A few samples

I'm going to point a few samples of music that have come out of my "studio" over the last year. I'm working on putting together a timeline of my recording, but haven't gotten there yet. So here is just a smattering of things I've done over the last year and some notes about each.


Jammin 3



Jammin 3 is just one of a series of jams I put together about a month ago. It all started with me grabbing a drum track and laying down rhythm tracks for the chords to Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Knockin has always been a favorite jam tune for myself and friends and since I was more focused on getting more full songs down on tape, it worked well.

This was a more acoustic version - rhythm and lead guitars are both my acoustic Takamine, there's a second rhythm track that is a Gibson Chet Atkins SST, and the drums and bass are both MIDI. I found the drums online (don't remember where) and I recorded the bass myself.

Stay

My fiance and I put Stay down roughly a year ago. I had just gotten my new mic (AT3035) and we were playing around one night to test it. Turns out it was a good take. I wanted to add drums, but since we did it without metronome there's some time problems (your genius gutiarist over here doesn't have the best rhythm in the world), and so I went back and manually added MIDI drums. I also added bass via MIDI, but this song is in a tough key and there's mistakes there. One day I hope to redo this song from scratch, but this was a fun take and still sounds pretty good.

O Holy Night

I would have to say that this is one of my best overall recordings to date for a number of reasons. It was recorded at Christmastime of 2007.

1) With the exception of the vocal part, I wrote and recorded all the other parts. The piano, the bass, the cello, the guitar. I wrote the music in Finale Notepad and then exported to MIDI for the piano, bass, and cello. The guitar parts were recorded with microphone and my fiance put the lead vocals over it.

2) Its a solid recording. I cut and re-recorded and rewrote parts until neither me nor my fiance could stand it anymore. In fact, I had gotten to where I hated this recording until I left it alone for a few months. I thought there was too much reverb, just didn't sound right ect. Now I can listen to it and appreciate it for the original vision - a church sung version of O Holy Night. I have gotten some comments that it sounds a little "over produced" and I'm sure my fiance and I will rework for another Christmas sometime, but in many ways I wanted to "overproduce" it - I wanted lots of parts, I wanted lots of instruments, I wanted big church reverb and I accomplished all those things.