Sunday, December 30, 2012

Silverwing records new CD

Hi friends,  I have been busy playing music with my band Silverwing and of course procrastinating since I last posted, so I need to do some catching up.  Here goes....

When I last posted, I was talking about recording the drum tracks and how we used the wrong microphones for the first attempt and so we purchased the Shure PGDMK6 Drum Mic Kit which worked perfectly.  Each mic picked up only the sound of the drum that it was pointed at, so we ended up with 6 individual drum tracks.

Next we recorded the bass guitar.  Of course, our bass player listened to the scratch tracks through the headphones while he played along.  Instead of placing a microphone infront of a bass amplifier, he used a chord do go directly from the bass into the Tascam DP 24 Digital Portable Studio.  This produced a clean track without any room noise at all.

Next it was my turn to do the rhythm guitar tracks.  Even though some of the songs are pretty rockin, we used an acoustic guitar on all the tracks.  I just changed the strum pattern for each song.  For "Moonshine" and "Rodeo" I strummed in short hard strums, but for "Wide Open Spaces" I used a much more flowing light strum.  It just is dependent upon what the song requires.

On a few songs I went directly into the board from the acoustic guitar with a guitar chord, but we also used an amplifier and placed a mic infront of it, for a different sound. One of the mics we used was the Guitar Cube from MXL. It is manufactured for recording guitar amps, so it served well.

It is difficult to hear your own mistakes and even though I have played the songs many times live, I still made a few mistakes. In past recordings our engineer has had us replay the entire track again and pick through it for the best parts, but since we are using only one track per instrument, we used the "Punch In" technique to fix errors as we recorded.

So after my initial track was completed, I would go outside and get some fresh air and let the engineer and my hubby listen to the track for any errors. I didn't like to hear it. It makes me cringe to hear myself and I am so critical. If they found a mistake we just "Punched In" the correction.
So they would make a note of what measure needed a correction, and I would play along with the recording, when we got to spot that needed fixing, they hit record, let it go through the error and then turned off the recorder. TA-DA big booboo all gone, just like that.

The CD is actually already completed and up for sale all over the internet, but just for the record I am going to continue to discuss the recording process. You can find a copy of our CD "Moonshine" at CD Baby and our site www.silverwingband.com. If you are in Northern Nevada or California check our schedule and come out to one of our gigs. This New Year's Eve Silverwing is playing at Sharkey's Casino in Gardnerville, NV. I'll post some pictures at my next blog.

Check out this link: New CD "Moonshine" by Silverwing