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Let's hear about projects you have done with almost no gear that turned out so good it surprised you. I'm sure there are lots of war stories about this subject. I would also like to hear your opinion as to why you think it turned out so good... Hint; this topic is related to the "What are you recording and why are you recording it?" thread
. .Fats :w:

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dpaton Mon, 10/14/2002 - 07:34

Actually, I did minimalist recordings for quite a while when I was in college. There was a coffeehouse like place on the 2nd floor of a flower shop that had live performances every Friday night. Most of the time it was a guy and his guitar, or a girl who read poetry and did some cool spoken word stuff. As the 'sound guy' friend of the owner, I used to make recordings for him and the talent. 2x Radio Shack "studio condensers", a Radio Shack mic stand, duct tape'd dual-mic bar and a borrowed Marantz tape deck. It's not quite as high on the combat recording scale as the answering machine Dan used, but the results came out suprisingly well. The live-to-two-track thing hooked me on recording for good. I don't have any 2 track gear left any more (multitrack basement studio), but a DA-P1 and my current mic box would make me a very happy man these days, if I was still living in a college town with live acoustic talent.

-dave

Doublehelix Mon, 10/14/2002 - 10:05

I was sitting in my hotel room one night, guitar in hand, with a great idea for a song, kinda like Dot posted above. I had a small headphone guitar amp with the small ear bud type of headphones, my laptop computer, and a cheap version of Cakewalk Home Studio on my laptop. I had no other cabling to hook the guitar amp into the computer, but really needed to get the song on tape.

Now once again, "necessity is the mother of invention", and since the laptop has a built-in "el-cheapo" mic built into the case, I just placed one of the ear buds from the headphones right on top of the little built-in mic grill on the laptop, and hit "record"! The quality was pretty horrible, but I was able to get the part down and recorded before I lost it!

Pretty lame!

anonymous Mon, 10/21/2002 - 20:05

Well, one of the pieces I like the most of mine is accually lo-fi. There was a poem I wrote shortly post 9-11. I was leary as to do anything with it seeing as I hate to give any attention to such an event.

Anyways, I was reading through It and I noted how I like the way it rolled off my tounge.

OK. now to lay it down. I knew I wanted to get into audio, so my dad got me a new IBM Thinkpad, seeing as it was powerful and affordable, for my birthday/graduation present, so there as had been for awhile was my medium(and still is, although the SW has changed.) I plugged in my Peavy PZM mic(I know my first mic, blah, but it did it's job before it died.) into an xlr -> 1/4 inch, and then 1/4 -> 1/8 inch into the onboard mic in on my laptop. adjuted the volume from the mic distance away form my mouth. recorded onto the pc with a Cool Edit Demo.

I then found it needed something else, piano maybe. So my piano was back against a large picture window at the time. I set the mic atop the piano facing the window, I love the way it sounds, a wall just doesn't reflect the same.

so, to put them together, I downloaded a freeware program called multique. then I figured an intro. I toyed around with midi (mouse click midi in cool edit) and found that it uses the info in your clipboard as a midi sample. and used both piano, and my voice, a rather eeire, chaotic, 40 second intro.
The sound I wanted kinda ominous.

You should be able to download it at the sight here
click the down arrow next to the magnifying glass to download.

http://

If you want to, take a listen and tell me what YOU all think

Rob

anonymous Sun, 11/17/2002 - 07:22

...are we allowed to have instruments? Four people (acoustic gtr, electric gtr, bass gtr, and congas), one mono Radio Shack dynamic 1/4in.- 1/8in. hung over the ceiling fan in the middle of the room, into a Sony portable MD recorder (ATRAC and all)...
This is not as combat weary as Dot's story above, but it surprised me how good it sounded! It could have been that the players were all experienced musicians adept at mixing themselves by playing volume alone, or that mono helped glue it all together, probably a combination of both...I've got another one (or two), but I've got to do some one-offs, so I'll be back... :w: