Daddy Hard Work Owen Appreciation Love
By HoolieBrown on January 16, 2026 10:16 pm
My five year old named this song - he's the most creative and encouraging person I know.
The goal in this one was to work studio style directly into the Dirtywave M8 to scratch out a complete track - first takes only! I tend to get bogged down during tracking in the studio, so forcing myself to use only single takes - even if pitchy or mispronounced or not terribly compelling (like the guitar solo 
) - compelled me to dig into all of the tricks the M8 is capable of to smooth things out. I had to find a lot of clever ways to nudge stuff around, balance dynamics and pitch, and get things to sit properly into the mix. This was a lot of fun.
- Drums, keys, organ, bass, horns were all sequenced on the m8
- All vocal tracks and guitar parts were recorded into the m8 - I use a UA 276 as a preamp/passthrough for light compression and gain staging. Also it's nice to have phantom power when needed, but I didn't for this track.
- Mic for vocals is an MD421 Kompakt.
- Guitar was played through a Boss Katana GO through the UA276 into the m8, as well, but I had to the original take back through a second time for the fuzziness and depth as the original patch was too plinky and harsh to work in the solo section.
Post production
- Minor tuning for vocals in a couple sections in REAPER
- OZONE 10 Presets for instruments to shortcut the mixing
- Some use of RAUM for big reverbs so everything would settle pretty well
- OZONE for light master and to compress everything and throttle all of the peaks
Learnings - too much to list, but next time I do big vocal harmonies like this I'll pan them out a bit more instead of stacking them into a single mono wav. Also I'll try to record during the day at full voice so I can handle dynamics - probably the most time consuming thing was getting volume balanced on the vocal track b/c I was half whispering, half singing. Total production time was probably 10ish hours, could cut 3 of those out with a solid vocal/guitar take.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
