home-made album released by a label

S

Steve H

New member
Hi everyone, an album called 'Arctic Circles' I made at home on a Korg D1600 has just been released by a small indie label, here Salient Recordings No re-recording or re-mixing, just the PRS/MCPS tunecodes added to the tracks in a mastering studio and straight to pressing. If anyone wants to talk about the recording process on the D1600 I'm available. I'm surprised there isn't a Korg forum.

The label has already got us a support slot with Paul Young which we did last week, and the album is to be re-launched in September with press and radio play in the UK. It's sort of 'adult alternative' style.

You can listen to MP3 track samples here: Track Samples

We couldn't believe the reviews we've been getting. There's some snippets here: Reviews
 
Congrats steve! yes I would like to know some details, that how you recorded it, what other istruments and software/hardware u used and what you did for mastering etc---and anything else you wish to tell. it would be a gr8 help---and congrats again!! I know it feels coool! :)
 
thanks ...

Thanks for taking the time to listen and for the kind words Morningstar and Garry!

Hi Anurag. As well as a MkI Korg D1600, I used an Alesis SR16 drum machine (an oldie but a goodie, except that EQing it is an art in itself), a Johnson J-Station amp modeller,a Korg X5D synth, a Marshall MXL2003 studio condenser mic, a Proteus 2 Orchestral (ancient, but the string and woodwind samples are uniquely warm), a Behringer patchbay, a Samson headphone amp with 2 pairs of Beyer DT100 headphones (BBC sports-commentator specials; ugly, sweaty, heavy and uncomfortable but still by far the best unenhanced reproduction) a Gibson 335, a Fender Strat with Tony Burns pick-ups, a Crafter electro-nylon, a Washburn electro-acoustic, a Fender Precision bass with an active EMG pick-up and a pair of second-hand Panasonic hi-fi speakers for monitoring.

I recorded the drum patterns first, then a piano guide track. In the drum machine itself I panned all cymbal-based instruments to the right and all skin-based instruments to the left, and recorded it with the recorder tracks panned hard left and right. This gave me more EQ flexibility, then I panned the drum tracks more towards the centre in the final mix. Then I recorded the bass and guitar, using J-Station presets with a little bit of extra compression. Then I layered on everything else, spending a lot of time honing the arrangements and getting the source sounds to be as good as possible. I recorded everything apart from the drums in single-track mono to make 3D placement in the mix easier. Recording Jane, our singer, was easy, she could sing into a tin can with a piece of string attached and still sound fantastic, but I did use a pretty good studio condenser mic and a touch of the D1600s combined compressor/exciter programme going down.

Then, in the mix-down, I consulted Paul White's excellent little book 'Home Recording Made Easy: professional recordings on a demo budget' (great advice on EQ and panning especially) and played the Grammy-winning digital remaster of Steely Dan's 'Babylon Sister' over and over again, using sweep and parametric EQ to get the basic tones of the individual tracks to sound as close as possible, then experimenting very carefully with variations of these basic tones. I used the D1600s useful 'scene' function to change things (mainly individual track volume) in different sections of the song and used the substitute finalizer programmes as the final effects.

The whole thing took about a year working on average about 3hrs per evening. I've got lots of details about the recording process that would take up pages and pages, so if anyone wants to know anything specific I can do my best to answer. For me, the key factors were the basics: good source sounds, very careful arrangements, decent performances, EQ, panning, compression and limiting.
 
Sounds pretty good to me ! :cool:

What monitors did you mix and master using ??? Also what size room ? Thanx
 
Hi Kylen.

I recorded, mixed amd mastered on a pair of second-hand Panasonic Hi-Fi speakers powered by a Panasonic Hi-Fi amp with the graphic EQ flat.

:eek: I know, I know, you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to have studio flatties. But my logic was if I played a lot of top pro CDs on the same speakers and tweaked the individual tracks and final mix to sound like the best of them (or at least a composite of the best of them) then I would be heading in the right direction. I did at least half a dozen rough mixes and played them on anything I could get my hands on, from a cheap tinny ghetto-blaster to very expensive Tannoy studio monitors in a pro studio nearby.

The room is my front room. We live in a very quiet street on the outskirts of the city and we have double-glazing. It's an old house and the rooms aren't perfectly square, so that obviated the 'standing wave' problem. It's just a normal room, a mixture of hard and soft surfaces and a natural ER reverb, so the vocals sound very natural. I noticed one day when I forgot to remove my acoustic guitars that the vocal sounded a little drier, so I put them back in and it sounded better. I worked with pro singers years ago, and a few of them didn't like singing in ultra-dry booths, preferring the larger room with the instruments lying around, so I sorta thought it would be OK, but luck played a big part also.
 
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