Tuesday, July 12, 2011

It's not easy being Green (Sea Turtle)

I've had a sort of stop/start time of it with my backing track project on the theme of the Green Sea Turtle. I'd wanted a heavily layered fiddly acoustic guitar track, but I found that it has been difficult recording acoustic guitar in my setup. I had only a USB condenser microphone on a desktop base with no way to mount it on a stand (nor did I have a stand, in fact). Playing to a microphone sitting on a table is really tricky. It's hard to get comfortable; therefore, I found the performance lacking. The difficulties really slowed me down and made me reluctant to get stuck in.

As a result of this, I decided to add more electric parts than I had planned on at the start. This changed the feel a bit but worked wonders for jump starting the project again. Then last weekend I went to a music shop and bought the bits I really needed for successful acoustic guitar tracking. I actually bought a new condenser mic (analog) and an audio interface to run it through. And I bought a boom stand to hang it from. Big improvement. Another neat little device I purchased is a monophonic pitch to MIDI converter. I've used it to play a realistic sounding upright bass part with my electric guitar as controller. I will be using this quite a lot in the future.

We're in the home stretch now. There's a bit more recording I need to do. Just little bits and pieces. Mainly I just have to get the production in shape. It's sounding good. As I was first coming up with ideas for this piece I made a couple of videos, which you can find embedded below. I intend to make another when this is finished showing the production environment at work. Looking forward to the end product.






2 comments:

  1. The open G sounds nice - can't wait to hear your track! Nifty finger-style BTW!
    Tim

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  2. Thanks Tim. I'm very pleased with how the track turned out. Can't wait to hear how Julian has re-imagined it.

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