Right after I finished the bass recordings, my computer started acting up, quickly progressing from intermittent to incessant hangups and finally refusing to boot entirely. After a few days of very annoying troubleshooting, I decided it was probably the hard drive. A new hard drive helped for one morning's worth of recording before being overtaken by the same problems. Now I'm pretty sure it's a motherboard thing, as it has a weird salty-looking patina on the underside. A word of advice: never drag your computer through snow drifts.
So I have my drives hooked up to this computer until I get a new motherboard. And I've gotten almost all of the recording done, unless I decide to add more instruments. I started with the violin parts.
I used my violin for the recordings. It was my great grandmother's, a Sears catalogue violin from the 1920s which was disastrously (in the opinion of a luthier I took it to once) refinished by my grandfather with what appears to be house paint. Having once played a quarter-million dollar violin alongside it in a blind test, I'm still convinced it's a great instrument. I recorded it with the Rode NT1a placed about a foot above it. The low ceiling meant I couldn't get crazy with the bow, but maybe that was a good thing.
Accompanying the violin on most of the lead lines is my Yamaha YSL354 trombone, which I bought at the age of eleven with money I'd won for playing the violin, coincidentally. I tried it on the NT1a, but found I preferred it with an AKG D310 that I had laying around. I remember seeing it used as a podium mic in videos of eastern European leaders during the cold war. If only Tito had played trombone.
I threw tambourine on when I felt the rhythm track needed something to drive it forward, or when I needed some high end to counterbalance the floor tom. This one's supposed to mount on a hi hat. I believe it belongs to freelance writer Matthew Kassel. I don't think he knows I have it.
I used a DX7s on one of the songs for its great imitation-Rhodes sound. I also used it as a midi trigger for Sonar's native True Pianos piano soft synth, since I don't have a piano worth recording.
The lyrics to one of the songs mentions "toy keyboards," so I added a Casio VL-1, which doubles as a handy calculator. The entirety of its range is only accessible by using an octave switch at the top of the keyboard, so to play the arpeggiated part I had in mind I had to sample the individual notes and stitch them together afterward. Hope it was worth it.
I had said no electric guitars at the outset, but I decided one of the songs could use a slide guitar, so I played my Stratocaster. I painted the pickguard in high school to look like a Costa Rican ox-cart wheel. Guess I was into them at the time or something. I used it between the standard middle pickup and the DiMarzio X2N in the bridge position, to the clean channel of a Fender Blues Deluxe Reissue with the reverb cranked. There's an SM57 somewhere near the speaker cone. I'd never played slide guitar before and the action on my guitar is low, so it was pretty fiddly, but I think it turned out all right.
Next? Fine tuning vocals, then editing and mixing. Stay tuned.
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