Back in the Garage
Since late December, we’ve been taking some time to work on recording. We’ve been working on our live performances, and recording is very different, so we’ve had to take a look at songs we’ve been performing and approach them differently. For the two tracks we’re working on now, we have taken two diverging paths.
The Girl In Number Six is a song we know the recording arrangement for pretty well, having recorded a demo for it previously. While there are several guitar parts we can’t cover live, it was just a question of syncing the drums and the bass together more tightly and knocking out our parts. There are still a few tweaks to make, but the version you can hear on the player is pretty much complete.
Desiree, on the other hand, required a complete re-think. The entire song really only has four chords and there are lots of ways to approach it. Finding the right way has been quite a journey, and we’re not quite there yet. We need to add one more drum part to the choruses and tighten up a couple of other things to make sure the chorus drives, but the vocal harmonies we’ve added and the guitar parts are working pretty well together. The important thing is getting the raw emotion of the song across without making life seem hopeless.
If you’d like to download the current versions of these two songs, you can go to our band page on SoundCloud to get 256 kbps MP3s. Get ‘em while they’re hot! They’ll be coming to thesixtyone.com soon.
These are sounding mighty excellent. How do you record the guitars? I’ve never been able to get that right.
Hi Jesse! It’s a little shaming to admit this since I have several nice amps (play through a Budda and a Vox AC15-H1TV and also use TopHat, Fargen, and Two Rock amps–man, I need to sell some of this stuff), but everything except any live guitar I recorded with the band through our little cheapo Portastudio is going through a $99 Line6 TonePort using Line6’s GearBox software. Since I play Vox-type amps most of the time, I mostly just use AC-30 emulations with a virtual compressor stompbox in the chain about half the time to make the clean signal a little chunkier (I keep the bass control on the virtual amp turned way down so there’s more room for bass guitar). I think there’s often a special to be had on the old TonePorts where you get the ‘gold’ version with all the guitar and bass amp emulations for just $99–it’s a pretty sweet deal.
I use SONAR for recording on my laptop after I dump the drums over from the Portastudio (I add session drummer bass and snare using the impulses of the real kick and snare as triggers), but I don’t use many plugins.