Here’s a sample (more info. at Rifflet):

Getting started

First, you do not need active pickups or a custom guitar, but it won’t hurt if you do have that. You’ll have to be extra aware of the levels, though, because active pickups will pin the levels out of an amp quicker than passive pickups, and while this sounds great live, it will sound clipped and weird on a recording. If you can, try out your amp/processor with a passive-pickup guitar and carefully listen for any clipping at that level. If the active one is clipping, back off on the processor master volume until the guitar is not clipping. Active pickups will get you very high signal-to-noise ratios, which are good, but not if they come at the cost of losing timbre because of clipping early in the recording chain.

Second, you cannot get a super hot guitar sound without some sort of noise suppression, unless you want a ton of noise on the track. I highly recommend setting the noise suppression to come in very late, so that it doesn’t mess with the guitar sound. It will still sound dead quiet after a half-second, and a bit of noise is natural with a super loud guitar track. What you don’t want is that noise riding underneath everything else (… unless that really is what you want, in which case go for it). I would recommend against thinking you need to delete all noise from a guitar track, as this will inevitably clip at the actual sound wave.

I recommend keeping a very even mix. Scooping the mids nearly always screws up the sound at this stage… you can always scoop them in the actual track on your pc/recording setup if you really think you need that, but you want that sound information there to scoop on the pc. A cheapo amp/processor will scoop it poorly anyhow. If you have a sick amp, it will sound great scooped or not, and again I’d really reconsider scooping a great amp. For example,. a H&K Triamp on Amp#3 sounds sufficiently awesome with the EQ totally flat. Again, I reiterate the best advice I ever got: fiddling with the EQ never made a wimpy guitar riff into a tough one… the character of a riff comes from the musician. EQ is really more for adjusting for room ambiance, etc.

Keep the peaks

Let’s call your guitar, amp or processor with noise suppression (the cheapo ones are fine), and mic or line out setup all as a single component “A”. I have a cheap mixer that I use for level monitoring, and I have found it to be an invaluable resource for double-checking the actual output level of my “A” setup. I hook the mixer up like this:

A -> mixer

I use the mixer’s db levels to double-check that at zero volume, I am getting zero signal, and at max volume from the guitar, I am getting near the maximum range of the mixer’s db level monitor. This ensures a nice wide volume range going into the PC for recording. I then monitor the mixer’s record levels with a PC using a tool like audacity as follows:

1. fire up audacity
2. hit record
3. check that the volume range looks just like the mixer’s db range.

Now you can be sure that if the volume here doesn’t look right, it’s because the pc’s record volume is set wrong, because you know that the guitar/mixer output is good from the mixer monitoring test.

In this case, peaking out is ok as long as it’s brief and only on the very strongest of attacks. I want the maximum possible output that is not clipping the signal, so i’ll crank up the pc’s recording level until i see that i’m getting that. There’s gonna be a tiny bit of noise on the track even with the noise suppressor, and that’s fine. If i really need to clean that up, I can always silence it later.

Once you know that you’re getting the right mix, go ahead and do the tracks, then go back and use a normalizer effect to bring up any quieter sections to within range of the highest (clipped) output. Remember, you want the track’s volume blasting — BUT not clipping! Double-check the output levels frequently — especially on sections that appear to be clipped, to see if you’re getting any distortion on the track. A tiny bit is OK because you can pull down the overall volume later and that will ‘duck out’ a bit from the mix. Notice in my example how i left a tiny bit of the distortion in order to capture the strongest sustain… I’d rather have that distortion in there if it means I get the really clear sustained notes at max volume, but that’s my personal preference.

The big studios will not accept any distortion — instead, they just normalize the track to within an inch of it’s life. If that’s the sound you want, that’s the only way to get it, and it takes forever. That’s why professional mastering/mixing costs so much… you might be there for 3 weeks trying to max out that track.

Finally, crank the volume a bit on your stereo, listen to it with headphones, and try out any other pairs of headphones you may have to verify what the track really sounds like vs. color that your audio setup may be adding. I have some speakers that are very bottom-heavy, and i have some cheapo headphones that are the opposite, so i know the track is really in between those two sounds.

First, I listened carefully to some recordings that I consider to have a high-quality vocal track. I compared the sound profile of these to my own recordings with my microphone, and I tried to identify the most obvious difference between the vocal frequencies. I noticed that my microphone appears to have a much larger low-end sensitivity, so large that it overwhelms any high frequencies that my mic may be picking up. It ends up making me sound a bit like Kermit the Frog, or like I’m singing underwater.

I tried EQ and reverb, but both really had more of a post-processing effect on the vocal. They weren’t doing enough to kill off the bad frequencies. I already knew that a lot of professionally recorded vocal tracks use filters, but I also assumed that running multiple filters would destroy the timbre of my vocal tracks. Instead, I decided I’d try to find a single, simple filter I could apply that would remove just the “bad” frequencies of my vocal track, with the hope that what was left would sound better. Since my mic’s output is so low-heavy, I settled on a generic, software-based high-pass filter plug-in to a popular recording application. I left all the default settings, figuring that I could always undo it and change them later if I wanted to, but as it turned out, I wouldn’t need to. Just the default high-pass filter “fixed” the vocal from my microphone. It sounds a tiny bit telephone-like, but most filters do that. In exchange, I get a vocal that to my ear is 90% of the way to a big, expensive-sounding microphone. Is it perfect? No, but:

1. It’s a better sound than where I was.
2. It’s fast to apply.
3. It’s at no additional cost to me.

Other microphones may require a low-pass filter vs. a high-pass filter, but I highly recommend trying either of these out if your vocal sounds either raspy or like Kermit.

In the app world, synth software  tends to either mimic a  real-life instrument or act as a kind of abstract, rub-your-finger-here noisemaker.

Bebot, for the most part, manages to do both in a fun package.

The interface is beautiful, in a retro-future-ish kind of way, and the Bebot’s “dancing” while you play is kickass without being distracting.

One of the most important parts of playing an iPhone synth is repeatability; it’s easy to make cool sounds, but can you play them again and again? Fortunately, Bebop has an optional “note grid” that shows exactly where to press, and you can zoom in or out to either show more notes or make a smaller group of notes easier to press.

It’s a real instrument, too

Click to view larger

Bebot is highly customizable. Double-tapping an icon in the bottom-right corner brings up an options screen that makes adjustments to effects (echo, chorus, and a warm, buzzy  overdrive) or the scale itself (see image). Being able to customize the scale makes it easier to play along with other instruments and lets you change the feel of your music without altering your playing style. An adjustable Autotune even snaps your finger presses to specific notes, and multi-touch lets you build chords.

After you’ve built a custom scale, you can save the preset for quick recall, although it doesn’t save your effect settings, which is annoying.

Even better, if you want to just mash your chubby hand down on the screen, turn off the Autotune and enjoy a full chorus of R2D2-style robo-bloops.

Bebot is fun to use, sounds great and makes a great tool for laying down synth tracks.  Here’s a quick track I recorded with Bebot: (I ran Bebot through the izotope Trash distortion plugin, so the sounds are slightly different.)

Bebot was created by Normalware and is available from iTunes for $1.99.
The video below is an in-depth Bebot walkthrough by the talented Jordan Rudess.

About 2 years ago, I set out to make an epic warrior-metal opera multimedia album and music project. Now that the album is nearing completion, I can reflect on my experiences. Among the obstacles that I knew I would face right from the beginning:

1. Limited financial resources
My lack of finances meant that this album would be extremely labor-intensive. This would be one of the lowest-cost-overhead multimedia projects ever made given its scope and absolute minimum requirements. In some cases, I had to wait for technology to catch up so there would be a free tool available that I could use to solve a particular production problem. In other cases, I had to accept hard truths, including that the final quality of my work was never going to be that of a professionally-recorded album due to the limits of my equipment.

2. Limited time availability
This would not be my full-time job. In fact, I would have many other obligations needing to be met on a regular basis. I would have to optimize the value of whatever little time I would be able to spend on this album in order to make any progress whatsoever. At first, I tried to spend every free moment on the project, but I discovered that the ramp-up time overhead of this approach was wasting what little time I had. Instead, I decided to wait until I had at least certain minimum blocks available, and then I broke up the existing to-do items so that I could finish all of one type in a certain block. This scheduling trick allowed me to achieve significant time savings thanks to an assembly-line effect. For example, I would do lots of drum tracks all in a row, rather than trying to finish each song completely (the ‘finish a song and move on’ approach did work sometimes depending on the amount of available time).

3. Virtually no direct assistance
I have attracted no other people who were interested in directly helping with the project. I have been lucky to have some indirect assistance from website projects such as rifflet.com. Having a way to listen back to my own stuff off of the Internet has yielded lots of opportunities for me to rearrange the works and therefore to come up with a much more cohesive final concept. I had to tear down and re-setup my equipment frequently due to having to use those rooms of my home for family stuff, so even if my equipment couldn’t be setup, at least I could listen to my stuff on rifflet.com and take notes on new ideas.

4. A shockingly negative public response
I have encountered little other than disinterest or doubt at best, to being straight-out told I’m a terrible musician, crazy, stupid, a loser/failure, etc. In order to complete this project, I have to ignore the deafening roar of these ever-increasing and unstoppable insults. My own comprehensive notes (musical composition, story work, drawings, etc) helped me to keep the project on track. Whenever I felt down from people ragging on me about this project, I would look back over the notes and consider that it made sense to me, and that’s all I really needed in order to decide that it was worth my time and effort.

I have come as far as I have on this album not because of a miracle, but as the result of my unwavering constitution in forcing myself to be content with achieving hundreds of seemingly insignificant milestones spaced out over several years’ worth of effort. Each step did make a difference and now they have accumulated into a nearly finished project.

The sound of the album is different than what I originally envisioned, but I ended up with a multimedia/musical product that I feel is unique. I am satisfied that I am about to achieve at least one significant accomplishment while I am still near the top of my game.

I am not trying to make money on this because that is not my goal. My goal was to make this compelling story/vision come to life for me and for anyone else who cared to experience it.

I expect to eventually make a few versions of the album “Melodius and the Soulforge”, with the initial V1.0 release currently targeted for 1/1/2010. Thanks for your support.

Official site for the MATSF project: http://www.devinmoore.com/matsf.html

Image credits:

Possibility 1: You do end up doing music for a hobby or career

If you own cheap equipment and you are doing music for a hobby or career, you will just end up replacing the equipment with quality stuff at some point.  The cheap equipment will not yield any money back because no one really wants to buy or use it.  What cheap equipment doesn’t get sold will go into disuse or disrepair quickly, or at worst, will by its presence in your rig limit your musical ability.  Case in point: cheap distortion pedals.  Since they have limited dynamic range, you end up buying other things to make up for them, and then finally you replace the source of the problem.  Buying a good pedal up front would have avoided the other purchases plus the limited dynamic range in the first place, allowing you access to the good tones from the beginning.

Possibility 2: You decide music isn’t for you

If you decide not to continue with a musical hobby or career, any aspiring musician will be happy to purchase your used quality equipment.  In fact, it may even be worth more than what you initially paid for it if the local supply:demand ratio for your exact stuff is right.  You can rest assured that your good equipment will be put to use for many years by many other talented musicians, as the good stuff continues to sound good for a very long time.

Thus, I highly recommend purchasing quality equipment used.  That way, you are getting both the quality and a somewhat reduced price.  If you buy quality used and sell back quality used, you will recover close to 100% of the cost.  I have burned through a lot of cheap gear, and now with my current quality rig, I do not anticipate doing anything but repairs ever unless I have to replace a unit, in which case I will replace with an identical quality item used.

Also, cheap equipment isn’t usually serviceable, where quality equipment is serviceable.  Services are of minimal cost and can extend the life and tones of good equipment for many more years.  When cheap equipment breaks, service will not save it–you are forced to buy again.

Devin Moore
Principal Artist, Melodius and the Soulforge

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsideguitars/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I have developed an extremely low-overhead (cost and time) way to produce music from scratch.  I acquired most of my gear used or many years ago when I had tons of money (long story), and I purchased the most tonally appropriate/flexible equipment I could for the sound I prefer. 

1. I prefer to buy good stuff used vs. bad stuff new, as I already have a good indication of the long-term quality of the equipment, and I am not paying more than I need to in order to get high quality equipment.

I also use a digital multi-effect unit rather than effects pedals. I use a generic tape-based 4-track for portable recording, and my official ‘studio’ is just an ancient computer, a used 12 channel mini mixer (to pre-level the mic’s/instruments and minimize cord switching into the pc) with a stereo y-cable into the PC, and an open-source multi-track recorder to do all of my digital recording. 

I lay down melodies as rapidly as I can think them up, then I go back and put down a drum loop in order to orchestrate the melody into more of a song loop.  I have trouble completing songs due to my difficulties in generating natural-sounding drum tracks. 

2. I hope to get a set of electronic drums.  Even for an sub-par drummer, e-drums take mere minutes to get a quantized (bad drumming-fixed) drum track to a song, vs. the hours I waste now trying to program drum passages via synth-based or computerized MIDI drum machines.

My rig has other significant drawbacks; first, inspirational recording on a whim is hampered by a time-consuming boot of the computer.  Second, because I have to work the recording equipment and play the instruments almost simultaneously, changing instruments and tracks is highly time-consuming. 

3. I would be wise to enlist a friend as a “recording engineer” (i.e. hit the button).  Just having a separate person from me to work the controls would shave a huge percentage of time off of my production process.

I mix down anything interesting to mp3 format and get it either uploaded or burned right away so that it isn’t lost in case of a power outage, equipment failure, etc.  Aside from my hectic schedule, there is nothing in my rig that should prevent me from fully finishing my project album at some point.  However, because of my hectic schedule, I save all post-production for “later”.  I opt to focus first on getting as much music down as possible in raw form. 

Once I have all the tracks in raw form for each song on the album, I can dedicate a whole day to getting each song ‘just right’ and crank out all the finished songs in a row. 

4. I try to keep my mind separated into “create the music” and then “finalize the music” so in the finishing stages, I’m not trying to make major changes to the songs.  That may be doable (albeit under protest from the A&R guy) using big record company money, but I don’t want any of that.

If I focus on one song per day, it should be doable not counting mastering or other post-production stuff that big studios waste weeks and thousands of dollars on.  I say “waste” because unless I know for sure I am going to ship millions of cd’s, I do not need a perfect mix. 

5. I always felt that most bands’ most popular or creatively interesting works are nonetheless very listenable on their cheaply mixed early albums.

Anyhow, I could always get a remaster later when the album goes multi-platinum (HAHAHA!)

Devin Moore
Principal Artist, Melodius and the Soulforge

Hydrogen
(http://www.hydrogen-music.org)

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming. If you are a windows user, it’s going to take some tweaking to make it work on your PC, but if you use Linux, say Ubuntu or a mac, you are in luck.

For a full review of Hydrogen, check out this Softpedia review. Find a similar positive review at Linux Journal.

orDrumBox
(http://www.ordrumbox.com/)

The orDrumbox is an open source drum machine that works on almost all platforms. This drum machine is designed to be a creative pattern based way of drum programming with automatic music composition capabilities.

You can compose beats even with polyrhythms, bass line and complete songs using included drum kits with the audio sequencer functions.

The interface is easy to use and you can try it out online before you download it. I had a fun time playing with it, however it’s not quite as advanced as other drum machines. So if you are looking for something beyond simple, orDrumMachine isn’t for you.