This track was sparked by a writing prompt from Aisjam of "start with a cowbell". I had some great ideas at first, but my final composition doesn't really live up to the ideas I had.

I started early in the week, but started down a harder path by dragging cowbell samples to my track. I wasted too much time on this before switching to the Steven Slade virtual drum kit and figuring out how to put the cowbell samples as drums in there. Once I did, recording my drums through MIDI was WAY easier!

My first plan was to use mostly synths, but I started trying to come up with a bass line with the guitar. I got something okay from that, but it didn't quite sound thick enough, so I borrowed a bass from my guitar teacher and re-recorded with that.

Then since I was already using guitar instead of synths, I decided to keep using that. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the Amplitube VST to work with Repeaer at all. The UI would come up scaled wrong and none of the controls worked. I spent too much time trying to get that to work before I gave up and switched to the acoustic guitar. That caused another problem since my input levels were setup for the electric guitar, so I had to do more post processing than I wanted and things probably don't sound as nice as they could.

By then I was already low on time and just used a chord progression I'm very familiar with. I really wanted to do some more variations on the melody and add a chorus, which was my original goal for the week, but then I was totally out of time and had to rush just to get something complete enough to publish.

Probably could have done a lot better with mixing. I definitely had problems switching between 3 different guitars and dealing with different input levels.

Things I learned this week:

• Some about playing a bass guitar

• How to use virtual drum VST with custom samples

• It's importanant to pay close attention to input levels when switching guitars

• Listen on headphones and speakers with the audio levels adjusted to some other professionally produced music first so your final audio level sounds right compared to others
  [*]Recording live guitar is much more complicated than using the M8. I actually have to be in my office with all the right equipment and enough time away from the family to do it, while the M8, I can use most any time and place.

Produced with Reaper. All cowbell samples are from Splice.

(Just noticed right before uploading that the entire track seems much quieter than I had planned. I tried a quick fix, so hopefully it comes out okay.)

Tags: guitar, reaper, splice, week 3 2024, View by:gunnbr