Harp Star
By onezero on July 17, 2016 11:50 pm
Back to the funk, with a twist. This week I had some rhythmic patterns in my mind that went in a funky direction. I started with a drum rack full of Analog percussion, and it kind of worked, but it worked better in a drum dialectic with a drum rack full of MPC samples, and an Impulse instrument of handclaps. Reflexively I did some keyboard bass and Rhodes, but took the keyboard bass after I quickly tracked a bunch of real bass lines that were worth keeping. Late Saturday night I tracked a lot of guitar (Moderne) through the Vox Wah and sometimes through the Reuss RF-01. I wasn't sure how much of these I'd keep--some ended up too wistful, some noisy in the wrong way, and some just didn't work. Very late in the guitar tracking process, I learned of the death of Alan Vega of the band Suicide (78, natural causes, one heck of a run), and in tribute put in a Suicide-like overdriven organ line and a blast of fuzz guitar. And I threw in some of auto-wah clavinet for good measure.
Without trying to cram a lot of ideas into this one, it was fairly easy to arrange...but it did require a lot of labor in the mix, and I discarded a lot of mix downs ("Whoops, need to bump up the M4L Humanizer delay. Hmmm, that guitar's getting lost. Now it's too loud. Is that clipping on the drums? Wow, that rim shot is way too hot. And those fake formant woodblocks are getting annoying. That's too much high hat in the filter delay send, better pull that before that hit." Like that.)
One drum rack got some auto filter, as did the clavinet, and I put inline Cabinet plugins on all the guitars. All MIDI instruments got M4L Humanizer, and everything got auto-pan. Sends were simple: just a large recording studio chamber convolution reverb, and Filter Delay, which got a lot of automation. The master bus got full-chain master.
The title is another name for the star Vega (of course), as a nod to the late Boruch Alan Bermowitz. Respect.
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