My first attempt at Lo-fi Analog recording
SPlDEY
Vegas 3,375 Posts
I'd like to hear some feedback from the STRUT on my overall production.
Soul Low - Green Apple EP by DOPAMINE FLUX
Equipment used:
Tascam388
4 Fostex 1/4" tape reels
Laptop
Digi002,
Roland Vs1680
M-audio Firewire 1814
Samson RUBICON-6A Monitors
1 - Blue Tube mic
1 - Bluebird mic
1 - Sm58 mic
5 - Sm57 mic
6 - random beat up thrift store microphones
1 - Roland Space Echo (reverb)
Just a couple days ago we decided to release some of the recordings and get some FEEDBACK. As we're not sure if this material will ever get a proper release.
Please let me know if you Like it. Hate it. I know Soul Strut of all places has no problem being opinionated. You can also leave a comment on the Soundcloud or whatever.. Thanks.
Cheers,
- Diego
Soul Low - Green Apple EP by DOPAMINE FLUX
Equipment used:
Tascam388
4 Fostex 1/4" tape reels
Laptop
Digi002,
Roland Vs1680
M-audio Firewire 1814
Samson RUBICON-6A Monitors
1 - Blue Tube mic
1 - Bluebird mic
1 - Sm58 mic
5 - Sm57 mic
6 - random beat up thrift store microphones
1 - Roland Space Echo (reverb)
Just a couple days ago we decided to release some of the recordings and get some FEEDBACK. As we're not sure if this material will ever get a proper release.
Please let me know if you Like it. Hate it. I know Soul Strut of all places has no problem being opinionated. You can also leave a comment on the Soundcloud or whatever.. Thanks.
Cheers,
- Diego
Comments
i like the melody, progression and lyrics
i especially like the vibes breakdown (although it gets slightly muddled in parts)
Right on.. Thanks brotha. Muddled is a good word for it. Haha.
I uploaded another one to Soundcloud. It's a much darker track.. Pretty sure it's not the Strut's style but I can post it up if you wanta hear it man.
- diego
When did that happen?
I don't get why you have a problem.
- spidey
Anyway, for some time now I've been getting that same kind of "uh-oh feeling" pretty much every time you start a thread, and very often when you post in other people's. Off the top of my head, there's stuff like the Music Critics Who Don't Suck thread that you kicked off with a link to your own blog, the Is It Better For Artists To Play For Themselves Or For The Fans thread that was basically an electronic press kit for your boy's band, someone else's Current Rock You're Feeling thread where you linked to your band's Soundsomething, and of course this thread right here, ostensibly about soulstrut dot com's opinion of your recording techniques yet for some reason featuring pretty prominently your band's logo, full contact info, and links to several external sites where folks can just, you know, leave comments or whatever.
I'm not knocking your obvious hustle (though it might help if you were smoother with it), and I'm not mad that threads like this exist, but the fact is that shit like this used to get relegated (rightfully) to the Announcements or Music forum. Having to wade through more and more of it here on the main page is confusing.
That was the point of my original post, and given a) the heavily promotional nature of this thread in particular and b) your apparent propensity for this kind of stuff in general, this seemed as good a place as any to bring it up.
Congrats on the five years, though.
I don't profit from my blog, my band, or my friends band. That was some slick research there though. If it really makes you feel better.
**fixed
- spidey
1. Just because you're not profiting doesn't mean you're not promoting. A commercial that doesn't make any money is still a fucking commercial.
2. Like I said, son: that was just off the top. When the attempts are as numerous and as memorably transparent as these, recalling them doesn't exactly require research, know what I mean?
3. Thanks. That's definitely a step in the right direction.
If anyone else is still interested here's the other track.
Nino - Garage demo by DOPAMINE FLUX
PAGING OTIS FUNKMEYER!!
- diego
nice stuff! got a kinda RZA darkness to that track......fresh
Composition wise this Songs is great, even if the vibes part is not in tune and sounds to me like thrown into the mix from a record.
I only can criticise the sound. To me it sounds to clean and there for to much like a demo recording out of the bands practice room.
I dont know which and how many mics you used for the individual instruments, but I always worked with the technics which Gabriel Roth of Daptone records fame once published.
Using only shitty dynamic mics, no condenser mics because the are sounding to nice in certain frequencies. For the drums I only use 2 mics. One for the Bassdrum, the second for the snare and Hihat. If you want to be even gritier just use one mic for the drums.
To achive the nice 70s shitty funk 45 sound, try to experiment with mic positions. A inch more to the right or left can be the difference between a dope sound and a boring sound.
BUT, only in combination with tape saturation !!!
As far as I know your Tascam 388 got REPRO, that means you can listen off of playback. This way you can check out the amount of saturation in combination with mic positions.
You really need to go into the red to get nice saturation, and you need to EQ the bassdrum and bassline down before hitting the tape, I needed to turn down the bass frequencies - 12 db, because the bass will be boosted back by the tape.
You will also hear that a hihat or cymbal which was not loud enough on your original recording, will be boosted too and will sound very loud.
The saturation compreses all the small sound informations like sqeaking bassdrum pedals or the resonance of screws and bolts of the drum and all the parts of the drum which can swing, but you can not hear on a modern day recording. Thats the reason why an old drum recording sounds so large in comparison to modern day recordings.
The same goes for all electric instruments, accept that if you want it, you could manipulate these instruments later, if you would use a PC at the end of multitrack productions.
For example, your guitar sound is to nice and to modern sounding to me. You could record it on tape and after digitalising all multitracks into a multitrack program like cubase, logic or whatever you could than use plug ins like NI Guitar Rig on the guitar track. There you can manipulate the sound into a more shitty 70s direction. The same goes for Fender Rhodes, Vibes, old Moog Synths and so on.
Another important sound part of old recordings are the effects.
For example your drums are very dry, even if you work with saturation, sometimes more room is needed to sound old. Try a spring reverb on it. Gabriel Roth says only a real sping reverb is nice, but to me the waves spring reverb plug in sounded as nice as the original, except for the static noise of my spring reverb tank which I sampled over my digital spring reverb.
Reverb and echo are very important on all tracks, especialy on vocals, guitars and horns. The more you can hear the effects on tracks the older it will sound, because today effects are used in very small ammounts.
If you are interested in thos Gabriel Roth articles you can get them here as PDF files:
This one is about composition and the players.
http://westtownrecording.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/shitty11.pdf
This is all about recording.
http://westtownrecording.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/shitty2.pdf
Here is a recording I did with all I talked about.
Imperial Breed - Horny Pipin Beats (Juice Exclusiv… - MyVideo
Peace
Hawkeye
Wow... HAWKEYE man.. great EAR. Really thanks for that and great work with the Imperial Breed. I was working to get away from that too clean, too pretty, too modern sound. Gabe (Daptone) and Miles (Breakestra) were the ones who inspired me to go Analog in the first place.
Wanta swing by Vegas and help us with a couple things.. Seriously though I'd like to pick your brain a bit in a PM.
- Diego
the recording sounds decent though. keep it going. i'm not mad at you for posting something you're proud of.
Delay, thanks for checking it out man, and I hope you got a chance to check out the second song.
You bring up an important subject for me. I'm always in my head trying to make sure whatever I do doesn't come across tacky or corny to other people, but the truth is... It's all subjective. Everything is corny to somebody. I think about it and I think about how shitty it is that I'm even thinking about it. I try not to think about it, but then I obsess over that too.. not thinking about it.. What it all boils down to though is I really could care less what people say about me or whatever it is I do. I really could care less. So, then I just go ahead and do whatever I feel like unconsciously anyway.
I found out I mentally block myself out though. My logic constantly fights my Imagination.
So, these songs are almost 4 years old now, and for me represent where we started in my garage, but it's definitely not where I'm at now. I want the music to reflect me and the members of my band more so now...
My whole mentality has progressed and transformed. Truth is musically I've learned a lot and have been influenced by your mixes.. I really have been re-evaluating my whole approach. Don't get me wrong. I love hip hop. I still think with the mentality of a BBOY. Though I really really have this deep desire to go more and more psychedelic more surreal. Write songs that feel like dreams I've had you know. I'm really dying to get to write new material with my players.
Musically though I want to get Heavier.. Deeper.. So, I've been trying to express that side in other projects. So, that's why I chose these 2 songs. The first one is how most people know my band. The second song is more of a strange song that.. I know is not commercially acceptable, and is not easy to digest. (Truth is neither is radio friendly.)
Now I realize though that the weird abstract approach... I'm always going to have. That's just me, my personality. Even a song like the first one is about soul but there's still that strange breakdown something about the off-key vibes/guitar that I can't put my finger on. That I like. To me it's strange, but it works. I don't know.
That's why I chose these two songs to represent two very different sides of the band. We got some other stuff that's more Soulstrut acceptable and other stuff that isn't at all.
Soul Low is what I think passes for acceptable style wise. Soul low was mixed very well by my close friend DJ 8-bits one of the better tracks from the session.
Nino is more strange and personal and I like it and don't give a shit if nobody else likes it. It's not mixed particularly well, but I really enjoy the roughness.. The other band members probably don't even agree with me posting it in this form as well.The lyrics are talking about the death of the father of our DJ. Lyrically though I was touching on the death of my father as well. So.. the words mean something very personal. I believe we wrote it around the same time we were covering ESG's UFO. So.. I'm sure that had some sort influence on it too..
I have a whole hell of a lot of things to say as an artist.. about who I am and where I'm from. I think it's for the best I step down as producer for a while. Leave it in the hands of someone much more capable than me.
I really respect this place SOUL STRUT. Taught me a lot. Tough place to get respect or make friends. I went through a whole hell of alot of trouble to even be able to post these little tracks here but it's worth it. I'm nobody now but more work and more work and more creating you know. Who knows one day right?
Thanks everybody... most importantly gives me and my band motivation to continue creating/progressing.
- spidey
the band's name reads like a Paul Oakenfold tribute jam band via Burning Man. people must be surprised to find out you are a fun, competent funk band. any chance to rebrand?
dopeness! Keep on my man, shit is probably only gonna get better. inspirational
Also from what I read from Hawkeye..shit is some good information.. older equipment older mics, would give it more character.. but the talent is already present.
so Hawkeye you got some music we could check out?
The tape saturation is nice on this one, the drums are banging BUT the sound is not old, I had the wrong mic positions.
I have never used old mics because I had no old mics. I used 1$ dynamic Radio Shack mics. Those mics are great for doing this, but in the wrong position or wrong degree to the sound source are sounding to clean.
But if you find the right position, degree, distance they will exactly do what you need + the tape saturation and a lot of reverb does the rest.
I cant find it online, but another tune I did which sounds good is "Imperial Breed - On The Run".
Peace
hahahaha... I guess so. Haven't really thought about it too much.
- spidey