What is/was your most AMBITIOUS recording?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Llarion
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Nice glad you told me about Menomena. They sound cool.
I like the drums. Sounds like they have Dj shadow influences.
Nice. :)
 
Man, I need a fast connection here at home...

My most ambitious recording?

It was a live recording of a kick @ss Hawaiian rock band (Sugah Daddy) in an untreated warehouse. 16 channels going into Pro Tools with 8 sub-mixs going to an ADAT for redundancy. Oh, and I was mixing the house sound AND monitors. Oh, and my assistant failed to show up. Oh, and no time for a soundcheck before the audience started arriving. Oh, and we've added an opening band with their own equipment...

Any one of those jobs would have been easy. All of them at once made for quite the headache. Good thing I had chosen this opportunity to use my new (i.e. unfamiliar) mixing console!!

Um, I won't be posting an example. :D The mix actually turned out OK for what it was- a live show in a warehouse. It just that the first 2-3 songs were the sound check... and they only played like 6 or 7.

In that situation I chose to focus on the live sound- the show must go on and I wanted to make the band sound as good as I could (which isn't hard- they're fantastic musicians.) I found out after the fact that the bassist/lead singer's monitor never did work. Also found out about the 2nd or 3rd song that the other lead singer's channel wasn't hitting Pro Tools- a quick reseating of the cable fixed that.

Ah, well. That's how you learn. The hawaiians were happy enough with the results and we're still friends so it must not have gone TOO badly for them. :)

-C
 
Excellent recording - I'm grooving to the beat as I listen ...... I've never heard the original. This is really nice.....

1) how do you keep those drums going the whole song (I'm getting tired just trying to keep up).
2) It evokes images of latin/spanish dancers
3) all the instruments - horns, flutes, guitars etc - great licks/chops
4) Nice crescendo at the end and outro on the guitar.....
I can see why you'd need a nap after that :D
 
Menomena - I Am the Fun Blame Monster has some of the best artwork...it's a flipbook! I just started recording, so I don't have any ambitious ideas tracked yet.
 
ido1957 said:
Excellent recording - I'm grooving to the beat as I listen ...... I've never heard the original. This is really nice.....

1) how do you keep those drums going the whole song (I'm getting tired just trying to keep up).
2) It evokes images of latin/spanish dancers
3) all the instruments - horns, flutes, guitars etc - great licks/chops
4) Nice crescendo at the end and outro on the guitar.....
I can see why you'd need a nap after that :D
Click to expand...

Thanks!! Here are your answers...

You've never heard the original; here are two samples:
A) The first minute of the studio cut...

B) The last minute of the Live cut, so you can see where I took arrangement points.


Your points:
1) pracitce, and a LOVE of that groove.
2) It should. It's from a movie set in northern Africa
3) Thanks!! wish it were a bit tighter, and wish I had better brass patches...
4) The 2nd sample is that ending. I think mine actually came out better... :)
 
I'll post mine in a couple of days when the rest of the gear gets to my location. It's a concept album: 9 perspectives, 11 songs, all about the September 11th attacks.
 
Forgot all about this...

The album is the project after the on-deck project so it is about 6 months to a year away from completion. Anyway, it came about because I wanted to do something where I wasn't constrained by normal song structure, length or subject matter. I also wanted to tell a whole lot of stories from different perspectives. The subject of 9/11 came up and I wound up doing a lot of research that stuck in my head.

The concept is 9 perspectives, 11 songs. My self imposed constraints are that all songs must begin with the same chord that the preceding songs ends with and that all of the pivotal songs must contain the same musical thematic elements (a common melody line, images, and phrases)

I didn't want to write songs about politics or any of those angles, I just wanted to write about what was happening to nine different people that would represent a cross section of those affected by the day.

I have about half of them written, and am happy with the progress, but this is not an album that you would sit down to listen to for kicks. To call it depressing is an understatement.

It's called "Iconic". Here are a couple of scratch tracks from the center section (songs 3 and 5)

The Watcher (From the perspective of an air traffic controller)
Tower (from the perspective of a WTC worker faced with the inevitable)
 
Geez, Falcon, and I was having such a good day too! :) Interesting concept; I'tll be cool to her more as it approches completion. Your voice is like my friend Larry, I like it...
 
Yeah, as I say it is a bit dark :). In fact it is likely to be too dark to be appealing to anyone commercially. The only thing I may do is pitch it as part of grant application to some Arts Councils, NEA, NEH, and state arts funding agencies as a folk art project.

I'm really more of a storyteller than anything else and there are just so many haunting stories there that allowed me to break out of the 3.5 minute verse/chorus/verse structure. One song is 73 seconds long, another is 11 minutes long, another is 13 minutes long but is split in half. The album opens with an acoustic guitar version of "Fanfare for the Common Man" and closes with an acoustic guitar version of "The Star Spangled Banner".

It will not appeal to many people. But that's what's great about doing what I do: I can do some things just because they appeal to me.
 
Art is art, man. Don't shortchange the appeal until you try it out on the people when it's complete. You never know what will catch on!!
 
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