diy home recording diary, part three

every tuesday for the next four weeks we'll visit with ryan, the creative force behind , and take a peek into the diary of his album recording process.

in week one he discussed introduction, inspiration, and instrumentation. week two was laying down tracks and using effects.

this time he covers getting the bass tracks worked out and transferring the analog audio tracks to a digital workstation

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6 songs - 4 weeks - 8 tracks

Recording Diary Post 3: Bass and begining digital.

So I've had a really cheap bass throughout life until about four months ago when I walked into my local pawn shop and spotted a Spector Legend Pro Series for just shy of $400. I picked it up and only needed to thumb at the thing for about ten minutes before I knew it was the right deal for home recording. I immediately ditched my knock-off Fender P-Bass for a Sansamp on Craigslist, and that's how we are making bass tracks.

The Tech 21 pedal can go from a really great clean jazz sound to an overdriven Acoustic amp blown on the lower 15" in a foot stomp, and this bass is this first time I've ever had a bass with variable highs and lows on an active pickup near the bridge. Needless to say, I was in knob limbo for days.

Once I had a tone dialed in, the majority of tracks on the EP were recorded with the exact same signal path: from the Tech21 pedal to a for amplification, into a compressor, then into a for a "small room" reverb effect before tape.

I have a habit of only bass before it hits tape, and compressing the other instrumets once they are dumped to digital, and I firmly believe its a good habit to have. If I master in the DAW with a bass that's already compressed, it's like I am playing the other instruments to it -- which when you think about it, is how most music evolves, from the rythm section -- so I never add any more compression to bass in the program... just the other signals, then a limiter to the final mix.

There are two songs on the EP where guitar needed to be reworked after the bass tracks changed some perspective: "," and "." I still get excited every time I plug in the bass for this exact reason. It's like getting hooked on a certain groove in the lower frequencies can change your mind completley about a song's hook. So when this happened, it was no problem. I would punch in with the bass, along with silence over the existing guitar parts on tape, with the intention of changing them up. Since I never switched around the basic clean tones of the POD guitar DI, it was always easy to reinsert a new take for the rythm and lead guitar pattern.

While tracking bass I was fighting a war in my head on whether to buy a DAW (digital audio workstation), or simply go with a cracked version of something off a torrent. The songs were all taking shape on the tape machine, and I was impressed with the mix I could hear in the monitors. This feeling gets more exciting for a recording hobiest when he starts to think of the mastering abilities in today's software programs.

The only program I had any experience with in the past was one called Cool Edit Pro, which I learned recently became Adobe Audition. A friend told me a horror story about spending a month on a project in a cracked version of Ableton that wised up to him in the end and shut itself down somehow when the computer went online. He was not able to recover any of the work, which must have felt terrible. With that in mind, I decided to just go and buy the cheapest DAW out there and make sure to register it in my name.

Roland-owned Cakewalk is the cheapest in case you didnt already know. There are several reasons why going with the industry standard Pro Tools, or newcomer Ableton is usually the right choice for people, but for me made the most sense and I'll tell you why: all I needed, really, was a multitrack digital interface to capture what was already done on tape and then spiff it up with some mastering basics. Sonar has great VST plug-ins (software made by third parties) that are included with the purchase of the DAW for $250, along with hundreds of midi instruments -- which meant I needed a midi keyboard, and I'll get to that in the last post.

It was a cinch to get up and running with Sonar on my Windows machine. For my analog to digital conversion, I am using an which is an older unit, but sounds great to my ears. A PCI card supplies the connection between computer and break-out box in this scenario, and a "snake" of eight 1/4 inch unbalanced audio cables runs from the line outs of the Tascam 388 to the inputs on the Layla. There is actually a preset in Sonar when you launch for "8 Audio Tracks," so I would literally only have to push one button to get all the tracks assigned in the DAW. Pretty sweet.

In my final post next week, I'll get into the plugins and mastering, as well as that midi keyboard.

Cheers,

Ryan

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