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| Music... la la la! |
| Yay! this is my music page, unfortunately the most infrequently updated page in my little niche of the net. Oh well. Anyway tot he right is a listing of my Cds, in case you're curious, but mostly this page will now be about my recording project (with pictures to come) |
| It all started in January, when I started taking Recording Tech for Non-Majors. Yes, thats right! I'm learnnin from a pretty accomplished guy too, one of his products is featured in this page=============> (click on picture) |
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| Dont let this face fool you =) he may be goofy but he's done everythin, just check his bio! |
| Then, whilst I was on the lookout for a song to record (as is our final project, to record 8 tracks of something) I came across a song by accident in someone's share folder while using a fileshare program. This prompted me to find more songs, and I found out it was part of a soundtrack for Chrono Cross. |
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| One song that I found, called Radical Dreamer, struck me as a very cool song =) very peacful and musically fun to listen to. "Thats gonna be my project" I proclaimed to myself, and it was so. and there was much rejoicing. |
| Then disaster struck. Yes, the flames signify disaster =) What happened you ask? Well that's easy enough to answer, the headphones in the recording studio that I was supposed to use were broken! not just the headphones, but the whole monitor system was fried! Ahhhh! |
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| Anyway after much stress and near-multiple-heart-attacks on my part, I was encouraged by my musicians NOT to make this a waste of a trip. After all, my good friends miep dot and bryan had all come in to play the song, and this was my only chance to record them. (btw, the picture to the right is the cover of the CD, with pics of dor, miep, and bryan respectively) |
| So, after buying a cheap condenser mic from radio shack and using Cakewalk, a program that I learned in high schol electronic music (thanx Mr. G!!!!) I recorded them each, one by one, on my laptop! Now let us pause and consider, the many of hundreds of thousands of dollars that is the worth of NYU's studio were useless, while my 1,200.00 laptop mic and program did the job quite well. Something's not right with this picture... |
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| Anyway after a long day and enough stress to kill a full sized elephant, The first half of my project was done. Because of time constraints, we deicded that the second half of the guitar part of the song would be played on the piano, by me =) To hear a midi of how we wanted the song to sound like click on the midi link to the right. (sequenced by me, altough I have not yet added the piano part in place of the guitar) |
| Well As Luck would have it, Disaster struck Again! Only this time it wasnt technical. See, there was no more studio time left to record the vocalist, so i recorded her the way i did the other musicians, in my room. Only I didnt realize till the job was done that she was off key!!! Not the whole song mind you, just one note, and she hit this note on EACH one of the takes we did (five, i only needed two). So I did some cutting and pasting, and yup, came up with something half decent, though I still want to replace that this coming weekend. After that, THEN i will put up the finished product, and send out a copy to all my wonderful friends who helped me out =) |
| "RADICAL DREAMER" written by Unstolen Jewl, preformed by Us! |
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| NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEXT!!! |
| Kk, so now I have the second half of the song left, right? yea, so I sign up for after-hours work in the studio (I work for nyu, so i can do that) And I come to the studio on a weds night and record myself from 11pm till 2:30am. Greg thinks to himself, "Damn! I'm gonna need some serious coffe for this...." The piano to the right here is basically the one I used (or at least it looks like it). A nice sounding piano, though it was a bit muffled. Anyway I tried to move it from Studio E down the hall to studio D where I do my recording. I got it a whopping five feet, halfway through the doorway of studio E, before I collapsed in an exhausted lump and feared I might give myself a hernia if i keep that up (no joke). Apparently the wheels on the bottom of that awfully heavy paino were non-functional. |
| So I lugged it back to where it orginially was (by this time I was rather sweaty. at least it woke me up a bit...) and decided that I would have to pull a dangerous stunt, and run wires DOWN THE HALL and record an instrument through more cables than any instrument ought to be recorded through. hehe So to make a long story short, I ended up using 5 headphone extention cables, 6 fifteen foot XLR mic cables, and 2 twenty foot XLR mic cables. All in all I had 130 feet of mic cables and about 60 feet of heahphone extention cables. That of course presents a problem, becuase with a sound signal going through that much cable, the recording quality wont be as good, and the headphones suck. Really, they suck through 60 feet of cable. The signal is so week that you have to boost it to hear anything, only becuase you have to amplify it so much, when you boost it loud enough to hear, it aslo painfully crackles and static-shocks your ears. NOT a pleasant experience when you're trying to record yourself. So to the left I have a VERY crude drawing of the setup, and below is approx how i MICed the piano. (If you're curious, I MICed them pointing away from each other becuase although it might give me a phasing problem, the sound was MUCH crisper) also, needless to say that isnt to scale :) |
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| WHEW!!!! Thank the Lord that part is done!!!! Yay!!!!! Now for the last part, the vocals.... |
| Note: Even though she was a bit off, The project graded me on recording quality, not musicianship. So I handed in my 8-track tape with her as the vocal tracks, along with my tracksheet (describes how to mix the song, what's in it ect. if you wanna see it's here) My teacher loved it, here are his comments at the bottom of this text box. I was graded on sound levels being as close to the max volume level as possible, the isolation between different tracks (so he couldnt hear any paino music if he just listened to vocal tracks) and the track sheet. Good levels, good isolation, good track sheet. Well I died and went to heaven, A needless to say, I'm VERY happy with this A |
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