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!

Well here’s something new to try. Blogging from the phone. Don’t worry mix previews will resume soon.

… 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.

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!

I love the Adam A7 monitors.  I really do.  They are open, revealing, accurate, incisive and, er… Loud.

Now this is usually not a problem.  We live in a detached house on the outskirts of a town. If I am mixing late then I’m not disturbing the neighbours.  But Mrs Green, well sometimes I’m up in the studio mixing and she’s downstairs trying to watch a DVD, or something on TV, and those Adams… Well, did I mention they are loud?

The other thing is, that although they are splendidly revealing monitors, at 46 Hz they are 3dB down, and from there they tail off steeply.  Which is the only real downside to mixing on nearfield monitors.  As someone recently said to me, the upshot of this is that getting the bottom end really right is something of a crap-shoot.  While I could just say, “never mind the low-end, I’ll just roll off everything below 46 Hz”, I really do want to have some Moog Taurus-esque bass in there.  (As I have said so many times before, this is prog, after all!)

My reference system down in the lounge is a pair of B&W DM603 floorstanding speakers and a REL Acoustics sub-woofer.  This combo has been carefully tweaked to provide a pretty flat response down to 20 Hz, so while I can check the low bass response of mixes in the lounge, I refer you to the above fact about Mrs Green trying to watch her DVD.

I do have a pair of AKG K240s headphones, and while these are pretty good for general purpose studio duties and are quite comfortable for protracted listening – which is why you’ll find them in radio stations the world over – they aren’t quite audiophile.  And it is for this reason that I have now acquired a pair of Grado SR125i headphones.  These are amazing.  Open, revealing, accurate, incisive and, er… Loud.  Except that they are only loud for me.  And they happily go down to 20Hz.

Which means the mixing can go on, and Sue can happily watch, undisturbed. Whatever time of night it is, and I get to hear what is going on in the Earth-shattering department.

Now, where are those Moog Taurus samples?

And Special Effects Fun

Last night, I did all the vocals for the new “Autumn Rain” track, and I guess that given the results, I have finally decided that it is a keeper for the album.  So now, the track count is up to 10.  This is the END OF THE FEATURE CREEP.  I promise.

For Autumn Rain, I wanted a fairly understated performance, and listening back to the initial take, it sounded all a bit thin and weedy. So I went for double tracking the vocal.  For the uninitiated, This is a technique often used in the studio to thicken up a vocal, where you sing the same thing again, and the natural phasing between your voice singing the same notes provides a warmth and thickness to the performance.

Having soloed the takes I did notice some intonation problems, so I punched in some replacement phrases where I had badly missed the pitch. (In Logic punching in is non-destructive, it adds a second take which it comps in with the original take)

Once I was reasonably happy with that I flattened the takes to a new audio file for each vocal double track, and then imported them into the dreaded pitch corrector.  In my case that is Melodyne which is capable of the most amazingly transparent vocal trickery, you can almost transparently shift vocal pitch and timing by several whole tones.  But I didn’t want to go that far, I just wanted to check my vocal tuning was accurate, and where I was out by a tiny bit, or where the odd note had a bit of wavering pitch, I wanted to smooth that out.  Is this cheating? Undoubtedly, yes.  Is it wrong? No, not really.  Firstly, I am, I confess, not the worlds greatest singer,, and secondly there is so much trickery, slight of hand tweaking etc that goes into recording a song these days, that this is just another tool in the engineers toolbox that helps turn that song in your head into reality.

On to the bridge.  After the first two verses there is a two-line bridge which I wanted to be replete with 4 part vocal harmony.  I duly worked out the harmonies and recorded them.  It was kind of what I wanted, but I wanted something more etherial to go with the lines  starting: Tears we Shed for long lost dreams. So I created a new aux bus and sent the vocal to that.  In the aux bus I loaded up an echo, and a flanger.  This gave a dreamy strange effect, but of course on it’s own was almost unintelligible. But mixed in alongside the harmony vocals it sounds gorgeous. (Even with my singing!)

So, the song that came out of nowhere is pretty much in the can.  I might see if Adam wants to add bass, but otherwise, it’s there.