Author: peterNH

One day a neighbor found
A perfect rose
Growing in a garden down the road
It was reaching up
Through a split-rail fence
Swaying gently in the summer breeze

She was feeling bold
So she snipped that bud
Now it’s on her window sill
And now she feels
A smile creep
Upon her when she looks upon that rose

You never know
What you might find
When you perpetrate
A minor crime
Commit an act out of character
Something no one ever thought they’d see you do

And even I
Had a Rolex crush
So I bought one in a store in Curacao
It was fabricated
In a shady shop
Likely in the city of Tapei

I bet it’s hidden
Down an alleyway
Some Taiwanese woman
Slaving every day

But I have to say
A smile creeps
Upon me when I look upon that dial

You never know
What you might find
When you perpetrate
A minor crime
Commit an act out of character
Something no one ever thought they’d see you do

This song started with the drum and piano rhythm. I had just been listening to some Mike Viola songs, including his work with Mandy Moore on her album, Amanda Leigh. There’s a song called Everblue where they play with a deep kick drum/tom with some dark reverb going on in the background. My drum pattern for this song seemed to have a place for that on the 4 count, so I gave it a try.

This was all done before I got my drum kit, so the drum tracks are all MIDI, using the built-in drum sounds in Cubase. I originally played the drum pattern on the keyboard controller and then tweaked it, all using the HalionOne “Dry Standard Kit.” Later, I broke out the MIDI track into separate tracks for snare, hi hat, ride cymbal, kick, low tom, toms on the chorus, and the drum rolls. That way, I could apply separate effects to each when needed. At that point, I also switched the kick drum to use one of the sounds in the “All Kick Drums” HalionOne package.

The horn part is a harmony using the HalionOne “MuteTrpt 2” and “Satin Brass” sounds. I like how the sounds blended, and my slightly inaccurate phrasing while playing the two parts on the keyboard controller gives a realistic edge, I think. Sometimes perfection is not what you’re after.

Vocals were recording using my Shure BG5.1 mic since I hadn’t purchased my new AT4040 at that point. I had to some mixing work to get them to sound as full as I wanted, but in the end I was happy with how with it came out.

I found the crowd effect for the second verse on an old sound effects CD I had purchased a long while back, called “Spectacular Sound Effects.” I panned it left to right as if were going across the stadium.

Sometimes it really isn’t clear
Who’s the hero and the victim
You think you’ve got it all figured out
That’s the time you better get out

Cause when you think know the answer
Identified the better dancer
You could be wrong

And every time I try to understand
All the sweet things that she’s done for me
I try to place them in an envelope
And send them somewhere ‘cross the sea
To me

I thought I found my tiny dancer
Bernie Taupin’s Mona Lisa
I want to throw my arms around her
Like she’s always done for me

But I am the man who’s kind and loyal
Always there in times of need
Or am I weak?

And every time I try to understand
All the sweet things that she’s done for me
I try to place them in an envelope
And send them somewhere ‘cross the sea
To me

She rolled into the city in a Cadillac
She couldn’t find a parking space
She sent it back
Now she rides the cabbies ’bout their foreign names
They think she’s kidding, but it’s all the same

I ride my bicycle down her street
Past her apartment, try to take a peek
Through her open window, she sings a song
I have to listen, gotta sing along

New York City’s big
(Like Cannonball Adderley)
From the subway down below
(Rumble of a downtown train)
To the skyscrapers above
I’m almost falling in love

She likes the jazz, she likes the prose
She reads about it while I paint her toes
I didn’t plan to stay this long
Can’t shake the feeling that it all seems wrong

At Yankee Stadium, beneath the lights
I had an epiphany that set me right
I’d stay a little longer ’til the crowd wound down
Then hit Penn Station for a train northbound

New York City’s big
(Like Cannonball Adderley)
From the subway down below
(Rumble of a downtown train)
To the skyscrapers above
I’m almost falling in love

This song was a challenge because of the prominent vocals in the first verse. I had trouble getting the lead vocal to sound the way I wanted. I finally ended up doing the following for the vocals:

• Copied the original track in Cubase to create two duplicate tracks of the lead vocal, compressing them using the VSTDynamics compression plug-in and the “Ballad Lead Vocals” preset (with a few tweaks), adding a bit of the “Hall LFEverb” preset of the RoomWorks reverb plugin, and panning them left and right. With these turned down a bit, they provide a bit of fullness and depth to the lead vocal.
• For the Lead Vocal track itself, I tried to avoid compression but ended up adding a bit, as well as a tweaked plate reverb that emphasized the lower frequencies rather than the high–once again from the build-tin RoomWorks plugin in Cubase.
• For the background vocals, I recorded it twice and panned both tracks left and right–although not full left and right, as I found moving the left side in a bit made it sound a bit fuller. The big trick was adding a filter to cut out the highs of the background vocals during the verses. For this, I fed both backing tracks into a single Group track and applied the Cubase built-in Dual Filter plugin, using the “Backings in the Back” plugin.
• Note that I turned off this filter via an automation setting during the chorus, since I wanted the high vocals to come through sharply. The filter worked best on the lower harmondy background vocals during the verse. It helped to move them into the background so the Lead vocal had prominence.

The piano tracks were fixed primarily by reducing the mid-frequencies via the Cubase built-in EQ. The upgright piano had a lot of muddy middle that I was able to strip out via this EQ.

The kick drum sound was challenging since the Shure mic I used is kind of ill-suited to the task and I only have an 18″ kick on my drum kit. I ended up cutting the EQ everywhere except at around 100hz, adding a bit of compression, via the Isolated Fat BD preset of the VSTDynamics compressor plugin and adding a bit of reverb. In general, though, I tried to bury this a bit in the mix with the Upright Bass HAlionOne sound.

The snare was pretty much untouched and is as live as it gets via the AT4040 mic. My son wasn’t as thrilled with it as I was, but I really like the live sound of it. There’s also no effects on the overheads, which I thought were pretty clear without any processing.

I did feed all four drums tracks into a group track and applied a little of the RoomWorks “DrumShine” preset to brighten things up just a bit.

For the upgright bass track, I added some EQ around 180 and cut everything below that so it would bite a bit through the kick and lower piano registers.

This was the first recording I ever did with live piano and live drums.

Recording the Piano
I recorded the piano first with four mics, kind of like a drum kit. I brought my VS-840 and Behringer mixer up to the living room for this project. All four mics were fed into the Behringer mixer. the mixer has two output stereo busses, the Main mix output and an Alt mix output. I sent two mics through the main and two through Alt mix. This way, I could feed four independent outputs into the VS-840 and record four tracks simultaneously.

I recorded over a click track to try to keep the tempo right. (If you took the time to read this, you might have heard the click, or beep of the click track, which bled out of the headphones into the AT4040 Mic during the intro.)

I positioned the mics as follows:

• The AT4040 to the left, up above the closed top of the piano. Surprisingly, I found the closed top was a nicer, rounder tone than having the top open.
• The Shure BG 5.1 on the floor to the right to try to pick up the bass notes.
• The two CAD CM217s positioned as overheads to the left and right and spaced back about 5-6 feet.

Later, I used MTS Sync and the VS-840’s digital output to move the four piano tracks to Cubase.

Recording the Drums
The drums were recorded using the same four microphones, but recorded directly into Cubase, since the drum kit is near the computer.

• Two CAD CM217 Condenser mics to serve as overheads on either side of the drum kit
• A Shure BG 5.1 Microphone for the kick drum (it’s all I had at the time)
• An Audio Technica AT4040 on the snare

My PreSonus Firebox mixer has only two pre-amped Mic inputs and two regular 1/4″ inputs. To record the four microphones simultaneously, I the two overhead mics to the Behringer mixer and the two other mics directly into the Firebox.

I used one of the Cubase presets in the VST Connections dialog box to set up three stereo busses in Cubase Studio. Four of these channels mapped to the four inputs on the Firefox, so I was able to assign two overhead channels, one snare, and one kick drum channel to individual left and right channels on two of the stereo busses.

Recording the Vocals, Strings, and Bass
All the vocals were recorded on the AT4040 mic with a pop screen.

The strings were performed using my MIDI controller and the HAlionOne software synth that comes with Cubase Studio 5. I used the String Ensemble patch.

The bass line is also a HAlionOne sound, the SR Upright Bass sound, performed on the E-Mu XBoard MIDI Controller.

Calling what I have a home recording “studio” might be a misnomer, because the space I use is also used for lots of other things, too. But, I do just about all my recording here in our finished basement.

My equipment consists of the following:

• Apple Macintosh iMac 22″ with a 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB RAM
• PreSonus Firebox firewire audio interface
• Steinberg Cubase Studio 5.1.1 – no special plugins yet
• G&L ASAT Classic electric guitar
• Fender Blues Junior amplifier
• E-mu Xboard61 MIDI controller keyboard
• An acoustic Yamaha upgright piano upstairs in the living room
• A Roland VS-840 digital 8-track recorder, which I use for remote recording, such as recording the piano in the living room or adding additional recording inputs via MTS sync with Cubase
• A Behringer Eurorack MX 1604A 16-channel mixer
• A used Tama Stagestar drum kit for live drums

In addition, I routinely borrow equipment from my kids, including an M-Audio 88-key MIDI controller keyboard I used on a couple of recordings, as well as a Fender Bassman amp and bass guitar.

Take this token of my appreciation
It’s something I’ve been working on
What you gave us
We can build on
Despite the ignorance you spawned

Let the Mad Men sing their song
Tap their ashes on the lawn

I know it’s not the gift for you
You’ll say it’s nothing you can use
But I believe when you look beneath the tree
Among the packages and tinsel you will see
Into your past

Every image I directed
Came from memories you groomed
Watching movies on an old projector
Flickering light across the room

Your father taught you how to skate
On silent Kodak Super 8

I know it’s not the gift for you
You’ll say it’s nothing you can use
But I believe when you look beneath the tree
Among the packages and tinsel you will see
Into your past

This blog will be used to provide details about the songs I post on my Web site. I’ll try to provide the lyrics of each song and, for home recording geeks, I’ll try to provide details on how I recorded and mixed each song. I like learning how songs were recorded and mixed–just thought I’d return the favor to those who are interested. I’m not a professional by any means–simply learning as I go along as a hobbyist.