fear and trembling/ecstatic discharge

uh oh....well...uh...

actually, right now, as i type, we are working on some vocals on one of the last songs - predator of dreams, on ecstatic discharge - the part we're working on now has around 16 tracks of vocals. talk about time consuming.

a lot of the times that i am on line, we are working on the cds. pretty much every night. the same computer i log on with i also use cakewalk sonor on to drive the adats that we record to.

 

well, we'll probably deal with it directly via mail until we can get some kind of distributor happening.

 

yeah, they will be two seperate albums, probably seperated by ~ a month. we have been doing a lot of multi-tracked vocals on quite a few of the songs. predator of dreams is part of a long set of songs (~38 mins) inspired by, but not about, dante's inferno, purgatorio and paradiso.

 

what's wrong with ecstatic discharge? i mean, i know it's no "take off your pants and jacket", but still, what do ya want. i'll be the first to say we're not blink182

 

we use sonor now (various versions of cakewalk for years) to drive and synchronize the adats, and to provide an accurate map of where in the song we happen to be at a particular moment, so that we can easily accomplish punchins and punchouts.

the way we recorded was that i sequenced out every song's bass line and many guitar and synth parts. the drummer, jim, then played to that, a sequencer playing bass and synth, along with a click. when i recorded i played to just jim and the click, and then the guitarists both came in and played to just bass and drums, with click only on certain parts. that's one of the big reasons why this has taken so long, everything was done like this, one piece at a time. it's like hand making every brick to be used in a house.

some of the computer editing that i have to do, and will probably be doing this weekend, actually, is cleaning up some click bleed in the drum tracks - sometimes the click came through from jim's headphones into the drum mics.

we're not doing any actual recording onto the computer, though.

 

for instance, here's the sequence of the instrumental, converted from the cakewalk proprietary format to a plain midi file. there are sysex commands embedded in this midi file, on a track listing they are called "mmc xx" where xx will be a track number or set of numbers. these are punch in and punch out commands for the adats. they send midi system exclusive mmc (midi machine control) commands to the adats when they are armed as the sequence "plays" through them. this way we can have a set punch in and punch out when we need to work on a section, and then we just drag and drop the mmc snip to another section when we're done.

note - change the extension on the file i have attached from ".txt" to ".mid" for it to open properly.

 

tom-A-to , to-mAH-to.