This is where it all happened… the music room. I had been using an old Dell Pentium 4 system before this, but I installed the Cakewalk on the Asus i7 laptop for this project, thinking it would work better. It didn’t. Apparently I have to adjust some settings to take advantage of the other cores available. It still worked fine.

Next came the drum track(s)… courtesy of the Technics KN-1000 workstation. I only had to mess with it a little…

I played the bass line (which is a combination of two bass line which I completely ripped off from the Batman and Peter Gunn TV show themes) on this Epiphone Viola bass. It’s similar in looks and sound to the Hofner bass played by Paul McCartney of the Beatles. As a guitar player, I really like the short scale and light weight. As part of the “producing” side of things, I must admit that I had to go into the bass track and move some (a lot) of the notes around to keep pace with the drums. Generally, I play guitar in a way that pushes on the tempo a little, but the bass has to be in the pocket to get away with that… doesn’t work for bass at all. You get what you pay for… and the check I wrote to myself bounced.

The guitar tracks were played through a direct box directly into the board. The track was recorded clean with an 8:1 compression. The distortion was added later with a Sans-amp patch. This track was pretty good, not too much to fix here.

The piano track was added through the auspices of the Technics KN-1000. I passed piano proficiency in college (the first time around) but I have never been what you would call a player… more of an operator, really. Anyway, I was attempting to add a kind of Lynyrd Skynyrd/Dr. John kind of rhythm part which I think worked but could be played in a higher register.

The vocals were all done with this mic. It’s a Studio Projects B-1, a cardioid, large diaphragm condenser. I recorded two main vocal tracks and 12 total for the back ups, 3 parts, 4 times each. They got mixed down to three total, one high, one low, and one high and low for the oohs in the middle. I used 6:1 compression with a low cut filter to record them and removed the filter and added a slight chorus effect and some reverb to set it back some.

And here is the result of almost 100 recorded and/or attempted tracks…

I wrote this song a few years ago and have never recorded it. It makes me happy to hear it after all this time.

I chose the Doobie Bros song “Long Train Running” mostly because I’d always performed as an acoustic jam and thought it would be a great version. I used all the tracks except the electric guitar and drum kit. As you can hear, there was plenty left over to get a fun mix.