Lately, I’ve been reminded of the “Busy, Busy” song from Veggie Tales. I’ve been pretty busy lately, so I’ve enjoyed taking a few days during the long weekend to recharge my batteries a bit. In the midst of that, I did my first couple of baptisms, too. That was a really neat experience, to know that God was working through me in this way.
Also, the past couple of days I took to fixing some of the nagging problems that I noticed in the two recordings we did this past summer. Download the new versions here:
About a Time – mix #4
You Are – mix #4
In “About a Time,” I added kick drum and snare drum samples to the mix. When we did the recording in May I was unable to put a microphone on the snare, and so it comes out fairly faint in the mix. So I added the MIDI drum samples. It was a painstaking process, since Danny didn’t originally play the drums to a metronome. I found each part of the drum track that had the kick drum or snare drum (based on the waveform and on how it sounded) and made a corresponding MIDI event at an appropriate volume.
For “You Are,” Stephen’s first attempt at recording the drums had a few minor mistakes. We had corrected this way back in August, but the silly recording engineer (aka me) had the wrong setting in the software and his re-recorded track — which was played perfectly — was unfortunately recorded in mono. This made it unusable and we didn’t have time to record another version. So, I salvaged what I could out of Stephen’s first rough drum track, and that’s what appeared in the earlier mixes of the song. In this latest mix, I crossfaded some cymbal hits over the parts that were missed. I also removed some of the female vocals and tweaked the EQ on the bass guitar track.
I hope you enjoy the new versions. Let me know what you think!
And – have a great thanksgiving!
D.
Sounding good.
If you’re wanting a make-work project (a.k.a. homework avoidance), you could attempt to hunt down and take out some of the fret noise in About a Time. Though it’s not really all that noticeable. I’ve heard much worse on professional recordings. Still, I’m sure it’d easily distract you from papers or exams. :-D
Yeah… it is quite difficult to remove fret noise, unfortunately… unless someone wants to give me $100 to buy SoundSoap. :-)
I think I have a way to be distracted for the rest of the day, though. I’d like to put together another mic like the last one I built so I can use them for stereo recordings – especially for the convocation choir.
Sounds very good!! Crazy to believe that MY brothers made that noise, errr I mean music!!!
How come you guys never ask me to be lead OR backup singer???? :o)