Blimey it’s been a cold coupla days… but hopefully with all this cold weather we’ll get to see some snowy stuff, so at least we’ve got something pretty to look at for all our troubles.
I’ve had about a million and one things to do this week, none of which have been terribly exciting (booo!). I’ve not even thought about Crimbo related items and it terrifies me immensely that it’s now only a few days away… arg!
But for creative arty farty souls like my good self – when things get too much there’s always a good way to escape from it all by disappearing off into our wonderful musical worlds… and for me if I don’t have a good reason to do so then I’ll soon find one.
As you’ll know from a couple of articles ago, I was doing a spot of videoing in my little studio as I wanted to create some newer vids of me playing. We’ll be doing the whole thing properly in January, but I fancied giving it a bit of a go myself (and I soon discovered that when it comes to film orientated stuff I’m apparently a bit rubbish!).
So yesterday I decided to have a bit of a break from my boring paperwork and do a bit more filming. I thought my mission could be to pick a track from one of my fav artists and record me jamming along to it on Karon (my cajon).
Most of the tracks I had originally thought of all had drums on them and I thought it might be a good idea to pick something that perhaps doesn’t have any backing (like a live acoustic track). I then started to listen to some tunes on my iPod and came across Tina Dico’s wonderful six track EP that I downloaded from iTunes. It features her playing all the tracks live with just vocal and guitar and they all sound gorgeous.
I chose this track called Break of Day which is one of my favs:
It was quite tricky to choose just one track to play along with as I love pretty much all of Tina’s songs. Not only does she not need anything other than her vocals and guitar but she’s one of those amazing people who could sing the phone book and make it sound like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.
So once I’d decided on a track I headed off down to the studio and got things ready. Before long I had Karon all micked up, the cameras in place and a large mug of tea on the go.
I had Karon micked up in the usual fashion (AKG D112 in the back, SM57 about 10″ from the back, Beta57 on the side and a Rode NT1a at the front) and started getting some takes down. It took me a little while to really get deeply into how she was playing the track, as she was playing it very loose with slight tempo changes that I tried to adapt to as best I could. I did quite a few takes as each time I heard it back there were certain sections of my playing that didn’t have *quite* the right feel to them or they were too invasive.
I finished up with a take I was happy(ish 
) with and started to download all the tracks onto my PC to mix.
When I put my headphones on I quickly realised that Tina’s track had lots of room micking going on to add warmth and depth to the track (and it works really well). I hadn’t really noticed this through my monitor speakers, but when I put my mixed Cajon track with it, it sat in the mix really horribly. I’d not even given room micking a thought… doh! Back to the drawing board…
I wanted to try and mix it so that my cajon sounded very close to the sound of Tina’s original recording, but for the purposes of my video I wanted it stuck out a little so you could connect what you were seeing with the different cajon sounds – but the last thing I wanted to do was ruin a perfectly beautiful song!
I decided to turn the front mic (Rode NT1) up and put all the rest of the cajon mics right down, so that they gave Karon definition but without being so invasive. It seemed to work well and with a little bit of compression to give it some punch I think I was as close as I was going to get.
So with the track all mixed, I’m hoping to get a video online before next week – but with Crimbo fast approaching and me being very disorganised we might have to see how that goes!
Anyways, thanks as always for reading and hope you have a wonderful week 
(image: Katie Marie Photo taken by Lisa (Indigo Blue Photography) and edited by Sandra (Soul Photography))
Come and enjoy Devon – book a hotel and get away!
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