Post Your Analog Recordings Here...

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Level Anything said:
"Sterling Silver" by Level Anything

I usually don't write "political" songs but this current climate here in the states has got me down.

Recorded to a Fostex X-3 w/ a TDK SA-X cassette. AT 2035 into a Tube MP, bypassing the Fostex preamps. Mixed into Logic Pro. Reverb and EQ. Done.

http://https://soundcloud.com/level-anything/sterling-silver-demo
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Great feel, great sound.......but what's hard to believe is that after 20 odd years of Pro Tools (does anybody remember early Digidesign stuff?) and the obsolescence of equipment on pretty much a yearly basis, this song sounds great. Not just creatively, but sound wise. The tops aren't over exaggerated, the middle has a 'wrap-around' type of warmth and the bass is solid without being boomy or over-powering.....yeh, nice.

Al
 
j.harv said:
Here's a cheesey power ballad type song I wrote and printed to tape on the ol' Tascam 388.
A little messy :p:p

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Loved the song.

If you ever re-mix it, I'd love to hear the lead vocal treated differently. Rather than the slapback echo and short reverb, I'd treat it like Peter Gabriel does, with a type of chorus / flanger type treatment.......really overdo it too. I think it'd give it real presence and your singing on this track is really good...it' doesn't need to be 'lost' in reverb and echo IMHO.

Al
 
altruistica said:
Loved the song.

If you ever re-mix it, I'd love to hear the lead vocal treated differently. Rather than the slapback echo and short reverb, I'd treat it like Peter Gabriel does, with a type of chorus / flanger type treatment.......really overdo it too. I think it'd give it real presence and your singing on this track is really good...it' doesn't need to be 'lost' in reverb and echo IMHO.

Al
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Thanks Al.

Yeah, I hear ya about the vocal treatment. I just find that reverb and delay mask my limited vocals and helps to 'smoosh' them into the mix.
Chorus and flange is something I haven't really messed with on vocals, but I will certainly try in the future.
 
j.harv said:
Thanks Al.
I just find that reverb and delay mask my limited vocals and helps to 'smoosh' them into the mix.
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Some of that thinking I think comes from guys like us doing it all ourselves. That's not to say we can't recognise a great vocal when we hear it, but we're far too hard on our own singing. Liam Gallagher, Bob Dylan, Mark Knofler, Bob Geldof, Midge Ure and hundreds of overs are not good singers per se. If you asked them to sing someone else song, I'm not sure they'd make a very good job of it, BUT can they put a song across with attitude, swagger, verve and charisma? Well, hell yes.
Your song has a good vocal and a decent melody........give it some swagger!

Al
 
Thanks j.harv....I wrote this song sometime back in 1993....never recorded it but started playing it live a few times.
It really is a demo in terms of trying out the new system. I haven't got a kit setup yet, but plan on doing so. I did this without a click too, so the timing is a bit pushed in places along with the ropey guitar. My fingers were killing as I haven't played the Yamaha in a while.

Al
 
Dr.SpringReverb said:

I don't know what it is
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Interesting sounds and textures. What are the sound sources? And the treatments?

I always struggle to find a 'form' for a piece like this. Have you ever listened to any musique concrete pieces by Stockhausen and others? I think it's because there is little for a listener to follow (like orthodox spoken language, written language, visual language or musical language) that after an initial feeling of 'ominous activity' I'm left feeling, where does it go now. I hear a reprise of the four note idea near the end, but like you said 'I don't know what it is?'

The older I've got though, I feel music is at its most powerful, emotionally speaking, when it is allied to some additional art form such as cinema, theatre or other visual medium. That's not to preclude all the other reasons for listening to music (excitement, contemplation, the physical and cerebral activity of 'doing' music) but for me to shed a tear, some other extraneous meaning is needed.
Al
 
altruistica said:
Interesting sounds and textures. What are the sound sources? And the treatments?

I always struggle to find a 'form' for a piece like this. Have you ever listened to any musique concrete pieces by Stockhausen and others? I think it's because there is little for a listener to follow (like orthodox spoken language, written language, visual language or musical language) that after an initial feeling of 'ominous activity' I'm left feeling, where does it go now. I hear a reprise of the four note idea near the end, but like you said 'I don't know what it is?'
Al
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Thanks - Sound sources: Hohner Pianet T, d.i. electric guitar, triangel, drumstool (as percussion), ride cymbal. Treatment: Tape-echo (3-head cassette recorder), spring reverb, backwards recording for the ride cymbal.

I listened to lots of Stockhausen and other weird stuff, Pierre Boulez, Delia Derbyshire etc.
I feel like i struggle to "construct" pieces like this. I don't know how Stockhausen composed his stuff, how he came up with textures and sounds that are "flowing" along without much (or any) repetition; there's obviously a sense of structure/logic in the "chaos", it sounds coherent yet varied. I don't really know how to approach this, so i rely on a simple motif that i repeat endlessly with some variation and added layers. :e More like jamming really.

The older I've got though, I feel music is at its most powerful, emotionally speaking, when it is allied to some additional art form such as cinema, theatre or other visual medium. That's not to preclude all the other reasons for listening to music (excitement, contemplation, the physical and cerebral activity of 'doing' music) but for me to shed a tear, some other extraneous meaning is needed.
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Yeah, i know what you mean. Or when the music is tied to specific moments.
 
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Hey Dr.

Thanks for the info on sources and treatments.

I remember doing a few pieces about thirty years ago now, where I mixed certain film soundtracks (I remember one being 'Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf' with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton) and interspersed it with 'music'. How it worked was I recorded the whole scene from LP to tape (A Tascam 38 at the time) and then at various points would fade out sections of less dramatic content and put musique concrete in its place. It sounds a bit of a kludge in writing it now, but overall the pieces worked well. They may exist still on some DATs somewhere (but I don't have a DAT player anymore).

I did a similar thing years later on this track:

https://altruistica.bandcamp.com/track/death-of-a-statesman

This was a resignation speech by Robin Cook regarding weapons of mass destruction. I never heard this speech until I started researching the subject about nine years ago. Robin Cook was the UK Foreign Secretary until 2001....he later died of a 'heart attack' in 2005. Tony Blair (the Prime Minister at the time never attended his funeral which speaks volumes about what he thought of Robin Cook at the time).
This speech is one of the best I have ever heard.

I think my music added makes the speech more powerful....others may disagree.

I think by taking a piece of verse that already has a structure is a great way of incorporating musique concrete and the beauty about that is that 'pieces of verse' these days abound, from speaking books to would-be Presidential hopefuls.

Al
 
altruistica said:
I remember doing a few pieces about thirty years ago now, where I mixed certain film soundtracks (I remember one being 'Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf' with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton) and interspersed it with 'music'. How it worked was I recorded the whole scene from LP to tape (A Tascam 38 at the time) and then at various points would fade out sections of less dramatic content and put musique concrete in its place.
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Sounds interesting.

I did a similar thing years later on this track:

https://altruistica.bandcamp.com/tra...of-a-statesman

This was a resignation speech by Robin Cook regarding weapons of mass destruction. I never heard this speech until I started researching the subject about nine years ago. Robin Cook was the UK Foreign Secretary until 2001....he later died of a 'heart attack' in 2005. Tony Blair (the Prime Minister at the time never attended his funeral which speaks volumes about what he thought of Robin Cook at the time).
This speech is one of the best I have ever heard.

I think my music added makes the speech more powerful....others may disagree.
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But that's a approach different though: Underscoring a speech? I liked it though.
Taking an existing structure and "follow it" sounds like cool idea too.

Have been experimenting with drone/ambient stuff the last few days. With sound-on-sound, cassette tape-loops (really frustrating - i need a reel-2-reel :e) etc.
 
Yes you're right, the music is really acting in a similar way to film-music.....trying to build on the drama already within the speech, or to punctuate the points within the speech.

The piece I linked to 'Death of a Statesman' happened very organically though. I actually came up with the 'front end' of the piece in response to a competition running on Propellerhead's Reason site at the time. It was a competition in which you could only use a certain sample set of sounds along with any real instruments (including voice).
After I'd finished the piece, I came across the speech online and could see how the piece could segue into it and then added the 'underscore' to the speech once I'd laid it down. I improvised the keyboard part and pretty much had it done within a couple of takes. The whole song then had (to me anyway) a feeling of continuity....it wasn't just a collection of things, but had morphed the whole way through from a rapping section, to a rock chant section to a drama/film score. I think that was the point I was trying to make.....that the 'form' of any composition comes from the integral parts. Only through repeated listening to a piece, where we can take on-board what we've just heard and preempt what's coming next, do we see any kind of structure. The difficulty lies in how complex the material itself is. If it's Boulez or Webern or any musique concrete then the material is usually 'challenging' to say the least.

Al
 
Oh yes, I forgot to comment on that. The 'Death of a Statesman' track was rather fascinating. Nice work.

If anyone's interested, I've finally released this thing: DOUG the Eagle - Evil Songs for Evil People.
https://dougtheeagle.bandcamp.com/album/evil-songs-for-evil-people
Evil Songs for Evil People

...the bandcamp link looks prettier, but the main site has it for free.

The album has six tracks of various lengths, and was recorded on an Otari MX80, and mixed to a Studer A807. The mixing was a bit more rushed than I'd have liked since I ran out of leave at work. Even so I'm rather pleased with the result. If I'd wanted absolute perfection I'd probably have mixed it ITB. Other tape decks used included my old faithful TSR-8 for the vocals, bass and other things which needed vast amounts of auto-punchin, and also my old Akai GX210d to provide some interesting octave-shifting effects on 'Red Queen Rising', which the other machines were too precise to do properly.

Some of the songs I've already posted demos of here, others I have not.
 
jpmorris said:
Oh yes, I forgot to comment on that. The 'Death of a Statesman' track was rather fascinating. Nice work.

If anyone's interested, I've finally released this thing: DOUG the Eagle - Evil Songs for Evil People.
https://dougtheeagle.bandcamp.com/album/evil-songs-for-evil-people
Evil Songs for Evil People

...the bandcamp link looks prettier, but the main site has it for free.

The album has six tracks of various lengths, and was recorded on an Otari MX80, and mixed to a Studer A807. The mixing was a bit more rushed than I'd have liked since I ran out of leave at work. Even so I'm rather pleased with the result. If I'd wanted absolute perfection I'd probably have mixed it ITB. Other tape decks used included my old faithful TSR-8 for the vocals, bass and other things which needed vast amounts of auto-punchin, and also my old Akai GX210d to provide some interesting octave-shifting effects on 'Red Queen Rising', which the other machines were too precise to do properly.

Some of the songs I've already posted demos of here, others I have not.
Click to expand...
Hey,
i'm not really into most forms of electronic music, apart from ooold experimental/noise/"krautrock" stuff. And Flying Lotus & some Radiohead stuff.
But i thought the songs are cool and quirky.
Do you know his Album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wozard_of_Iz
?
I some ways, your stuff reminded me of this. Combined with some kind of synthy post-punk or something like that.
 
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Dr.SpringReverb said:
Hey,
i'm not really into most forms of electronic music, apart from ooold experimental/noise/"krautrock" stuff. And Flying Lotus & some Radiohead stuff.
But i thought the songs are cool and quirky.
Do you know his Album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wozard_of_Iz
?
I some ways, your stuff reminded me of this. Combined with some kind of synthy post-punk or something like that.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I've always been trying to reproduce the keyboard section of a 1970s progressive rock outfit, Tony Banks from Genesis or Rick Wakeman's solo stuff.
For pure electronics I was rather fond of Michael Garrison's debut album, 'In Regions of Sunreturn' which I think was done on 1" 8-track in the late 1970s.

The 'Wozard of Iz' which I'd not heard of before, is definitely very late 1960s. It sounds a lot like things done by White Noise, or possibly Joe Byrd. I'm not sure it's aged as well as, for example, Wendy Carlos, and it is a little experimental for my taste, but some of it was quite good and I'll have to see if I can find a copy.
 
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