The stuff you find laying around. . .

I was cleaning up the hard drive this morning and found this laying around. . .

You may remember a rousing rendition of "Rocking in the Free World" by my friend Sean Flaherty back in July . . . well in that same session we recorded this track of Pearl Jam's "Off He Goes" it sounds surprisingly good considering that I never bothered to learn the guitar part. I faded the track out when that became apparent, but the first half of the song sounds decent.

Check it out Flat!

All Along the Watchtower

Project Studio Fun!
Started as evening jamming . . . turned into a recording. Thats me singing, playing electric and acoustic rhythm guitar, lead and bass guitar. The drum machine gets an assist since I couldn't record me drumming in the middle of the night.

Chris does All Along the Watchtower

Chris solo Songs

Here are a couple songs that I banged out last night. I pretty much just pressed record and played them.

Add It Up - One of my favorite Violent Femmes songs, fun interesting lyrics and simple chords. This is one take, acoustic guitar and singing.

Sympathy for the Devil - My all time favorite Stones song. There is a 3rd track here with me noodling a little on the guitar.

Disclaimer: I am not a vocalist, I am trying to work on it, but my pitch is horrible.

New CIC Songs

Here are some new songs we are doing these days, they were recorded on November 21st in the Mt. Tabor Studio. As mentioned in the previous post the Vocal channel is a little overloaded and clips quite a bit.

You Can't Always Get What You Want
Louie Louie
Wild Thing
My My Hey Hey
I'm a Man

Wilco Complete Tablature

Because I had trouble locating this in the juniorrocker archives I am reposting this wonderful, and valuable link to the Complete Wilco Tab and Lyric archive.

http://www.gumbopages.com/wilco.html

Vocals, Vocal Mics, gain, and clipping

Long ago when I first started recording CIC I encountered an issue recording Chuck's vocals. He had a tendency to move around, and not get all the way back to the mic. This resulted in serious volume shifting, which was difficult for a novice engineer like myself to deal with. There is also the proximity effect that is inherent in the Shure SM58 mic that I like. The proximity effect will boost bass frequencies creating a warmer and richer bass sound when the vocalist is very close to the mic. So this creates a very different sounding vocal if the vocalist is moving around.

So rather than jump on Chuck about this all the time, I tried to create a more live mic with lots of gain so that he didn't have to be right up on the mic, and I added a new mic with a wider polar pattern and and Better off-axis response. That means it picks up more stuff around the mic.

Well now I am having more problems that when I started. The wider polar and better off axis-response means more noise on the vocal channel. More gain means more clipping. When you hear the latest CIC session you will note that Chuck's vocals are annoyingly distorted and the amount of noise is so great that I cannot effectively compress, condense or gate the vocal channel.

So once again . . . I leave it pretty raw and loud. Next time we record we will spend some time working with the vocal setup to get it just right, with just enough gain that Chuck doesn't have to eat the mic, but not so much that it picks up the whole room. Stay tuned.

The iPod is burning up

It has been a long time since I have seriously listened to Christ I'm Chuck. I think that it is necessary to clear the proverbial palette every once and a while, then go back and check your work.

My role is particularly challenging as musician, sound engineer, and producer. Because I am involved in all phases at some level (I hear my guitar playing and my mixing, etc) it is pretty easy to be critical and just as easy to ignore the many little defects.

So on my return trip from Little Rock today I listened to the entire Christ I'm Chuck collection (the ones that are on my iPod anyway). This spans about a year of recording and clearly represents progress as individual musicians, as a band, technically from a recording perspective and the overall mixes seem to get better, and I am proud of the progress.

Today I began to notice the many imperfections, lots of things that I think are wrong with the tracks that I would like to do differently. Keep in mind that my approach is to try and make it sound like I thought it sounded while we were playing, that is typically raw straight ahead rock. Rough around the edges, imperfect. I like it that way, but there were things . . . to much vocal, not enough rhythm guitar (did I say that?), the kick wasn't fat enough, not enough bass (or in many cases too much bass). These are all things that I can do again.

I also realized that I have a ton of recordings that I haven't touched yet, a bunch of new songs, some new and different classics.

What does all this mean to you? It means that I must produce a new collection of CIC tunes. It will be our box set. Newly remastered classics, some b-sides and rarities.

Not bad for a band that one time played a Halloween party, eh?

Stay tuned.

Violent Femmes Tablature

I am having a ton of fun learning Violent Femmes songs.

This site has good tablature for all your favorite Femmes classics: http://www.angelfire.com/hi/VFemmes/