?

I bought a nice keyboard. A Roland Juno-D. The Juno-D has 'velocity sensitive' keys, and great sounds, including drums. Lately, I've been using that keyboard more and more in my music, a lot more than I intended in the beginning. It has a stick control for tremolo and pitch-bending, which makes it great for keyboard solos, which I've been playing around with a lot more lately. But as for drums, short of using a real drum set (or an electronic version thereof), I found that using a velocity-sensitive keyboard was the best way. When the time is right to record 'final tracks' for selling my music in the professional arena (see 'The Future of Fire and Stone'), I'll probably have to hire a good drummer to record real drum tracks, but for now the Juno-D works very well.

When I record drum tracks with my keyboard, I end up with a much more natural sound because of the variance in velocity and that 'human error' that throws me off of perfect tempo in small increments. Since I can't play an entire drum set's worth of drums at once, I have a method of laying a few different tracks in the same way for each song. One track is for the bass and the snare. Another is just for the hi-hat, and a third is for cymbals and toms (when I use them). Honestly, when the time comes to lay the drums, that's my least favorite part of recording. I'm not much of a drummer, and I don't care for it. It's tedious, but necessary, and I'm always glad when dealing with the various drum tracks is over.

Of course, that's just talking about the main drum tracks. I have other percussion instruments that I use regularly, and those are a lot more fun, because it's more natural to play real instruments than it is to artificially play the drums. Several tracks feature a tambourine, shakers, and later in 2005, I bought a 'Djembe' drum, which you can hear as the main drum feature on "The Drinks We'll Miss" and "Always".

Upon familiarizing myself with the keyboard, I ditched the bass guitar. I'm a better guitarist than bassist, and maybe it was because I had a cheap bass guitar, but I sometimes had a hard time recording bass tracks without the notes wandering off pitch, or just generally being too sloppy. That said, while I much prefer recording cleaner, tighter bass tracks with the keyboard now, and do it with different sounds depending on the song, there was a distinctly different bass sound on those two songs (mentioned above) that used that crappy Peavey that could not be replicated with the Juno-D.

When I took up my music again at the beginning of 2012, I found that the technology had changed quite a bit. As I mentioned before, I upgraded my 'main guitar' to a black Martin 000CXE. The Ovation served me well, and the sound was very bright, but it had a few limitations for serious recording, and I eventually decided to go with something of a higher quality and more versatile.

I had a more interesting dilemma between recording in 2005 versus 2012 of different tech. My old computer with the 1212 sound card had since been retired (or at least put on the 'light duty' of being converted into my kid's computer), and my main desktop was now a modern multi-core I3 that was really nice, but didn't have an aftermarket sound card, and I wasn't too keen to install the old EMU 1212 into my new box. I also had a laptop that I had been using for one of my businesses at my disposal, but was also restricted to its basic onboard sound card. I was surprised to see on the market a variety of 'external sound cards' available, all of which connected to a computer by USB, so in the end, instead of buying a new professional recording sound card to install into a PCI or PCI-Express slot, I bought the best of the $100-ish externals (a "Lexicon Alpha") and set up my laptop for recording.

After sitting for a few years, my Juno-D keyboard ended up needing serviced (hence the markings on the keys). It turns out that Juno-D's are notoriously vulnerable to having their key contacts erroded by dust. Even after having the keyboard serviced and the contacts cleaned, I still have several bad contacts, and some keys that don't work at all. So I mark the keys that are bad when I find them, and have to transpose the octaves (using the keyboard settings) to work around them. Because of this big flaw with Juno-D's, if I had to go back to when I originally bought the keyboard, I'd buy a different one today.

These days, another change I've made in my recording techniques, is that I use an omnidirectional microphone instead of the condenser mic I used to use. The condenser mic I used in all of the 'Kokiri' songs I recorded pre-2012 has a pickup range of 180 degrees, which also picks up a lot of static and background noise outside of a professionally sound-proofed studio. In all of my latest songs, the Omni mic has been a lot easier to control.


On to recording.

As I record a song, I always start with a metronome track. In the beginning, I was able to set that up on Pro-Tracks with the GNX-4. Now, it seems the GNX-4 drivers don't work quite right with Windows 7, so I have to manually record a metronome with the keyboard, which involves a little more, but works just fine. I record the music, track by track, bit by bit. Usually I start with the guitar tracks, then I move to the bass line. Then I might record the vocals and harmonies, then the keyboard fills. By that point, the song starts filling out and taking a life on of its own, and I start adding in the 'special stuff'--little riffs and solos of various instruments here and there. Then the drums, and whatever else comes up after that.

By the time everything has come together, but still hasn't been balanced, the song owns me. I could have been working on it for hours and hours, my stomach is rumbling, I'm thirsty as hell, it's late, but ... before I go to bed, I'll be compelled to listen to it loudly in my monitor headphones again and again until a few more hours have passed.

Usually I can record a song in two days.

The first day, typically, consists of laying down all of the tracks. On the second day, when I approach the song again after being away from it for a little while (sleeping), I'll get to work balancing it, applying the volume and panning envelopes, any effects, and redoing any recorded bits that stand out and need to be fixed. When I set the levels to record tracks initially, using the GNX-4's compressor and noise-gate (which I never have to adjust anymore), I try to maintain input levels peaking at around -6db. Invariably, there are always spikes into the red on most tracks, which I'll even out, one track at a time, with volume envelopes.

Another thing I learned (from books) in the beginning, is that once everything is leveled out and it comes time to play with the balance of the various tracks interacting, it is important to listen and apply balancing with your headphones set to a very, very quiet level. You might record loud, and do some rough balancing and smoothing while loud, but when you're approaching the final product, you balance quietly.

By the time everything is where I want it to be for the final product, I'll export the entire project into a 'wav' file, and then take it to "Steinberg Wavelab" (another software program), which is where I put on the final balancing touches. In Wavelab, I'll adjust the frequencies, bring the peak up to 0db, add limiters, and compress the whole song in various ways to give it the same levels and punch as professionally-produced songs.

Each song is made into an .mp3 of the highest quality and editted to include the song's information.

So far since I've picked up my music again, I've noticed that my vocals have gotten better over the years, and I have more range and skill than I did when I started recording in 2004. When listening to the old songs ("Brighter Day", "Sadness", etc.), I can hear the imperfections--troubles I had with pitch, etc. In 2012, I tested my vocal range and found that it extended from F2 to F5, and has lately deepened down to E2 as well (to encompass an operational range of a tad over three octaves). While I've been able to increase my lower range a bit, I can push and push, but never seem to get above F5, or maybe F#5, as if there is a literal WALL there at the top. I've also noticed that since I started recording again, the technical aspects of the recording process have become a lot easier and quicker for me than I remember. Maybe the last few years of business I've been in have made my mind more organized, and that translated into more efficient balancing.

Another aspect of making this music that I've found fun is creating 'music videos' (which I call 'lyric videos') for my songs, especially for the newer ones. For making my music videos, I use Windows Movie Maker 2.6. After getting into the program and learning a little, I actually downgraded from the Windows 7 version to version 2.6 (from Windows XP?) because 2.6 had an easier user interface. The videos started as basic slide shows with subtitles to show the song's lyrics as it plays, but as I learned more of WMM's capabilities and effects with each new video I made, I eventually figured out everything that this simple movie editing program could do. Now, I make full use of all of the program's effects, splice video clips with moving pictures, and syncronize the video and transitions to the rhythm of the song.

Eventually, if I'd like to make more complicated music videos, I'll have to learn to use Adobe Premiere or some such professional editor. For now, my music videos will never become more complex than the latest videos are, because I'm at the end of what Windows Movie Maker can do.

If you've read all the way through this (sometimes dry and technical) account of my recordings, you must be really interested in Fire and Stone, or a musician yourself learning about recording, so thanks for reading. Please go on to read about my plans for the future of Fire and Stone, or listen to the music, watch the videos, and enjoy.


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