The Keyboard Rig - Brendan in the background

Rehearsals for the live launch party continue apace.  Last night we rehearsed without having to cram into the MarkOneMusic studio (big thanks to Milton Baptist Church for the use of their building) so we had a proper PA, backline, and could be loud.

It was also a chance for me to properly try out the live rig I’m intending to use on the night.

At it’s centre is the Roland Fantom G7.  This is sat atop the lovely (and sadly discontinued) sci-fi looking Ultimate Support VS-80 V-stand.  From the Fantom I’m getting most of my keybaord sounds, and I’m also using it’s sampling capability to trigger samples from the sample pads. This will provide some intros, and some special effects to spice up one or two songs.

The Fantom’s live mode allows me to layer up to 8 parts, and I have created a live set per song.  I’m then controlling it all, selecting, layering, and augmenting the sounds with Apple Mainstage running on a Macbook Pro.  The Fantom can act as an audio interface for Mainstage over USB.  I’m then controlling the actual patch changes using a foot-pedal.  (This is essential, for instance,  in Don’t Give up on Love there are 9 separate patch changes during the song – I now know why Rick Wakeman likes to have 9 keyboards!)

This pedal operation was supposed to be easy as the Fantom has two definable foot-pedal sockets, but I discovered a little bug in the Fantom software, where it doesn’t send a clean on-off message over MIDI when you press the pedal. In fact Roland’s tech support guys are, as I write, trying to figure out the problem.  On the assumption they can’t, I have come up with a plan B. You might remember a while ago I got a little Behringer UMA25S controller.  This has a pedal input and can connect to the Macbook via USB too.  It’s pedal control does give a clean On-OFF, so although I won’t actually be playing the UMA25 it will remain tucked away under the keyboard rig just to route the pedal signal.

So the patch changes are managed with the left foot.  Then on my right there is the Boss VE-20 vocal processor for the vocal harmonies and effects, into which I have my EV N/D767a vocal mic plugged – Much nicer sound than the ubiquitous Shure SM58 in my opinion.

So between controlling patch changes with the left foot and harmonies with the right and a sustain pedal in the middle, there are times when tap dancing might be a useful skill to have.

Anyway, I can report that baring a few small teething problems, the rig works like a dream, and sounds incredible.  Of course this assumes I will be playing and singing all the right notes – Or at least, most of them! But that’s another story, and one I hope I can nail with practice in the week and a half left until the gig.

We had a first full rehearsal of the Fantasy Bridge live band, and Sue and I both thought that one element that wasn’t translating well, was the vocals. As you might have gathered the album features quite a lot of vocal harmonies, and it was clear that I needed to do something to try and replicate this live.

Technology to the rescue! Boss, the effects pedal company, and part of Roland make this little beastie called the VE-2o Vocal Performer.  Among it’s party tricks, it can add reverb, delay, compression, vocal enhancements, effects, like flanger and distortion, and of particular interest to me, harmonies!

You tell it what key you are in, what the intervals you want are, and then sing…

Suddenly there are three of you on the stage singing perfect harmonies. Well, if you are singing in tune there are!. It can also do a rather nice double and 3x vocal stack effect which is great too.

Once again I have to give a big thank-you to Ian, the Roland guy at PMT Bristol for his patience, product knowledge and the great demo of the little red beastie.

That rather excellent keyboard playing genius Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater fame is renowned for his quest for unusual musical controllers.  One of his favourites is the Haken Continuum  Fingerboard which is a touch sensitive surface you play by sliding a finger across it.  It is wonderful, but costs an arm and a leg, and probably a few internal organs too. However Jordan is also a champion of musical apps for the iPhone and iPad, and he teamed up with  a developer called Kevin Chartier and created an iPad app based on the principles of the Continuum, called Morphwiz.  Now Sue has an iPad, which she occasionally lets me use, and being the great wife she is, and knowing I was intrigued by Morphwiz, bought and installed the app. It’s rather brilliant.  Left and right moves across the screen control pitch and up and down moves control timbre.  It has a clever feature that always pulls you to a correct tone in your selected scale when you touch the screen (if that’s what you want) and similarly, you can ensure a slide ends on an harmonically correct note. It’s even polyphonic.

So impressed by all this, was I, that I had to feature it on the album, specifically on Day by the Sea in the intro, outro and the end of the instrumental. And rather good it is too.

I now have a candidate mix of the song to listen to over the coming week and if I’m happy with it, I will let you hear a snippet next weekend.

Which scarily will mean all the songs will then be mixed and ready for mastering. Gulp!

Look at this!

Splendid isn’t it.

It’s my new Fantom G7, and full of excellent wonderfulness it is too!

I’ve been after a keyboard that I can use live for quite a while.  The Alesis Fusion is an incredible synth, but the 88 note fully weighted keybed makes it VERY HEAVY.  It’s sample load feature can sometimes be a bit quirky, not freeing up memory properly and giving an ‘out of memory’ error.  Not often, but if you select a mix, or a song that uses big sample sets you can get caught out.  But mostly, it’s just very heavy.

The Roland Fantom has some great features that were designed in to make it a brilliant live keyboard.  Including the ability to sequence backing tracks, change sound at the push of a foot-switch, trigger samples from pads, the list goes on! It is also, being a 76 key semi-weighted board, light enough to man-handle fairly easily.

What I am thinking is that I would really like to do some live shows featuring Fantasy Bridge material, but since the rest of the band is in another country/currently at university/running their own business (delete as appropriate) the only option is really to do it as a one man show.  I don’t know how audiences will take prog rock Karaoke but I figure there is only one way to find out, and that is to actually try it.

And now I have a keyboard that will allow me to try at least.  And it doesn’t half sound good!

Joy, beautiful spark of divinity

Daughter of Elysium,

We enter, drunk with fire,

Into your sanctuary, heavenly (daughter)!

Your magic reunites

What custom strictly divided.

All men become brothers,

Where your gentle wing rests.

Quite so, Messers Schiller and Beethoven, quite so. Of course, in German it rhymes and everything. More to the point, however, and apropos the subject in hand, namely a certain prog rock album.  It ain’t half a good tune.  Now, I’m not sure what Ludwig would have made of a hammond organ (via suitably overdriven leslie) and an electric violin (via suitably overdriven amp stack) going hammer and tong at his carefully crafted theme, but actually, I have a feeling he might have actually quite liked it.

This afternoon I revisited the synth solo that has actually nothing to do with LVB’s piece at all, but was an excuse for me to  indulge my liking for my Korg Prophecy, the Moog modular Arturia plug in and a logic Amp Designer setup called Turbo Stack, with the setting set to ‘Shred’ Which didn’t, to be honest seem over the top at all…

Which means that we are at the point of getting the DI set up and getting Sue to record her violin part, before letting me loose again with the Amp Designer. (cue eerie lighting and the sound of someone going MWAAAHAHAHAH!)

Fun, fun, fun!

Well, I watched a DVD of Conspiracy, Chris Squire and Billy Sherwood’s band last night.  If you like Yes, you are almost certain to like this.  Anyway one of the two keyboard players Michael Sherwood (Billy’s brother) made extensive use of a Korg MS2000b vocoder to recreate the layered vocals from their studio output, and I thought as I was watching, that the intro vocals to Children of a Forgotten Sun could use an effect like that to create a really thick vocal texture.  I already had 7 harmony vocals going on, but a vocoder harmony bed under that would be amazing.

Anyway, I remembered that Logic has a vocoder plugin called the EVOC PS20, so I went straight to the studio and figured out how to drive the EVOC.  I then took the lead vocal part used this to drive the vocoder playing a series of chords and bingo! Instant lushness.

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Click Here to have a listen

… When It’s another drum, recorded by someone else.

Yes, the magic of drum replacement.

Well. As I hinted in the previous mail, it turns out that my drum recording skills leave something to be desired, which means that I have not quite realised my vision of awesome rock drums recorded in a big room. To be honest, the kick drum tracks sound a little like a cardboard box, and the snare just lacks that snap that cuts through the mix.  Luckily, I have some pretty neat performances from Paul, and now I’ve pretty much edited out the odd bum hit, corrected the odd timing error with Logic’s Flex Audio feature, and comped the drum tracks on 6 of the 7 tracks, I’ve turned my attention to drum replacement.

Now while I might not have the requisite mics or years of experience in  placing them, or thousands of pounds worth of mic preamps, converters and what have you, Steven Slate has all these things, and a drop dead gorgeous collection of the best drums ever made, which he’s meticulously recorded to 24 track tape in a pro studio with the best mics available, processed with some wonderful high end outboard, converted with some high end D-A and created a set of drum samples that are in demand from some of the hottest  producers out there.

So, on to Logic’s Drum replacement facility. Well, I read the manual, I watched some tutorials, and it looks quite simple.  In fact, this Youtube video makes it look so easy:

Right!

What I found was that the ‘Threshold’ control actually seems to have an almost random effect on which hits to choose and which to ignore.  Meaning that to ensure that you get all the hits that are real drum hits, you get lots of ghost notes where the replacer has chosen to trigger off a bit of bleed-through from another drum at a much lower level.

In the end the solution was to insert a noise gate, gate the track really heavily to get only the drum hit you are after, and then bounce the track to a temporary track which the drum replacement algorithm can work on.  In other words: it’s taking ages!

But we’re getting there. I’ve been burning the midnight oil, and all but A Day by the Sea are done…  And I think the final result is turning out to be rather tasty.

A somewhat action packed edition of the blog today folks.

First off: Guitars.  Andy came over the other Friday and brought his rather nice Yamaha acoustic, and his even nicer American Stratocaster.  I miked up the Yamaha with a Samson CO2 Small Diameter Condenser mic set about 18″ (45cm) from the soundboard pointing at about the 12th fret.  Got a really nice sound.  Anyway, we tracked the acoustic guitar parts for A Day by the Sea and Together on the Shores of Time.  Then we moved to the Strat, which I DI’d directly into the DAW, and then using Logic’s Amp Designer I selected the Large Tweed Combo which is modelled from a classic Fender Tweed amp.  This was used to great effect on the rock section of A Day by the Sea.  I’m really pleased with it.

Also on the Guitar front Nick has agreed to do me another solo, this time the guitar solo in the 6/8 instrumental section of A Day by the Sea.  I  sent him links to the section in question, and the whole song, and he’s going to get to work on it.

Next up: Bass.Adam was in Tracking some alternative bass parts for A Day by the Sea, because we agreed that what we had worked out last time could be improved on.  This time we came up with some really outstanding bass parts, and it has lifted the arrangement to another level.  We also tracked about 70% of the bass for Children of a Forgotten Sun before we ran out of time.  We have another session booked for this coming Friday so that should see all the bass in the can.

Finally for today: Drums. Paul is booked in for an all day session on the first Saturday in March.  This will be a fun day.  I’ve booked a Church building for the day, which has some killer acoustics – It’s a large vaulted ceiling building which would seat up to 300 people but it is carpeted and the chairs are upholstered.  This gives a space which has a nice  reverb tail but isn’t overly lively.  I reckon that we can get a great drum sound in there.  I also have access to a fair selection of mics – D112 Kick mic, Audio Technica AT4021 overheads, Shure SM57 for the Snare, Rode M3 for the hi-hat and another for the floor tom.  and my Samson C02 pair for the rack toms.  I’ll also take my Groove Tubes GT57 Large Capsule condenser for the ambience mic.

I have installed Logic onto the Macbook pro, and I’ll be taking the Alesis Multimix to interface it all to the computer.  I’ve recorded a drum kit in that space before and was please with the results, but this will be the first time with my own gear, so it’s all going to be a bit of an adventure.

This is the big push to get the final bits of tracking done.  I still have Sue’s electric violin part to get for Ode to Joy, but I can now see the end in sight for the tracking.

Or.. that big grey thing behind the microphone…

The second studio toy that santa brought was a Vicoustic Flexiscreen, which is a gadget that sits atop your mic stand and absorbs reflected sound energy, giving a much deader acoustic environment around the mic.

It’s a bit like having your own personal vocal booth.  Many home recordings suffer from the fact that they are recorded in less than optimum acoustic conditions.  You might think your room isn’t imparting any character to the sound, but in all likelihood, untamed reflections from walls and ceiling are interfering with the sound in a most unflattering way.

I had already invested in some large absorption panels made from rockwool, and these have gone a long way towards a more neutral recording space, but vocals could still be a little boxy in character.  But the flexiscreen appears to have tamed a lot of that now.  Which is excellent.

So, onward with the work!

As I mentioned in the last post, I got a couple of toys for the studio under the Christmas tree, and this is the first of two posts to tell you all about them.  So, first up we have a new MIDI interface from Mark Of The Unicorn: The MOTU Micro Lite.  For those of you that don’t know, MIDI – The Musical Instrument Digital Interface – was developed by the MIDI Manufacturers Association back in 1983, to standardise the way electronic instruments (primarily keyboards) talked to each other, allowing one synth to control another, or another device entirely, like a sequencer to take control of the instrument.  Since then MIDI has become ubiquitous on keyboards, and anyone who has spent any time with electronic keyboards will be familiar with the three DIN connectors on the back – MIDI IN, MIDI OUT and MIDI THRU.  Anyway, the Micro Lite is a device that allows a computer to interface from it’s USB bus to MIDI equipped equipment. To quote the MOTU blurb:

micro lite is a 5-in/5-out MIDI interface (compatible with Macintosh and Windows).

Built from the same technology found in MOTU’s flagship MIDI Timepiece, the micro lite is a professional MIDI interface that provides portable, plug-and-play connectivity to any USB-equipped Macintosh or Windows computer.  The micro lite takes full advantage of USB, giving you high-speed MIDI throughput, sub-millisecond timing accuracy, support for “hot-swapping” and plug-and-play expansion.

Computer MIDI interfaces used to be a common sight in studios, and everyone and their dog made one, but as the  software instrument revolution took hold, everyone gave up on their MIDI controlled hardware in favour of software plug-ins.  Now as any regular reader might know, I like software instruments as much as the next guy, and they afford someone like me the opportunity to include the sounds of a classic Hammond organ, or a Moog modular synth into their projects.  However I still like real synths, real hardware with keys, knobs, and of course, for the most part a MIDI socket or three to allow them to be controlled by a sequencer, or DAW.

Up until now I have been using an Edirol 2 channel interface, which was fine, except that a) I have 5 external instruments which meant that I had to daisy-chain them via the MIDI THRU socket, which causes problems when you have multitimberal instruments capable of receiving multiple signals on different MIDI channels, and b) for whatever reason, the mac didn’t like the Edirol driver and the interface would regularly become unavailable for no good reason, which was annoying. To say the least.  Now while little one or two channel interfaces are still to be had, MOTU are pretty much the only game in town when bigger more pro devices are required.  This thing is great.  It’s built like a tank, and device driver is stable and solid.  Nice

As I type, I have the keys and modules all cabled up to their own dedicated interface, and from Logic, I can just call up, for instance, the little Prophecy, select a sound and play.  Which means that I’m having fun trying out all sorts of new lead sounds, and new pads.  Ahhhh!