Recording » Kristie Addison

Recording Update

NZ Music, Recording, Update No Responses »

Dec 122008

Here is a sneak preview for Meatmarket. This is just a premix so don’t start getting all picky on it just yet

It’s 7:30am on a Saturday morning. I resisted the urge to sleep till 11 since I have a friend coming to record some bass tracks this morning and I need time to clear the myriad of coffee cups that litter my desk. And time to write another long overdue blog.

Drum tracking is finished, a couple of songs have all the tracking done however most are still waiting on bass. I am trying to nail a tough guitar solo in one particular song which is giving me grief. I mean I can play it, but I just really want to play it solidly. I just can’t seem to get that magic take. Vocals are done on most of the songs, bar a couple. Robin Liu (Infinite Flying Kick) came in to record some guitar parts and brought with him a new song he’d written for the album. I need to write vocals and other parts for that too. A few tracks have moved on to the mixing stage. I had planned to do the mixing myself but at this point I’m so sick to death of my own music that I really felt I needed to get a pair of outside ears in. In fact I’m getting two pairs of outside ears with David Edtmaier of Miscreant Recordings and Michelle Klaessens from The Rock Factory doing some each.

A quick shout out to those who have contributed so far…

Mike Johns – Guitar

Tory Staples (Battle Circus) – Drums

Christina Chunks (Infinite Flying Kick) – Piano/Synths

Robin Liu (Infinite Flying Kick) – Guitar

James Dudley – Guitar, Backing Vocals

Dave Edtmaier (Miscreant) – Guitar, Bass, Mixing

Anthony Corban (The Mysterons) – Bass, Guitar (Yet to be tracked)

Harry Champion (The Exiles) – Bass

Michelle Klaessens (The Rock Factory) – Mixing, and no doubt she’ll throw in some piano and backing vocals

Meat Market Pre-mix [3:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Testing Podpress media player…

Music, Recording, Update 1 Response »

Nov 082008

Rough WIP - "I'll Always Be Second Best": Play Now | Play in Popup

This song is very much a half finished WIP. I lost my voice last week after a cold, and when I tried to sing this on Friday I got only one terrible take done before my voice gave out again. So I will definitely be redoing the vocals on this!

It has recently come to my attention, that there are people out there who don’t know what WIP stands for. WIP = Work in Progress. There you go. I usually use the term to refer to something that isn’t finished yet, something that is in fact, a work in progress

I am trying out a new WordPress plug-in called Podpress. Unlike the previous media player I’ve been using (I think it’s called Wimpy) this one should show up in the RSS feed. I guess I’ll find out soon.

Enemy is here!

Music, NZ Music, Recording, Song Writing 3 Responses »

Aug 142008

Enemy is the rewrite of the theme song I wrote for Erik Hogans game Derelict. It will soon be available for download from Amplifier, and eventually from iTunes.

Special thanks again to Michelle Klaessens (The Rock Factory) for a fabulous mastering job, Mark Towl (Stapleton) on drums, and Mike Johns (Revolution Brother) on lead guitar.

The Gear (because recording is always just an excuse to play with fun things!):

The song was entirely recorded and mixed at home in Cubase, with my ancient Tascam US122 USB interface. I used Adobe Audition for a little wave form editing in the form of noise removal on a funny hiss from the piano (must try solve that some day).

The Drums are recorded from the line out of a Yamaha DTXpress electric drum kit – thanks to Go West Music Henderson for the loan.

The piano is a line out taken from my Yamaha CLP-230 Clavinova via a stereo headphone output

The rhythm guitar is my 1999 Ibanez RG520 (V7 and V8 pickups) played through my Peavey Triple X head and Peavey 5150 cab, which is mic’d up with an Audix OM2 dynamic mic and an Audio Technica AE6100 dynamic mic.

The lead guitar is Mikes Fender Strat played through his bizarre set-up involving an amp that’s rewired to bypass some bit of it and another external unit. I’ll have to ask him about it sometime because I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

The vocals are me singing though an Audix OM2 straight into the interface, that was turned up to the max to get a bit of distortion going on. (In hindsight this was probably not the best way to do it! )

Yamaha DTXPRESS IV Electric Drum Kit

Gear Reveiw, MIDI, Recording 3 Responses »

Jul 242008

I borrowed a Yamaha DT Xpress 4 for some recording tonight, along with a drummer since drums are not really my forté. I thought an electric drum kit would be perfect for an evening recording session at home, as it wouldn’t keep the neighbors up like an acoustic kit would.

I wasn’t familiar with the kit before we started, so when it arrived I was actually expecting a USB port for MIDI. But unfortunatly only the higher models that come USB equipped (so I hear). The kit does have a MIDI out, but no MIDI in so my cunning trick I was planning was foiled from the beginning. (This cunning trick would have involved recording the drums on a midi track, quantising and editing to my satisfaction then running the MIDI signal back into the kit and this time recording the audio output. It’s a very cunning trick that works quite well with keyboards. )

Instead of the cunning trick I just recorded straight from the line out into my USB interface. I was really impressed with the easiness of the whole process. Just two leads. Not ten mics and ten mic leads and ten mic stands and endless soundchecks. And the whole kit folds down so easily that you can carry it up the stairs in one trip.

Obviously an electric drum kit can not replace a really nice kit in a great studio, but for home recording I think it’s a really great idea. I loved the samples in the DTXpress, it has some that are cheesy and fun and some that are very usable. While I probably wouldn’t go out and buy this particular model myself, as I definitly want a USB port (or at least a MIDI-in as well as a MIDI-out) after playing round with it I am definitly keen to try out some of Yamaha’s other electric drum kits to find something that suits my purposes.

Sound Design for Derelict

Games, Gear Reveiw, Music, Recording, RPM, Sound Effects 3 Responses »

Jul 072008

Derelict Alpha was just released yesterday, I downloaded it shortly after midnight and began playing my way through (slowly, because I’m terrible at games). Even though I’ve worked on the game it was just as exciting for me because I hadn’t played it since the beta which didn’t have my sounds or music in, and theres been a lot of other changes too.

A huge congratulations to ERIC HOGAN on finishing this big project. Erik is a talented indie game designer from Auckland NZ and he has developed Derelict in his spare time over the last 9 months. You can download Derelict for free from his website.

Notes on sound design for Derelict.

I came into this project as it was nearing completion, there were already a lot of sounds in the game from various soundbanks, and already three tracks of music from the other musicians Samuel Gavin, Edward Clombe, and Bill Norris. I wrote two additional tracks and began working on the sound effects.

One of my favorite effects is the sound the teleport module makes in the game. The teleport looks like a cylindrical blue forcefield, and monsters are transported onto the ship through them. I created the sound for these by plugging an instrument lead into my recording interface, and moved my thumb about on the hot end creating sounds like electrical hum. Then I just chucked in a little phaser, a touch of reverb and that was it.

The sounds the monsters make in the game were a lot of fun to do. I used my Digitech Vocal300 vocal effects processor to pitch shift the signal down and my old reliable Audix OM2 dynamic mic. Just recorded snarling and lurking and scary breathing all pitched down, again a touch of reverb to replicate the sound of a big deserted spaceship.

The footsteps were the most challenging sound for me. Because these sounds were recorded at home not in a studio to keep the budget down as this is not a commercial project, keeping out the background noise was a bit of an issue. Especially when weather is involved. But if it’s not weather it’s dogs barking, neighbors mowing the lawn, or people driving past. In the end, I found the best way for me was to use a dynamic mic instead of my condenser, and to manually silence all the sound between the footsteps. The dynamic mic was a tough choice because I had to get it much closer to my feet for the recording than I had my condenser, so it was tricky to walk realistically in one spot while being careful not to kick the microphone or tread too hard so that vibration traveled up the mic stand into the mic. All in all, I’m reasonably happy with how the footsteps came out.

Here are the music tracks I wrote for Derelict.

Pitch Correction in Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition, Pitch Correction, Recording 5 Responses »

Apr 172008

I have noticed this search coming up a fair bit in my stats, so thought I better write a post on it. I’m gonna grab a vocal line from something I’m writing at the moment, and run through using the Adobe Audition Pitch correction plug-in. I am using version 1.5, but version three is out now hopefully the operation will be reasonably similar.

You can not use the Adobe Audition Pitch Correction in real-time in the multi-track window. You have to select the track you wish to pitch correct, and double click it to go into the edit window. Here is the vocal line in the song without pitch correction.

It is best to pitch correct the vocal track line by line. Select the first line, then go to pitch correction. The Automatic function can be very good if you know the key you’re in, I find it a little unreliable if I use the chromatic scale setting. I am singing in A Major for this piece, but there are some parts of the song where I need to sing a C natural which is not in the key of A major, so I can’t just pitch correct the entire song to A major. However, I can pitch the first line to A major. The next line, I can adjust the pitch manually by selecting the manual tab, finding the note that needs tweaking and then adjust the envelope as shown in the picture. So I can go through the entire song quite quickly line by line either adjusting to the key signature, or manually adjusting any notes that either don’t fit the key signature or are too far off.

Here’s the corrected vocal line, it’s just done roughly because it’s only a rough vocal take for a demo of a song. And no amount of pitch correction could make a rough vocal take sound great.

Extreme pitch correction can be used as an interesting effect… In adobe audition just turn everything up to max and pretend you’re Daft Punk, or Cher, or a robot.

The RPM Challenge – Post Mortem

Recording, RPM 4 Responses »

Mar 012008

Well, The RPM challenge is over, and while I didn’t complete it in time I feel it was definitely worth while attempting it because I have written a lot of new material that I otherwise would not have.

Next year, I think I would do a few things differently to make sure I finished in time.

Not starting a week late. I started a week late this time, because I heard of the RPM for the first time a week into February.

Not spend so long on songwriting. I spent so long writing, demoing, then rejecting songs, that I planned to do most of my proper recording and mixing in the last few days. This backfired terribly when I got the stupid flu and spent the last few days lying on the couch feeling like death microwaved on high for 30 seconds.

Take it more seriously. Probably the biggest reason I didn’t finish, is simply the fact that I didn’t make it my number 1 priority. If I had taken it more seriously, I would have been forcibly removing visitors from my home – family or not, recording on those last few days no matter how sick I felt, and recording in the evenings without worrying about annoying the neighbors.

I had actually been planning on having a proper album finished by June, so this was good motivation to get some more material together, and I now have a few new songs that I’m quite keen on (and quite a few I’m not!).

[Actually, if I had really low standards I could just send in ten demo's I've done, but nah. Not gonna happen ]

General Midi – not quite dead yet?

MIDI, Recording, Song Writing 3 Responses »

Feb 012008

If you don’t know what General Midi (GM) is, you’re missing out on something which is at the time time both very awful and very cool. General Midi is a specific specification for synths, that basically means the the default synth on your soundcard or operating system should theoretically have the same instrumentation as mine. So, instead of having to save a big audio file, I can save a little set of midi instructions, and your GM synth will follow these instructions and play back the notes of my song with the drum parts sounding like drums, squarewave sounding like a square wave, and the pineapple tasting like a pineapple, and of course the schnozberry tasting like schnozberry. It’s awful it really is.

Bunnies of Doom (and Fantabulous SFX of Doom)

Recording, Sound Effects, VST Instruments 1 Response »

Jan 162008

I fear I may have spelt Fantabulous wrong. Lucky it is not a real word aye. Or the spelling police would be on me in a jiffy…

Yesterday I spent most of an evening recording sounds for my friend Joshs indie game Caverns of the Underkeep. It’s a rogue-like game, which according to geeks I know, is a game where the map is randomly generated each time you play. Josh claims it’s not a RPG – but it sure does look like one It’s done in Java, so you just play it in your browser. It’s different every time you play which is cool. Especially at the moment while it’s still being built and is constantly being updated. /Plug for Joshie. Continue reading »

Work in progress – new song to critique

Recording, Song Writing 2 Responses »

Jan 062008

This is a new song I’ve been working on. It’s had almost ten different versions, and this is the rough of the version I’m probably going to go with. It’s almost a bit too “easy listening” for my personal tastes, but I think it’s probably the version most likely to get me in with a chance at a NZ on Air grant (Muh huh huh haaaaaa).

Older Entries

Kristie Addison