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New Music!

I gone done and made new music.

A piece created for the Guitarist Home Recording Collective May task, laid back Jazzy vibes in ‘Cafe de Leith‘.

Niiiice.

Cafe de Leith

The Guitarist Home Recording Collective task for May 2005 was to create a recording using at least one of the supplied Jazz samples.

I had been trying to incorporate a jazzy style into my playing and this task was the perfect opportunity to create an original Jazz piece.

I was aiming for a summery laid back Jazz Café vibe with this piece, using the acoustic for all rhythm and lead parts over just the supplied drum loop.

Finally finished on a sunny day in Leith I named the song ‘Café de Leith’ as a tribute .

Cafe de Leith [Download MP3 - 3.3 MB]

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Database corruption and Recording Journal

The Bad.

It appears my Movable Type database was corrupted, I suspect due to an upgrade of Berkeley DB on the Blueyonder Servers.

So, I’ve spent the better part of two days building my blog from scratch, importing the old blog entries and manually adding in the posts made since I moved to Movable Type, though sadly I lost all comments made since the move.

This could have been solved alot easier if I had access to my webhost’s server, nevermind, I shall be backing up regularly now .

The Good.

I’ve just started a Recording Journal.

Primarily as a reference for myself, as I stumble through the learning process for each piece of recording I do from now on, but also something that may be of help to others.

Guitarist Recording Collective: May 2005 Part 3

Now being fairly satisfied with the guitar sound I started to work on arranging the piece in Cubase SX.

First thing to do was to calculate the tempo.

Listening to the loop section I came to the conclusion that the loop consists of two bars of 6/8. Armed with this info, right clicking on the loop in Cubase SX and activating hitpoints I was able to calculate the bpm to be ~65 bpm. This now allowed me to accurately create sections, loops in Cubase’s Project Window. In order to ensure clean joins between loop sections I also had to chop off the silence at the start and end of the main loop.

Next I decided on the layout for the whole piece, opting for:

| intro | head | head | solo | head | outro |

Over the head and solo sections the following chords, as mentioned in Part 1, were used:

|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 F#13|Am7b5 D7#9|Gm7 C7|Gm7 D7b5#9|

For the outro I wanted something different, wanting to end on an upbeat vibe by resolving to FMaj7, therefore I came up with:

|Gm7 F#13|Am7 D7|Gm7 C7|FMaj7 |

Now that the structure was there, I recorded the backing guitar over the drum loop coming up with the following:

‘head’ backing

Once the backing was finalised I had a foundation with which to build on. Next task, to come up with a melody/head.

Guitarist Recording Collective: May 2005 Part 2

Tried a different mic position last night, with mic pointing at join of neck and body but mic at 12 inches from guitar, noodling away I recorded:
Acoustic Recording Test #1

A touch of compression and reverb was added to beef things up.

Less of a ‘boxey’ sound this time. It’s getting there .

Guitarist Recording Collective: May 2005 Part 1

The task for May’s Guitarist Recording Collective was to use a collection of provided Jazz style samples of bass, drums etc. to create a track using at least one sample.

Now that I have unpacked all my necessary recording bits n bobs I decided to give this one a go. Recently I’ve trying to incorporate some Jazz into my playing .

Listening to the provided samples I wasn’t too impressed with the chord progression so decided to come up with my own and hopefully create a track using the supplied drum loop.

I also decided to record all guitar parts using an acoustic, for that intimate Jazz Cafe vibe.

So, the chord progression.

I’ve been faffing around recently with certain minor Jazz ii – V – i progressions and opted to use this resolution in the piece. Therefore currently the progression goes something like (very roughly):

||:Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 C7|Gm7 F#13|Am7b5 D7#9|Gm7 C7|Gm7 D7b5#9:||

This should give me plenty of scope to create a main melody/head and then noodle for a bit.

Last night I started trying various ways of mic’ing/recording the acoustic. The Fylde I’m using is fitted with a Headway pickup so I wanted to use this in the recorded signal.

The reason being since I’m only using a Shure SM58 to record the acoustic ( currently saving up for a nice Condenser mic ) using the DI from the guitar should add a wee bit more top end.

I setup the mic to point @ the join between the neck and the guitar body and recorded a small snippet of some playing to check. I noticed that with too much of the DI signal the sound was very ‘boxey’, so tamed that down a bit which improved things slightly.

I tried the usual listen on monitors then listen on headphones to check the sound and felt that the sound was maybe a touch too bassy, possibly I was too close to the mic. A quick read of Recording and Production Techniques by Paul White revealed I should maybe try a distance greater than 12 inches or so.

Tonight I’ll give this a go and maybe try another mic position.

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