Not too exciting, but...
after recording my first song ("Seek and Hide", to avoid confusion with the quite-different Imogen Heap song), I am ready to re-record the vocals (which were sort of scratchy, gravelly, and experimental when I first recorded them)
Also, I modified the Dr. Who Cyberman-stencilled toolbox which houses the PAiA Vocoder 6710 I got off of eBay. It had extra room to magically fit my Antares AVP-1 Vocal Producer rackmount unit, so I installed that in there and drilled holes in the back/bottom of the toolbox for the audio/power jacks. Now it is a truly badass vocal unit, which works as follows:
I run my retro-looking Nady large-diaphragm condenser mic (phantom-powered XLR) through my E-mu 1820 audio interface; this works well, because I can directly record clean audio and also because the phantom-power and XLR interface means I can't just plug it into the Antares or vocoder. So what I do is add an Insert to the appropriate recording strip (associated with the Nady) in my ASIO PatchMix DSP to have an ASIO send to the physical output (stereo 1L/1R) on the back of the E-Mu 1820. I send this to the Mic Input of the AVP-1, THEN patch-cable it to the Mic In (Instrument 2) jack of the vocoder, which I will most often use with my Novation X-Station, but the beauty of it is that I can use any instrument to vocode my voice... Atari, concertina, whatever (I can't wait to see what it sounds like when the Pole Position engine rumble starts singing!)... also, it's no problem if I don't want to vocode it, because there is an instrument bypass switch on the vocoder to let the clean signal through (either for Instrument 1, or Instrument 2 - the microphone/vocals)
So, in short, I can easily choose to have a clean signal or to vocally-process my voice, auto-tune it, compress, de-ess, vocode, or any combination of the above... all without pulling out or switching any microphones or jacks!
Needless to say, my little home studio is turning into a bit of a spider's-web of wires...
PS. Also learning to play This Charming Man and Annie's Song. I'll post another update once something exciting happens (ie. more song recordings, public song postings, OR completion of the Theremax theremin I am building...)
2 comments:
The tabs to This Charming Man look pretty complicated but I think I might learn it too since I've been in the mood to learn a lot of songs recently.
Yeah, I learned how to play the basic riffs.
It's not easy at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fun to play.
Next I am going to learn the bass line and drum parts (which seem to be easier than the guitar)
Post a Comment