Special thanks again to Michelle Klaessens (The Rock Factory) for a fabulous mastering job, Mark Towl (Stapleton) on drums, and Mike Johns (Revolution Brother) on lead guitar.

The Gear (because recording is always just an excuse to play with fun things!):

The song was entirely recorded and mixed at home in Cubase, with my ancient Tascam US122 USB interface.  I used Adobe Audition for a little wave form editing in the form of noise removal on a funny hiss from the piano (must try solve that some day).

The Drums are recorded from the line out of a Yamaha DTXpress electric drum kit – thanks to Go West Music Henderson for the loan.

The piano is a line out taken from my Yamaha CLP-230 Clavinova via a stereo headphone output

The rhythm guitar is my 1999 Ibanez RG520 (V7 and V8 pickups) played through my Peavey Triple X head and Peavey 5150 cab, which is mic’d up with an Audix OM2 dynamic mic and an Audio Technica AE6100 dynamic mic.

The lead guitar is Mikes Fender Strat played through his bizarre set-up involving an amp that’s rewired to bypass some bit of it and another external unit.  I’ll have to ask him about it sometime because I didn’t pay much attention at the time.

The vocals are me singing though an Audix OM2 straight into the interface, that was turned up to the max to get a bit of distortion going on. (In hindsight this was probably not the best way to do it! )

So – my list of work to do on it…

1. Re-record the vocals! In rough versions I tend just to take the first crap take. The vocals need to be a lot lot better. Also if you have good enough ears, you can hear the metronome leaking through the headphones into the mic during the quiet parts of the singing. I have new and much better headphones now, so that shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

2. Record the bass with a real bass. As my bass was downstairs, I couldn’t be arsed to go fetch it for a rough. So all the bass is VSTi and hence it is rather crappy.

3. Re-record the guitars. There are mistakes all through, and you can hear quite a bit of computer noise through the guitars. And there’s this one strum I do where I whack the body of the guitar every so often and it makes a stupid popping sound.

4. Drop the vocals down a bit in the last half of the last chorus and put in a mean guitar solo of doom. My excuse for not having one in the rough? I have a Peavey Triple X head and a 5150 cabinet downstairs – and I’m recording upstairs. Its not that I’m lazy… it’s more that… I couldn’t be arsed at the time. Yeah.

5. Mix it with some descent studio monitors, rather than with stereo speakers from the early 90’s. I think that’ll make a huge difference I really do. My speakers are waaay to flattering, and tend to be a bit lacking in the bass end, so I end up with a mix that’s harsh in the highs, and too bassy, and sometimes just full of other muck I can’t hear through my speakers.

So there we go. Eventually I will do the things on my list above, and I’ll have a finished song. I’ll eventually put in these lists for my other rough songs I guess.

P.S. I noticed something really odd when I converted the wav. to MP3. Windows media player lists the MP3 at being 3:58 long, but lists the .wav correctly at 3:30. The MP3 I’m certain is the exact same length, it doesn’t appear to be playing the MP3 any slower than it plays the .wav file. Perhaps it has something to do with using a variable bit rate compressions? Does WMP use the bit rate to calculate the time or something? It’s really odd. It’s bugging me.

The other thing that’s bugging me is the song sounds too compressed as an MP3, I can hear it ‘breathing’ and it’s really brought out the compression on the vox. But I can’t be bothered fixing it at the mo. It’s just a rough anyway.