Sorry, MBR = Boss Micro BR Palmtop. :lol:
It's a digital four track recorder, with a usable on board condensor mic (the guide vocal on the early version was recorded with it, the accoustics on the finished product were), line in, headphone/line out.
It has 8 virtual tracks for each of the four tracks - so bouncing for sub mixes enables creation of something that sounds like this.
It has all the usual level, pan and reverb controls on track play back.
It has a huge raft of "studio quality" processors for mixing and mastering, including parametric EQ, and 3 band compression (with a load of presets).
It has a load of guitar amp simulators (don't use those myself, but they work).
It has a rhythm section with a large library of patterns (can't edit the patterns) that you can combine to create drum arrangements. Several drumkits. The rhythm playback (stereo) does not use any tracks unless you want it to.
It's FAB and costs around £170 at the moment. (The Boss PSU is extra - gits - and you'll need a bigger SD card - and a USB card reader would be a lot faster for PC transfers...)
And it fits in your shirt pocket!!
This song was done
entirely on the MBR. All I needed was guitars, bass, and I used my Vox Tonelab (for guitar amps) and POD XTLive (for bass amp). The only "cheat" was I use a Rode NT1000 for vocals, which meant they had to go through my mixing desk for the phantom power, and I always put a dbx compressor/gate on the track insert to control the peaks and external noise when I'm singing.
On song construction stuff - it's all really simple and follows superb rules that you would love if you found an explanation that suited you. I'm the same as you if it wasn't rule based, I wouldn't have been able to learn it otherwise.
But I did start from being able to sing a song I heard on the radio or a record - all I had to do was read the chord boxes and strum 1-2-3-4 while I sang. I could feel it was right, cos it sounded right. But I was very interested to understand why the chords worked like they did, and I kinda picked that up as I tried more songs.
King of the Road was the first song I learnt (C, F and G). Greystone Chapel the same week (G, C and D).
I noticed that if I played Greystone with C, F and G instead, I had to sing higher, but it was still right. I noticed that D leads into G leads into C leads into F. I went searching and found F leads into Bb into Ab, etc, etc, into E into A into D into G into... hang on a minute, we've gone round in a circle! I figured out that I could use this circle that "I'd discovered" to transpose Beatles and Bee Gees songs down so that I could sing them. After a while I didn't have to write on the sheet music, I learnt the relationships and could do it at sight.
I couldn't play barre chords, so I started looking for easy ways of playing chords - ended up with knowing how to construct my own chords anywhere on the neck (and how to omit bass notes- very important for playing in a band sometimes).
It's all been logical progressions, and I sped it all up by writing songs the minute I could string three or four chords together.
Really early on (14 or so) I discovered what I called the "Beatles" chord - Bb. If a song's in C, the "standard chords" are C, F, and G. The Beatles kept chucking a Bb in!! The reason it works is cos of that circle I'd found (it's actually "the circle of fifths") - Bb is taking you and the listener off to another key so you can flirt with the other key and drop back: C-Bb-F-C
Take it to the manly guitarist key (E), and you've got E-D-A... (Sympathy for the Devil, Midnite Rambler, Let me entertain you (Robbie Williams), literally MILLIONS of rock songs)
Then I discovered the Bee Gees went one further - Eb!!! Same principle, but even more exciting C-F-Eb-Bb-C.
Then stir in the relative minors Am (C) Dm (F) Em (G), as well, and the 7ths - and you can do what you like when warbling mindlessly over it...
You find the "rules" and break them, and then one day you find there are perfectly good "classical" reasons why your "ignore the rules" worked. Do you know why "power chords" work? Eg "E5" - it's because there's only two notes in the chord, the "root" E and the "5th" B - there might be some repeats of these, but basically E and B... there's no "3rd" to indicate whether it's major (G#) or minor (G). The effect this has on western ears is "no resolution" to happy/sad - so, play them soft and they're spooky, play them hard, and they're stately and powerful, play them sneaky with a Tony Iommi sound and they're threatening...
It's all logical cause and effect, every bit of it - but because there's so much of it, we have the freedom to be creative with it :)
I'll stop there, I wanna get the tube home!! :lol:
If you want, go and look at this thread
http://bossbr.net/community/micro-br-b65/sooner-or-later-writingarranging-demo/0/ I posted how I wrote the song and recorded the original demo version. It's all scientifically contructed :lol:
