General Music Chat

Thanks to everyone for the support on the first flawed endeavor. This is a bit bit more coherant.

As before, I wrote both songs and played bass.

Talbot

Very cool 70's vibe. Reminds me of the way music use to sound. Still need a better reocrding then put it in ourstage.com.
Why don't you buy an MAudioFastrack interface. You get Pro Tools Essentials with it. I got mine on E-bay for 88.00. Money well spent and you can record day and night and never bother a soul but your own ears.

Sweet Lucille sounds like a badly recorded, unknown version of Little Miss Strange..

Very interesting..

I'd like to hear that recorded correctly, please.. ty.

+1 vote for the MAudioFastrack, he's absolutely right. (it's cheap too)

Very cool music.

I don't understand why it sounds like it was recorded from your neighbors closet ?

It was originally mixed down from a studio tape onto a cassette. Getting a cassette recorded into the computer caused a second degradation of sound with my mediocre equipment and subpar technical skills contributing to the bad sound.

I'll have to find a studio that can convert the master into something decent. The original sound on these was quite good, particularly the drums which you can hardly hear on this version.

I'm working up some stuff now where I'm recording the sound as it comes out of my amp. I'm starting to wish I had a Mac - I hear they have great music software.

I'll look into the gear you all recommended as well.

thanks
Talbot

This kind of thing is why I keep coming here Mike.

Looking forward to more of your music as well as being able to upload some more of ours again.

Having probably 20 - 25 songs just sitting in our live sets without good recordings to share on line is hard for an impatient man like myself.

Best wishes!

Yeah Mike, at least I can hear the intent. You may want to think think about a hand held PCM recorder. They are not that expensive (300?) and very useful.
Macs are great but even a MacBook is going to run a 1000, and then if you want to get into logic another 500, and then a converter any where from 300, to a few grand. Good luck Mike and thanks for sharing. Is that you playing bass? C'mon up.

Mike,
most of the recording software including Pro Tools gives you the choice to run it through Windows. If you want to record at home any desktop will do as long as your d-ram is sufficient. But a laptop would obviously give you that mobility for locations. But you don't need a MAC. We have 3 in my house but i don't need them for recording. Just sayin....

Dated and roughly recorded but the great melodic ideas are obvious.
Guitar lead has moments of Lynyrd Skynyrd in it. With the right rec. gear
you could make good songs great. I think they are diamonds in the
rough for the southern boomer crowd.[/b]

Thanks to everyone for the support on the first flawed endeavor. This is a bit bit more coherant.

As before, I wrote both songs and played bass.

Talbot

I like your songs, and I actually like the voice work in the Lucille song...

Don't worry about the production quality, I suspect your songs would really shine right once they get proper studio on them..

(hell my samples are the product of what I call 'Guerilla ' recording. )

From what I can tell it sounds good Mike. Mechanized sounds cool almost sort of punk style, with some actual talented guitar and drums. Hey how is the quality when you listen directly to the cassette recording? Is it better than the end mp3s? What software you using to convert it? Just curious if there would be a way to improve the end results.

Cassette sounds cleaner to be sure. The original studio tape was very nice but lost something in mixing it down.

I've often been a band leader type but there was always someone smarter than me to do the technical thinking - so I'm playing catchup.

Played the cassette through a cheap recorder into a cheap Radio Shack mic going into my laptop with Audacity as the software. Not a winning combination!

I'm having issues recording my guitar work too because any guitar settings I actually like seem to overwhelm the software. Got a Tascam Pocket Studio and still learning. Can record straight into it but I like the effect of my amp.

I hate this technical junk because I want to focus on playing but it's a tollboth and the toll must be paid to follow this road.

Talbot

Mike the microphone in between is by far the biggest problem and the recorder step seems redundant causing additional fidelity loss. If you use the headphones out mini plug on the cassette and go directly into the “line in” of the sound card it will lose very little and retain stereo. http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3812787 Amazon.com also has this stuff. Being a laptop it may not have line in and the only option could be “microphone in”. If using a microphone port make sure the signal boost is off.

If it goes through the amp it will lose stereo although you can still make up the two channels in Audacity. From cassette, to amp, line out from amp to sound card line in. They have 1/4” (From amp) to the min plug (To sound card line in) adapters http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102952 .

If you get rid of the microphone and recorder in the chain and the sound quality will improve a huge amount. It will be split mono (just record to a stereo track), but as stereo as it can be coming from a mono amp.

Audacity now supports VSTs so if you have a particular effect on the amp you want across the whole mix, you may be able to add something very close afterwards:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=VST_Plug-ins