You are allowed to enjoy this…

The way I record has now changed due to the various changes in my life. Spare time is a premium and I am torn between my baby daughter and the shop I now own. However, I refuse to let my creative urge (no matter how feeble the results might be) die out and so I have found myself recording things even quicker. I believe in the “get it done” work ethos when it comes to “art” – and I think you can labour over a piece of writing or music or art until you lose focus. Now I am just recording this stuff as it happens. I now riff to a drum track from my drum machine and improvise bass parts over it. Then I go back and refine and revise. “The Sun Even Shines” was such a track and this new piece is starting the same way. The same seed is sown and so if you check back in a couple of days something might have come out of this rough recording.

This little ditty was based on that “Super” jam I recorded last month. Unfortunately, my guitar playing is less that inspired as I have been have a few aches and pains in the joints of the fingers in my left hand. Now I have an excuse for my crappy playing – hurrah!

Recording chum Andrew Osborne sent over the individual tracks he’d recorded for his cover of Tubeway Army’s “Are Friends Electric?” and this gave me the chance to have a go at some production. His version was a more mono mix, whereas I tried to make it more “produced” if you know what I mean. I also dropped the old vox back in – but this time I think you can hear that I had a heavy cold when I was singing. Whoops!

I have upgraded/sold off a part of my home studio. In an effort to conserve space, I have sold my audio mixer, FX processor, compressor module and PC audio interface/synthesiser. I have replaced the equipment with an EDIROL M-16DX digital 16-track mixer which seems ideal for working with Sonar. I’ve owned the new mixer for over a week but not done much recording with it. As with all new gear, there is a honeymoon period where you test it out and try and figure out how to get it to sound like your old equipment! I am having trouble with the levels in the M-16DX at the moment. Anyway, now I can recorded sixteen tracks at once if I wish, so I can have the drum machine running and jam live over the loop, which is a novelty that I’ve missed since moving from a 4-track multitrack recorder to PC recording back in 1997. I could only ever record a single stereo pair at a time. This morning, in about fifteen minutes, I recorded this little thing. It’s nothing serious – just a playful rhythm track for me to test the levels of my new mixer.