More Songs Recorded on VG-88, VG-99 and GI-20

[Ed Driscoll]

Trigger warning: After writing lots of home recording articles over the years, I'm uploading links to several MP3s I've recently recorded; if you just want to hear the tunes, scroll about two-thirds down. But for those who never read about my obsession with home recording, here's a whirlwind primer.

Ever since I first bought a copy of Pete Townshend's original Scoop double album of the demos recorded in his home studio in 1983, I've been an aficionado of home recording.In the mid to late 1980s, I recorded many demos for my college-era rock band on a Fostex 250 four-track cassette recorder, my guitars, a Fender Precision Bass, Yamaha CX5M Jurassic-era music computer (basically a DX9 on steroids) and a Roland TR-707 drum machine.

When the band broke up, I stopped recording by around 1990, but got back in a big way in the early naughts, recording on various flavors of Cakewalk's Sonar DAW, Propellerhead Reason, the Zero-G "Nostalgia" software synth which has some great recreations of the iconic Fairlight synthesizer and countless other vintage instruments, and by 2007, Korg's software versions of their M1 and Wavestation synths. And for guitar, I used a Roland VG-88, VG-99, a Roland-Ready Strat, my Les Pauls, and my old '80s-era axes.

When Roger L. Simon, the founder and at the time the CEO of PJ Media asked me to produce their weekly show on Sirius-XM radio in September of 2007, music recording as a hobby fell by the wayside. In order to produce a 55-minute show each week, I spent many, many hours during the week editing interviews in my DAW. This culminated in a marathon all-day session on Thursday, in which I assembled the show and uploaded it to XM's server at around midnight Pacific Time. (The following day I was invariably wiped out.) I learned a lot on the fly about computer audio doing the show; in a miraculous bit of synchronicity, right around the time the show went on the air, Izotope released their incredible RX audio restoration applet, which was a godsend for removing or tamping down hum, hiss and other gunk for telephone and live interviews.

When the powers that be at PJM decided to end the Sirius-XM show for a variety of reasons in late 2010, I slowly began to ponder returning to recording music demos. I missed songwriting and still had all the virtual and real gear I had built up over the years; I had RX to tame the limitations of my den and home recording gear, and I wanted to experiment with the latest version of Sonar, and try out that Melodyne pitch correction software I had heard so much about for years, plus TC-Electronic's VoiceLive 3 vocal harmony generator.

I also wanted to make better mixes, and avoid the bass-heavy, massively compressed material I inadvertently produced in the mid-naughts. Reading Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior of England's Sound on Sound magazine was hugely inspirational in that department. Among his many useful tips, Senior recommended buying a pair of Auratone substitute speakers to test each mix out on to ensure that it translates to low-end systems, and I ended up buying a pair of Avantone MixCubes, which the reviews describe as a faithful recreation of the old "Horrortones," a mixing room stalwart for decades.

Sonar X3 (and presumably its current incarnation) has a powerful comping function, where you designate the portion of the song you'd like the program to loop over, and then set the program to automatically record pass after pass. I've then happily spent an hour or more soloing on electric guitar, trying out all sorts of licks and tricks, and then assembling these parts phrase by phrase into a cohesive solo, especially when combined with...

Celemony Melodyne, which turned out to be far more than just a pitch correction applet for vocals; I've used it to edit drum loops, to tighten and fix the odd bum or missing note in comped together guitar solos and bass riffs, and to mangle sampled percussion sounds beyond recognition.

So here are a few of the tunes I've been recording since 2012. In listening to them, keep in mind's Julia Cameron's words in The Artist's Way: "Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one."

So with that possible disclaimer in mind, here are a few pieces from my starting over yet again phase:

"The Mighty Ocean," which is still a rough mix, is based on an opening riff and chord changes I had sitting around since 2007, waiting to finally be called into action. Last year, I wrote the chorus section, the lyrics, the guitar solo section and the coda that finally made those initial chords work. The tracks were built using a few of Roland's VG-88 Strat patches for the clean electrics, a VG-88 12-string patch, a VG-88 Les Paul patch for the guitar solo, an electric bass from the VG-99, plus various synth pads from Reason and Nostalgia, and Sony Acid drum loops edited and stitched together in Melodyne. And loads of harmony vocals from the VoiceLive 3.

"Can't Go Home Again," which features VG-88 acoustic guitar and on the middle eight solo, a VG-88 warm analog-sounding guitar synth patch, plus a Fender Rhodes from Reason played partially on keyboard and partially via my Roland-Ready Strat and a Roland GI-20 guitar to MIDI interface. 

"Live Within the Lie," which I linked to here earlier this month, is the most technopop of the recent material I've recorded, with an E-Mu Arco Strings patch from Nostalgia, comped together on both keyboard and the Roland Ready-Strat, an iconic mid-80s E-Mu bass line from Reason, and also from Nostalgia, E-Mu's Ethnic Percussion patch on the last chorus, which I mangled the daylights out of in Melodyne. Plus harmony vocals from the VoiceLive 3, and pads from Nostalgia. The lead synth was played on a VG-99 preset, which was strongly reminiscent of one of the tones on Andy Summers and Robert Fripp's I Advance Masked album from 1982, which is practically a demo disc for the classic Roland GR-300 guitar synth.

"Burning Bridges," which isn't as developed a song as my newer efforts, but was the first song I recorded after getting back into recording in 2012, using my Roland VG-99's
"D-Beam" Theremin-like hand controller to create some fun dive bombing guitar sounds. The song concludes with a decelerando I programmed into Sonar, before a massive simulated dive bomb on guitar.

So that's a, umm, "Scoop," to coin a phrase, from the archives of what I've been up to recently. Be gentle with me in the comments – and is anybody else at the VGuitar Forums into home recording?

[Ed Driscoll]

No thoughts on these, fellas?