Spanish Influenced acoustic guitar experiment...

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89gtsleeper

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http://www.myspace.com/2ndstorystudios
Listen to the track "Spanish Acoustic Experiment".

This song was really somewhat of an experiment. I was out on the porch the other night and came up with this rhythm guitar section I liked. I went upstairs into my studio and recorded it in one take. Then I played through the song twice playing some improv lead on top of the rhythm. Total time spent on recording is around 15 minutes including setup time for DAW, mics, whatever.

The next day I spent around 4 hours cutting the song up and putting it back together to try to actually make a song of it. You can be the judge as to whether or not I succeeded. Something to listen to on the lead guitar part is how the solo seems to just kind of flow naturally but in reality, I might have taken only a few notes here and there and put them in different sections. Can you tell?

Now honestly I know my playing is not 100% perfect and if I really wanted to try to sell this song, I would redo it for sure, but that was not the point. You can hear some excessive fret noise, me breathing alot (sorry I play with emotion :) , and the occasional not so perfect note. Even the balance of the mix itself is not perfect, but again not the point. Another thing to note is that the initial recording from day one was only about a few seconds over a minute long, and after the editing the track shaped into right about 2minutes. So what do you guys think of my experiment?? Enjoi.
 
Very nice. Your editing skills serve you almost as well as your playing skills. Had you not described the technique, I wouldn't have noticed. I would have noticed some repetition of the theme, but that just lends itself to a strong sense of melody; makes it feel more "written" and less "improvised." But I wouldn't have known it was stitched together.

I do that a lot with verses, choruses, etc., even sometimes with phrases, but I've not done such precise surgery on a note by note basis. Gives me some good ideas!
 
WhiteStrat said:
I do that a lot with verses, choruses, etc., even sometimes with phrases, but I've not done such precise surgery on a note by note basis. Gives me some good ideas!
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The way I have used the more note-by-note editing method for a real song is for vocals. I will more or less lay out all of the other tracks in the song first and do the vocals last. I will just sing all the way through a song, and then start over with a new track and will just go through until I've used up all but 1 of my 24 tracks. Then I will go through a rigorous workout of mute/solo for each track as I listen to only a single phrase... then will take the one I like the best and copy it to my one "Master" vocal track. I will go through it this way for each phrase. Then I will listen to the song all the way through with my master vocal track and only stop if a single word or syllable stands out as poor. If I find a problem, I may then try to splice in a very small cut from one of my many vocal takes. Tedious work, but the end result sounds way better. Once I have a complete vocal track that I am happy with I will either manually make a copy of the track, then start messing with things like panning, reverb, eq, delay for each of the identical tracks, or I may start over the whole process to make a true vocal double ala John Lennon... that is, if my vocal chords can take it! :)
 
I like it a lot, i like all of your songs on here. What are u using for the bass drum (on your other songs), I really like it.
 
Anything that has drums was a Zoom MRT-3B drum machine. Honestly, that's about the only setting I don't write down most of the time, is which of the drum sounds I use. I just decide which one I like for the song and go with it. It's a really cheap ass drum machine and I swear on my life if I only had an actual drumset my music would go to another level. For now I just have to work with what I got.
 
Oh and for the record, the kick sounds so big for two reasons...
1) I spent a bunch of time EQing them and reverbing them afterward to make them sound bigger.
2) I don't own a bass, and using a guitar with a low octave effect doesn't sound like a bass IMO, so I just use guitars for everything and use a big fat kick sound to try to fill in the lows that I'm missing.

If I had a bass I'd probably bring the kick down a bit to give everything it's own space to breath, but it is what it is. Thanks for listening. I'm really trying to get my music out there, and try to show people what can be done with technique as opposed to excessive equipment.
 
Head's up on something else experimental... All I will tell you for now is that I recorded a guitar, then played it back nearly a dozen times through my speakers and miced that in different ways each time. More coming soon.
 
Never heard a song on MySpace sound so good, especially considering how much it degrades the quality, but it wasn't noticeable on here. I started listening to it before reading your post, didn't notice any edits. Still didn't notice any edits after knowing they were there.

Must have taken awhile to piece the song together. I like it.
 
Hey Robin, shoot me your email address, and I can send you an mp3 file if you still can't get to it from my myspace page. As far as the quality, I burned a cd right out of my Tascam 2488, popped it into my computer, used Windows Media Player to rip it to 320kbps mp3, then uploaded into myspace. they tell you it must be like 128kbps max, but that's bullshit. I think another thing that helps is the fact that I don't really use much if any stereo bus compression on my songs. I know myspace adds it's own, so that might be part of it also. It still doesn't do the music justice, but it could be alot worse.
 
danny.guitar said:
Must have taken awhile to piece the song together. I like it.
Click to expand...

Like I said, on this one I think I spent around 4 hours or so on editing... I don't move as quickly as I should most of the time because I can't always decide what I want to do.... especially on this project... you know how it goes.
 
Nice playing, and wouldn't have known there was any editing involved.

I know the point of the thread is editing, but I'd toe the guitars in a bit, make them meld together more (still two parts, but not quite so distant from one another).
 
:) Yeah, really nice track this. Too short really, but I'm guessing that you're still working on it. Very clever editing. I wouldn't worry too much about the fret buzzes, as to me it only adds some humanity and actually fret buzz is sort of quite a nice sound in a strange way. Some added reverb or echo would merge things together a bit and improve it in my humble opinion, but then I just love sound effects.

The other tracks are really good too. Nice sound you've got building up there and it'll be good to hear it all when you've completed the ones that are on the go still.

dreamer7
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http://www.soundclick.com/gardenofsurrealdreams
'From Nowhere To Here And Back Again' – a dark filmic electroacoustic otherworldly sonic tapestry.
 
Thanks for the kind words dreamer. I am starting to think maybe I should really try to turn that into an actual song. I may sit down in the studio over the next week and see what I can come up with. I'll keep you guys posted.
 
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