The Smith's Journal - February 2010



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2010-02-02

Studio learning curve

Tags: Studio

Later on today I found a Wandering Tune while driving home from school, and so I came in and fired up my studio computer to record it for a change instead of just writing it down. Playing around for a while, I started overdubbing for the first time, as a proof of concept, just to make a demo of my musical idea (as a piece it's not ready for primetime though, so you can't hear it yet). Firstly I sang the melody over a synth bass drone, then added some creamy analogue goodness from Jupiter, creating a fine Minimoog-esque echoey lead line. Before long I had figured out what I was doing, so I'm happy to announce that it all works very easily. I'm quite dazzled by the potential of a virtually infinite number of tracks - spoilt really :-)

I got quite far without even RTFM; soon I'll read up on how to edit and further process the audio I've captured. Some useful docs for Ardour users: shortcuts cheatsheet, podcasts and videos. Here's some stuff about MIDI editing in the upcoming version 3. Harrison Consoles also have a PDF and video online all about their Mixbus which is based on Ardour, and makes a good intro to using Ardour.

I've hit my head against a few routing limitations, since I now want reverb on the mix, so next I'll figure out how to digitally patch in my TC reverb unit and how best to route effects sends from the DAW to my crazy analogue outboard. In the meantime, I also played around adding plugin effects in the computer, and learned how to use automation ;-) The final vocal track ended up being mashed up by a Sinewave Oscillator modulator, so it now resembles some sort of EVP ghost-radio noises from beyond the grave... ;-)

A productive evening!


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike v3.0 Licence © The right to copy is left with the user copyleft Malcolm Smith 2010-01-02 - last updated 2010-04-06