video: eighty-one
I hope you enjoy my arrangement of Ron Carter’s tune “Eighty-One.”
I’m accompanied by myself on bass (synth) and drum (sampler). I played all the parts.
Some description of my recording setup, because I anticipate a lot of questions:
This was recorded in Reaper, a very powerful and flexible DAW. It’s my first completed project using this tool, and I’m very happy with it. I sequenced the drum part, which is being played by a kit made up of one shot samples released under a CC license which I obtained from freesound. The bass part was performed on an antique Alesis Quadrasynth and recorded as midi, then played on a bass guitar VSTi plugin called 4front bass. I did edit the midi somewhat, mainly just cleaning up multiple note strikes. The bass part behind solos was all one take. So I did actually play that part straight through at real time.
Rhodes was the only thing I recorded directly as audio. My Rhodes nameplate FX loop had a BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer and a Lexicon MPX 100 audio processor in it. The Lexicon was just doing a tempo-synced delay line. The BBE box does whatever it does, which is hard to describe, but I like it. I took stereo outs from the suitcase bottom into my Edirol UA-25, and Live to Reaper with the native ASIO driver for the Edirol box, which works quite well.
I tracked everything in about a day. There’s a FX bus track in Reaper with a simple room reverb and a bit of EQ on it. Sends from each track go to this so I can position each instrument in the foreground or background separately within the same sound stage. I put a mastering limiter on the master track. It increases the average volume by decreasing the dynamic range of everything (makes the soft parts louder).
I rendered that down to a .wav file, which I then synced to the video. That was encoded to FLV and posted to ye olde YouTube. FLV compression damaged the audio somewhat. I tried to keep that minimal, but I have a clean MP3 for you to listen to.
I’m also making the backing track itself available (bass and drums only). Let me know if you record a version with it.
