Category Archives: Home Recording

Home Recording

Leo Brouwer

Leo_brouwerI recently was reminded by a friend of the great guitar music of Leo Brouwer. I first encountered his music when taking classical guitar lessons at Miami-Dade Community College from the great Classical guitarist Carlos Molina.

Brouwer’s music is just really interesting.  His compositions are modern but they are Cuban.

I have now added Etude First Part from his Etudes Simples collection. HIs original score notates the piece at 104 although he doesn’t bother stating the tempo but notes when the piece should be finished in real time. However, Ricardo Cobo, in his Brouwer, Vol 1 albums play the piece at the more aggressive tempo of 184. In my opinion the syncopation of a piece really comes alive at the more aggressive tempos but in any case a great piece to study.

Below I have my rendition of the first few bars with some creative liberties added to give this snippet some sense of completion. I will work out the entire study and post that sometime later.

Brouwer 1 snippet

From Doodle to Music

from_doodle

 

Doodling is the act of just playing with abandon not really focused on being musical. Most of the time its at best relaxing, it can be exploratory if one is doing it over a changes i.e a chord progression but too much is a waste of time. Practice needs to be structured if one in going to progress so doodling in general is contrary to a serious musician’s objectives.

However, one area where a bit of doodling can be beneficial is in composing. Often , ideas come when one just let’s go and is free from the stress to produce. The key of course then would be to record your “doodling” and go  back and try to glean some musical lines.

For a recent doodle which like most of my doodles pretty much crappy run of the mouth line I went back and tried to salvage the underlying musical idea that was lurking in my subconscious at the time. What you see above is the notation of it and below is the audio for the midi playback.

It sounds better on the guitar. The performance includes slides and minor nuances that I can’t be bothered notating i.e. too difficult. Perhaps the transcription is not totally accurate though I think its quite close. You would not turn a lead sheet with all those rests but the cleaner lead sheet would have misleading playback i.e. more legatto than what I intend.

I’ll share a recorded guitar line later.

from doodle

Updated April 24th, 2013

from_doodle2

 

The above is a more accurate transcription of what I intend the line to be. This is amounting to the start of a solo as opposed to a melody.

Here’s the audio for it:

from doodle v2

The audio is just the midi playback for the scored line , the performance includes stylistic innuendo in the form of slide approaches which I will share.

Updated : 4/26/2013

Recorded guitar line:

from doodle v3 w guitar

Deconstructing Metheny

One of my long term goals which I think I have mentioned is to come up with my rendition of Pat Metheny’s So May It Secretly Begin. The attempt is to perform whatever parts I can i.e. guitar , bass, sometimes keyboards and sequence the rest. Drums will probably be scored in with perhaps fills and breaks recorded via my Roland Handsonic or keyboards.

The effort is not only a music learning experience but its also about a recording engineering experience.

Today I added what I figured out to be the chord swell over the cm7 intro vamp, I think I have the right voicing. I have not yet added the flute – ish trill . Also for fun I found myself just musing on the guitar over the vamp with my newly added cm7 swell and to that I dropped a line on the guitar. Its raw and frankly crappy but it was just a first rough take of something that popped out of my head.

This blog is for documenting my journey and about not taking myself too seriously and having fun.

Check it out:

swell with riff 2

 

 

Tientos

Below is my performance for Juan Martin’s second solo study entitled Tientos.

Tientos is a Flamenco dance form. I found this defintion on the web:

a slow cante jondo music and dance in a four-count rhythm, was first developed by the singer Enrique el Mellizo (1848 -1906) as an expressive variation of the Tangos. Poet Federico García Lorca considered the Tientos to be almost liturgical in its solemnity. Traditional Tientos lyrics – letras – set a dark mood, and have to do with loss, unrequited love, imprisionment, longing for freedom and other serious messages. Dancers strive to capture this mood in their solos.

The most notable aspect of the slow Tientos tempo is the beat structure. Where the first beat in Tangos is subdued, it is strongly emphasized in the Tientos, as is the “and” of the second beat.

The study piece emphasizes along with the Tientos form , the use of the thumb stroke  as well as the use of held  chords while running single note lines.

Its an easy but pretty piece:

Tientos2

Controlling your DAW from iPad

touchosc

 

Here’s a pretty cool tool that I bumped into. Might just be the justification I need to buy an iPad , that and the fact that I want to do iOS / RubyMotion development targetting iPad.

Here’s a video showing how its used with Logic Pro. BTW, you can also not only use it with a number of DAWs but also virtual synths and just about anything midi. It does though come as a official Logic Pro control surface i..e it will just work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzjnVTqjblY&feature=player_embedded#at=15

 

 

Scaffolding Metheny

I like notating music that I’m working on i.e. sequencing with the goal of switching out the parts for live performances by no other than me and where I can. That means mostly bass and guitar but depending some keyboards and sequenced drums.

Here’s an initial bass and guitar sequencing of two passes through the melody of Pat Metheny’s So May It Secretly Begin.

 

melody 2 ends

Reddi , Tube Based Recording

reddiRecording acoustic instruments in the home studio is hard. Most can’t afford to have an acoustically isolated and controlled room at home. Room noise becomes a real problem and noise gates are not a silver bullet.

My current approach is to use a Godin Nylon which has a piezo pickup. The Godin Nylon has an acoustic chamber but its not the full size body that standard classical guitars are spec-ed to. The Godin Nylon actually sounds great when amplified and it sounds reasoanble when recorded directly i.e. given some good sound engineering. However, its not quite there to my ears. So part of my recording strategy is to employ the services of a little red magic box called the Reddi.

The Reddi is a tube based direct box that goes a long ways to provide that more personal , real warmth that one can get from a tube mic but of course without the room noise.

A blurb from their site:

A bold statement, yes, but one of many just like it said of The A-Design’s Audio REDDI all-tube DI by an ever increasing number of professional bassists and recording professionals (see below). Designed and built by former career studio bassists, the REDDI has been hailed by engineer and bassist alike as the best-sounding DI around. Inspired by the glorious sound of the Ampeg B-15 tube bass amp, its 6N1-P tube-driven amplifier feeds signal directly into a hefty custom output transformer, which is key to providing a harmonically rich tone. Its wide-bandwidth design from 20Hz to 60kHz reduces in-band phase shift, which results in greater detail and realism in the audible spectrum. Another big plus of its wide-bandwidth design is the prevention of LF phase shifts by maintaining a linear response extending below the audible bass range, which is the secret to achieving a big, full sound.

Read more here.

 

Reaper

Reaper is an incredibly powerful Windows DAW, which is as increidibly affordable at a price of $39.00 and which has a very active if not passionate community behind it. I bumped into Reaper because my usual DAW Adobe Audition does not have VSTi support. VSTi support means being able to load virtual instruments not to be confused with virtual effects which it can indeed do. There are many more reasons than just VSTi support to contemplate using Reaper. It is really a powerful multitrack recorder with very flexible signal routing capabilities. It also comes with a ton of free effects which seem to be very well liked within the community. Reaper does not have in my estimation the editing tools that Audition has. My guess is that I will be using both tools with Reaper being used for the intial multitrack recording to initial mixes and Audition in the final mixing and mastering process.

Some of Reaper’s features:

  • Portable – supports running from USB keys or other removable media
  • 64 bit audio engine
  • Excellent low-latency performance
  • Multiprocessor capable
  • Direct multi-track recording to many formats including WAV/BWF/W64, AIFF, WavPack, FLAC, OGG, and MIDI.
  • Extremely flexible routing
  • Fast, tool-less editing
  • Supports a wide range of hardware (nearly any audio interface, outboard hardware, many control surfaces)
  • Support for VST, VSTi, DX, DXi effects
  • ReaPlugs: high quality 64 bit effect suite
  • Tightly coded – installer is just over 2MB

  • ool-less mouse interface — spend less time clicking
  • Drag and drop files to instantly import them into a project
  • Support for mixing any combination of file type/samplerate/bit depth on each track
  • Easily split, move, and resize items
  • Each item has easily manipulated fades and volume
  • Tab to transient support
  • Configurable and editable automatic crossfading of overlapping items
  • Per-item pitch shift and time stretch
  • Arbitrary item grouping
  • Markers and envelopes can be moved in logical sync with editing operations
  • Ripple editing – moving/deletion of items can optionally affect later items
  • Multiple tempos and time signatures per project
  • Ability to define and edit project via regions
  • Automation envelopes


    • and more well worth checking it out. Don’t let the prize fool you Reaper in many ways is just as powerful as any of the other well known DAWs such as Cubase and ProTools. It may well be exactly what you need.