Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Players => Topic started by: carlaz on October 13, 2006, 11:52:10 AM
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This is a demo for the first few verses of a song I wrote about 10 or 12 years ago, but never managed to perform or record with any of my bands or projects. It's actually the first thing I started working on after I got my Crawlers at the start of this year, but somehow this song has always progressed in fits and starts. I hope to get it completed before another 10 or 12 years pass!
Anyway .... the guitar is as always my Crawler-equipped 1990 Gibson LP Std. Much of the song is heavy riffing, all bridge pup, double-tracked with two different GarageBand amp sims. There are some lighter, cleaner-toned but heavily effected bits -- I fear I can't remember now which pup they were, and I might have even used the coil-tap there. Drums are hand-programmed with ns_kit7 samples, and the bass is (as always) my '76 Rick 4001, also through a GB amp sim. I feel like there ought to be some keys or synths, maybe piano, somewhere but I haven't figured that out yet.
I just ventured trying to record vocals the other day, and I freely confess my singing is even worse than the sloppy "done in one take over breakfast" guitar solo. Well ... if I could find someone else to sing, I would, but I haven't, so it had to be me ("No, it didn't!" I hear you cry ... ;)).
At present, the current recording kind of peters out in a bit of drums and bass. There's supposed to be a spacey, almost Doorsy, section there (with, alas, more vocals!) but I haven't worked it out yet, or even recorded any guitar for it. This is meant to be a pretentious, excessive rock epic ;) so it will slowly return towards heavy guitar tones, and wind up with a final revisitation the initial heavy riff-verse-chorus pattern. But I haven't gotten there yet.
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The quietest pickups I've ever heard, no noise whatsoever....
Is it supposed to be percussion only?
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Hey Carlaz,
download your own clip!
I think you forgot something :twisted: ;)
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Heh, how did I do that? Ah, well, it's just the gods of rock trying to protect you from my dodgy vocals! ;)
OK, I think I've fixed it now ....
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Hey fellow GB user, what do you use to record vocals? mic, pre etc? I like your spacey stuff, got any AIFFs instead of the mp3s? :twisted: :twisted:
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Hey fellow GB user, what do you use to record vocals? mic, pre etc? I like your spacey stuff, got any AIFFs instead of the mp3s? :twisted: :twisted:
My vocals are recorded with the old Shure BG 2.0 that I used with my first band back in the early '90s! I run it straight into my TascaHey fellow GB user, what do you use to record vocals? mic, pre etc? I like your spacey stuff, got any AIFFs instead of the mp3s? :twisted: :twisted:
I record vocals with an old Shure BG 2.0 that I used with my first band back in the early '90s! I don't even have a mic stand, so I just hold it in my hand when recording the vox! ;) I run it straight into my Tascam US-122 audio interface, thence into my iBook. Very low budget! ;)
I have it in mind to get a cheap-but-decent condensor mic, like a Studio Projects B1, but haven't gotten around to that yet. Oh, and a stnad and pop shield to go with it! That would make be slightly less low-budget (but wouldn't improve my singing, I fear! ;)).
GB exports AIFFs to iTunes, so yes, I have AIFFs and could stick them on my web site whence they could be downloaded easily enough. Heck, I could archive the GB .band archives and make them available as well. Let me know what you want, and I'll sort it out somehow. :)
I'm reasonably happy with some of the GB amp-sim presets that I've tweaked up for guitar and bass. It's not like I spent a lot of time agonizing over them, but I like them better than the stock ones (though, actually, I use the stock "Classic Rock" guitar amp sim preset quite a bit!). I'm not sure if there's an easy way to export them, but they should (I hope, I think) come through in any shared GB .band archives.
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Cool, is that using the 'save as archive'? I haven't tried it yet, I'm sure GB should allow easy sharing of files but I haven't figured it out yet.
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Hails Carlaz.
I really liked the distortion
Pretty Black Sabbatish Q:p
I LikeD the track too man
Very good. it sounds kinda folk too on the vocal part right!?
Q:)
Hails and thank´s for the CRAWLERS clip
JP
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I really like this track! The Crawlers sound pretty good to me, havent heard many other clips of em though..
I dont mean to sound harsh but I'm not really a fan of your singing, it sounds a bit monotonous on the verses (bits with clean guitar), sounds fine on the bits with distorted guitar though. Then again I could do no better so I'll be quiet :lol:
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I dont mean to sound harsh but I'm not really a fan of your singing, it sounds a bit monotonous on the verses (bits with clean guitar), sounds fine on the bits with distorted guitar though. Then again I could do no better so I'll be quiet :lol:
Yeah, I'm not a fan of my singing either! I'm completely inexperienced in singing :P and would replace me with almost anyone in a heartbeat. To paraphrase Almost Famous, want someone else to be the singing front man and I'll be the guitarist with mystique. ;)
I probably only sound better on the distorted guitar bits because it's harder to hear me! :roll:
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Cool, is that using the 'save as archive'? I haven't tried it yet, I'm sure GB should allow easy sharing of files but I haven't figured it out yet.
I think you can "Save as" with GB in 2 different ways. I think one way saves the .band archive with full quality AIFF audio, but not the multiple levels of undo, which can take up quite a bit of space, and the other way saves the audio as 128kbps AAC files (also without multiple levels of undo), which makes things a little easier to sling around, though at the cost of audio quality.
I've not tried this either, but I can give it a go!
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Well Carlaz, I think your vocals have their charm and besides which, we are supposed to be listening to the BKP's so hats off you my good man.Is that a Ric bass I hear?
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Hey have you been allowing a bit more top end through on this one (I much prefer the tone).
Vocals come with practice (so I'm told)
I see nobody else has commented about you reading too much HP Lovecraft ;)
Rob...
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I see nobody else has commented about you reading too much HP Lovecraft ;)
It's impossible to read too much H P Lovecraft! I got all excited (well, by my own torpid standards) when I saw the title. Great stuff.
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I really liked the distortion
Pretty Black Sabbatish Q:p
Yeah, the amp-sim I used is one I designed to evoke a modern Iommi-style tone (which, clearly, will still sound very Black Sabbath!). Overall, I was going for a kind of Sabbath/Blue Öyster Cult vibe.
I LikeD the track too man
Very good. it sounds kinda folk too on the vocal part right!?
Thanks, man! :) Yeah, I've listened to a lot of folk music over the years, so it probably shows up in my vocals! Actually, there's a Romanian folk-rock-prog band from the '70s called Phoenix that gets name-checked by a lot of current Eastern European metal bands -- I've often thought the vocal styles for Phoenix are possibly the kind of thing I could do. I haven't got much range, but my voice at least isn't too thin or hideously out of tune, so with practice I might be able to sound OK, if not great! That might be wishful thinking though. I'd still replace me with someone who could actually sing well, if I could! ;)
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Well Carlaz, I think your vocals have their charm and besides which, we are supposed to be listening to the BKP's so hats off you my good man.
"Distinctive charm" ... Yes, I shall market myself that way in future. :) I always try to remind myself: "Ozzy can't sing either." ;)
Is that a Ric bass I hear?
Absolutely. What's good enough for Macca and Lemmy is good enough for me! ;) It's got an old Bartolini pickup in the bridge -- unfortunately resin-potted, or I'd have had it rewound by BKP by now. If BKP did in-house Ric bass pups, I'd buy one in a heartbeat! I love my ol' 4001. It's not quite as old as I am, but its percentage of my age is getting bigger. :)
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hp lovecraft rules, great clip dude
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I see nobody else has commented about you reading too much HP Lovecraft ;)
It's impossible to read too much H P Lovecraft! I got all excited (well, by my own torpid standards) when I saw the title. Great stuff.
:twisted: I always liked the title, and was determined to make lyrics that more or less followed the story. I remember trawling through the text, jotting down any good original wording from ol' HP to be massaged into the lyrics.
I was an undergrad at Harvard, whose rare books collection included a bunch of Lovecraft's original notebooks. There was one full of random one-liner story ideas with all weird capitalization and underlineing for emphasis everywhere, like "GHOULS come from the sea in the form of SEALS and prey upon the living!". Awesome! :)
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I always liked the title, and was determined to make lyrics that more or less followed the story. I remember trawling through the text, jotting down any good original wording from ol' HP to be massaged into the lyrics.
I was an undergrad at Harvard, whose rare books collection included a bunch of Lovecraft's original notebooks. There was one full of random one-liner story ideas with all weird capitalization and underlineing for emphasis everywhere, like "GHOULS come from the sea in the form of SEALS and prey upon the living!". Awesome! :)
That anecdote itself conjured up an image of you as a student in an old gambrel-roofed house, sitting it a dimly-lit attic room whose corners seemed, to a close observer, to have strange non-Euclidean angles...
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I always liked the title, and was determined to make lyrics that more or less followed the story. I remember trawling through the text, jotting down any good original wording from ol' HP to be massaged into the lyrics.
I was an undergrad at Harvard, whose rare books collection included a bunch of Lovecraft's original notebooks. There was one full of random one-liner story ideas with all weird capitalization and underlineing for emphasis everywhere, like "GHOULS come from the sea in the form of SEALS and prey upon the living!". Awesome! :)
That anecdote itself conjured up an image of you as a student in an old gambrel-roofed house, sitting it a dimly-lit attic room whose corners seemed, to a close observer, to have strange non-Euclidean angles...
I noticed the lyrics (which I don't usually manage to do the first time I hear a track). Ooooh theres so much material in his stories to be used for childrens lullabies ;)
Hey Philly you forgot to mention the strange buzzing in the air
As for the pickups try giving Mike @ http://www.ricsrus.com/ a shout, he may have something suitable for rewinding.
As I want my neck pickup to sound less wooly but unfortunitely it will be Xmas before BK get that job (well they can get the job bofore that providing they don't want any money).
Rob...
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Carlaz bud,
LOVE the heavy crawler tone bud!
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That anecdote itself conjured up an image of you as a student in an old gambrel-roofed house, sitting it a dimly-lit attic room whose corners seemed, to a close observer, to have strange non-Euclidean angles...
Close enough .... ;)
I noticed the lyrics (which I don't usually manage to do the first time I hear a track). Ooooh theres so much material in his stories to be used for childrens lullabies ;)
There's actually a book dealing with references to Lovecraft in music (review here (http://www.musicstreetjournal.com/strangesoundreviewlp.htm). Good fun! :)
I'll have to work on my singing to keep it from being too monotone, as _tom_ comments, though trying to keep from overdramatizing myself into some kind of sub-TenaciousD territory! ;)
Hey Philly you forgot to mention the strange buzzing in the air
That'll be some RF interference from the laptop ;)
As for the pickups try giving Mike @ http://www.ricsrus.com/ a shout, he may have something suitable for rewinding.
Alas, he's out of stock on Ric bass pups at the moment, and only lists 4003 hi-gain style. I have my heart set on HB1 humbuckers, like those used in the Lemmy signature model! :twisted: Still, I ought to be able to find something eventually .....