Working Title
The Guest Room Studio
Check Out the Album
Original Concept:
A month (or so) of music. Cover tunes will be played, unfinished projects will get almost-finished, the band is working on an expanded repertoire, jazz band rehearsals will be ramping-up, I want to produce better/more efficiently... rules will, of course, be broken.
enormous expectations will soon be tempered by reality...
Artist Post-Game:
This was originally going to be a month of band practices (which, thanks to our lead singer, would all be live, played in a room together and multi-tracked as vox, bu vox, 2-3 guitar tracks, bass, and stereo drums... yes, he has a lot of expensive toys), brought home to my daw to cherry-pick our best run-throughs, fine tune the mix, and put together 2+ hours of music to represent where we are. For several reasons, that just became impractical and I lost my aspirations to work in that direction.
So, this is a month of side projects. Actually, "Side Projects" was a possible title at one point. This is all very intentionally NOT what my band is doing because I decided to keep that separate to avoid inevitable frustrations.
I had actually "put the daw away" for a while there since November (long story) and was looking forward to INCOALMO as a good motivator to get moving with things. The other motivator was my friend/band-mate, Doug, who suggested he and I do a little side project together... which is the last track (What Is And What Should Never Be, our singer won't do Robert Plant style, but we have some singers in mind to finish it and I am open to nearly anyone throwing a vox track on there for snickers and giggles), it is the only track with someone else playing, the only track I consider unfinished, and full disclosure: started the last weekend of Feb. I still consider the bass line a scratch track and Doug thinks he has some better takes in him, but it is a cool Zep cover and we will polish it up when the time is right.
As for the other four songs, they represent "silly stuff I do with my daw once the kids are in bed and I can go put the headphones on and play for a bit before my bedtime". I had a lot of fun with those and behind the scenes, I am continuing to improve workflow, automations, and all kinds of other cool stuff.
Big advances from last year:
1) A better Drum plugin, better drum routing in the daw, better compression, gated snare (sometimes) and other percussion such as claps, tambourine, etc, better eq control on drum channels, better dynamics and more humanized sound (hopefully)
2) Better guitar eq, delay, etc... some with my cool new pedalboard, some in the daw... all items recorded direct and had amp/spk simulation added after, also loop-style recording is now something I programmed as a custom action
3) Bass tracks now have things like analog-style saturation and compression sidechained to the drums for dynamic control
4) Master tracks (busses) are run through one master limiter that is pretty easy to tune, along with some other nice master track plugins. A reverb bus is used which puts everything "in the same room" instead of having several different reverbs. I have tuned-up things like delay times and reverb dwell to fit songs/tempos better.
5) Automation Envelopes... wow, what I have found out can be automated has continually blown my mind over the last few months. I will spare you all the details, but EVERY parameter of EVERY plugin can be manipulated and automation is both a creative tool and a problem-solver. In particular, the tempo envelopes for The Wall Trilogy and What Is And What Should Never Be were critical!
6) Templates for tracks and templates for full projects make getting things moving so much faster. I have a template for guitar that already has a high pass/low pass eq and amp sim inserted and the template is set to record from the first input of my daw where the guitar always gets plugged in. I have a bunch of very user-friendly templates now, along with plugin chains and plugin presets...
So that is a bunch of nerdy stuff, but I think I need the nerdy stuff to capture the creative stuff.
I had a lot of fun last month and appreciate all the work and inspiration from the INCOALMO community. Thanks for the listens and the feedback. Thanks for giving me a good excuse to listen to music outside of my usual taste. Thanks especially to Joe and Jeff for the effort and organization involved in all this!