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I'm about three quarters through the recording of my third solo album and thought I'd upload one of the tracks.

I also made the video to demo the gtr effects that I used in the making of this track. So the video shows the track from the album and also gives an idea of the effects used to get the guitar tone.

Guitars were a Tokai Loverock into an MI Audio Crunchbox, into a clean Marshall TSL. Amp was miced with an SM57. Hammond was a C3 into a 222 Leslie also miced with SM57s.

The song's called "Everything Goes" and was written by the keyboard player, Dave Sharp.

Hope you enjoy,

Cheers,

Peter.

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Comments

PJH Sat, 10/18/2014 - 01:10

Hi Donny, thanks for your comments and for listening.

I'm not sure what you mean by "recording workflow" but I'll try to elaborate.

The drums (a Gretsch Catalina kit) were miced individually in the booth, Shure SM57s on the snare and Toms. I used an AKG D112 on the kick. For overheads and Hi Hats I use three Behringer B1 condensors (I use them as they're really bright sounding mics).

We tracked the drums first to a click with a rough version of the song for the drummer to listen to. Once we were happy with the take, we then built up the track bit by bit. It was quite fortunate that we left the camera running during the drum take. It was a pretty decent performance and once we had the basic drum track we only then decided to continue to film everything else. The video was really an afterthought.

Dave recorded the piano next and then added the bass. The bass was played DI into a Sansamp. The piano was miced with an SE2200 and a Rode Nt2A. I then tracked the gtr solo part. I played the Guitar into an MI Audio Super Crunchbox distortion pedal. This was plugged into a Marshall TSL. The Marshall was completely clean and all the drive came from the pedal. I stuck an SM57 about 6 inches from the speaker grill aimed at the centre of the cone. The amp was quite loud but not overbearing.

We then recorded the Hammond. This is quite an interesting thing to record. We miced the top rotors of the Leslie with two SM57s to get the stereo spread as they spun. It takes a little experimentation to get them just right as if you're not careful you get a bit of "wind" from the spinning horn blowing onto the mics. The Hammond was pretty loud so that in the solo parts we got a little bit of break up.

I recorded the acoustic (Ibanez Artwood) with an SE 2200 mic (also bright which I like) and did the same with the sax.

The whole track was recorded in Sonar X3. It had a total of about 16 tracks. I also mixed the song in Sonar and mastered it in Adobe Audition. There really wasn't a lot of editing needed as the raw tracks sounded pretty good to start with. All in all it was quite a simple production. No studio "trickery" needed.

We edited the video in Sony Vegas.

We also recorded a second version of the track which is a kind of "part 2" but was done with piano and two nylon string gtrs. A much shorter version but ended up sounding quite haunting with the sparseness of the instruments. Obviously they'll both end up on the album.

Hope this helps and thanks for your interest, Donny.

Cheers,

Peter.