Longing for the day ...

Recording Forever Mine and arranging strings - Friday

Just finished the third version of the string arrangement, based around a reasonable guitar take and a placeholder vocal. Thought I'd better document the entire process from a technical and musical point of view:

• Recording device: 2011 Macbook Pro running OSX El Capitan 10.11.6
• DAW: Pro Tools 9 with Reason and Komplete. The DAE plugins no longer work as OSX is not compatible with them
• Sound Card/ADC: Presonus Audiobox iTwo
• Microphones: Rode NT1-A (vox) and a matched pair of NT5s (guitar); Sure SM57 (stomp)
• Guitar: Tanglewood FT-45 with Martin strings.
• Stomp Box: home-made pine box with an SM-57 under it. See this video:

So, I started by recording the stomp box with a Dr Martens boot on my pine box. I find that the softer rubber sole of the Dr Martens gives the stomp a more mellow, deeper tone than a harder shoe, but has more definition than a sneaker. Using the SM57 avoids having too much boomy bottom end. Maybe I'm full of crap, but that's how it seems to me.

I recorded a whole heap of stomping to about 2 minutes of click track, then looped the best 4 bars of it, since it's a constant within the song and I'm in a hurry here.

I then recorded the guitar in two takes, comped them into the best I could very quickly, but didn't edit very much. I should have trimmed my RH fingernails to a consistent length but didn't, so you can hear some inconsistency in sound on the arpeggiation - the 5th is much softer than the tonic and octave. My index fingernail broke in the middle of recording, which made things worse. When I do this properly I will fix these things.

I had been playing with a strings/keys part (RH only) for the full band ("Banding Together") version of this song, so I grabbed the MIDI of that part to use as the starting point for the strings. Created individual tracks for cello and violin and dropped the respective Kontact patches on each - straight out of the box, except that I turned the Concert Hall FX off.

That was Friday. What you think of this process? Got any thoughts or suggestions? Share them below.