Sequencer Virginity Lost

I'm definitely liking this whole sequencing thing.

Over the weekend I had a proper play around with Reaper. I'll admit that it took a bit of juggling of settings before I actually managed to record anything directly, as opposed to recording in a separate package then importing the media. To begin with I was recording the output master (ie everything except what I was playing). Much head-scratching led me to directly selecting the recording input from the Windows Volume Control, external to Reaper itself. As far as I can tell, this is the only way to do it. The 80MB pdf manual (yes, I did RTFM) was of little help!

What I really liked was the ability to dial in your bpm then record chunks of rhythm, chop it up into multi-bar loops with snap on and then just shuffle them around, copy/paste etc. Each clip was automatically assigned a steep ramp up/down in volume at each end for seamless blending.

Obviously, the ability to EQ, pan etc individual tracks was great, too. A major step forward from where I had to mix down every step before progressing to the next.

Oh, and the biggest shortcoming in my earlier demo recordings was the distinct lack of bass! Lately I've been looking to my band's bass player to supply me with clips, but obviously that has to be at his convenience, so they may or may not appear in a timely manner. Enter Reaper's pitch-shift FX plug-in! Record bass line on guitar, drop one octave on that track and with a bit of EQ fiddling, Bob's your uncle... a bass line! Okay, so it's not perfect, but what I did was to take one of the lines that our bass-player had already sent, shifted one octave up, then tried to emulate that tone on my guitar. That way, when I shifted down it sounded about right. Ta-dah!

My one bug-bear with Reaper so far is latency. I'm sure I can tweak the settings to improve things and, frankly, whilst recording guitar via a mic'ed amp it's not really necessary for me to monitor the input. But, what I was finding was that a newly recorded track was out of sync with everything else in the project and hence had to be manually adjusted. A small price to pay!

What else... I need to investigate multiple takes, punch-ins etc. Oh, that and the rest of the FX that come with the package.

After a very brief play I managed to make a quite serviceable version of "Diving Duck Blues" (another Taj Mahal cut). I'm thinking I might take that one along to the band's next meet (tomorrow)!

I'm still not an expert with the ol' sequencer, but I'll admit the flexibility of the thing has won me over. Everything was so easy, just the way it should be. I now can't imagine going back to recording my old way!

Sequencing?!?!

I need to move into the new century... somewhat late, granted.

So, I've been trying to put together some demos/backing tracks for songs that I want my new band to learn... for arrangements I want the band to learn. So far it's been a really laborious, time-consuming task.

The problem is that I'm using a screw-driver to hammer in a nail, as it were. My only real experience of putting tracks together has been by painstakingly mixing together clips onto a single stereo track, piece by piece, using a wave-editor. Granted, I figured out early on that I could take a mono copy of a drum track and put it over on the left or right channel then use that as a template for the rest of the instruments, one by one, in separate files. The mix-down would then be very hit-or-miss as far as the levels were concerned as each track needed to be merged one after the other.

On Sunday night I set to re-recording the guitar parts for "Outside Woman Blues". I felt it went really well. Red's newly lowered action felt great and I was jamming. The Blackstar sounded crunchy yet funky... the E-"Hendrix" chords were stinging. Although I was tempted to just record the whole thing from start to finish in one go, instead I elected to record in sections, playing each snippet over and over, giving me a selection of decent cuts. I picked up that technique from U2... I should have known better, eh?

There I was with a wav file full of Creamy soup (a pun!). It was all pretty decent and finding useable clips was no problem at all. Then I started in on the slow process of stitching each bit together using headphones, drums in the left ear, guitar in the right. Mistake. I should have just used speakers! What sounded great in extreme stereo wasn't so great when mixed together properly. My synching was spot on in places, but lousy in others. As the guitar had been mixed to one track, there was nothing I could do but to throw my hands up in despair.

Hours wasted.

Imagine then, even if I'd got it right, our bass player is going to send me the deep end which I'd have to mix in there, too... then there's the guitar solo...

The bottom line is that I need to rethink the way I assemble songs. I need to start thinking about using a multitrack sequencer. Last night I found that I have a demo version of one, downloaded years ago but never used. I'll have a go with that and see what all this techno-wizardry is all about...