I've been working on recording this song for a couple of weeks, and I finally got it as done as I can get it.
I use the freeware digital recording program, Audacity to record my music, and it's a bit limited in it's options. There are some final production options that I don't have available with Audacity, and I'm not sure I would know how to use them anyway, so this recording may sound a bit raw.
This song is a dark piece of music to match the words of the poem that 
https://steemit.com/poetry/@paintingangels/it-s-all-just-as-well-this-bed-here-in-hell
It didn't really take me too long to come up with the basic chord structure for this song, it just sort of happened on the guitar while I was experimenting with weird chords. It's a bit of an odd minor progression that seemed to fit the mood of the words.
Recording the song was, shall we say, "interesting". I had some problems with Audacity saving my work and had to redo a couple of parts because of that. I finally ended up exporting each track individually to WAV format so that I wouldn't lose a track if Audacity didn't save it properly. That way, I could at least not have to re-record the track if it disappeared from the audacity file...again.
One of these days I'm going to pay for a recording program with more features such as VST integration so that I can record the drum track from the digital drum program directly onto a track instead of having to play the drum track on the laptop and record it to the desktop computer. Two audio interfaces are needed for that trick because my headphone jack on the laptop doesn't work.
Anyway...I started out by recording the drum track that I used for the song so I would have something to play the other parts to and keep the timing steady. Once I had the drum track that I wanted, I started recording the guitar parts. I recorded the clean guitar part with the Intersound IVP preamp directly into the audio interface. This is the preamp, I had worked on it for a friend and he let me use it until he's ready to ship it out to Portland, OR.
The next track was the distorted guitar track that I added to the song. For that track, I decided to record it with my Shure SM-57 instrument mic in front of a 12 inch speaker. The speaker was pushed by my little 10 watt home made amp. For distortion, I used my vintage Rat distortion pedal. Here is the setup that I used.
For the bass track, I used the Intersound preamp again, there's plenty of adjustment available to taylor the sound of the instrument to the way that you want it to sound. Here, you can see the drum track and the 2 guitar tracks on the computer screen as I was getting ready to record the bass track. You can also see my Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface that I use.
The computer monitor with the finished bass track, as well as the drum track and the 2 guitar tracks.
From there it was on to the vocal track. I had to record the vocal track several times to get it the way that I wanted. It took me 3 evenings of working on the vocal track to get it finished because when I push my voice like this, it doesn't take too many takes before I can't hit the high notes and I have to quit for the evening. I don't have that problem so much with clear singing, but this song needed a bit of a hard edge to the vocals. For some reason, I forgot to take a picture of my setup for doing the vocal track, but it was pretty much like this.
So, that's the story of the recording of the song, except the part about having to rebuild the tracks 3 times because Audacity kept losing my work when I would save it. It was a good thing that I saved each track separately to WAV format, that allowed me to rebuild the song by replacing the missing track that Audacity would lose. Of course, I always had to readjust the timing of the track to match the other tracks. I think that was where I had to be the most picky about everything, I could hear very small timing differences between the tracks due to recording latency or replacing a lost track. Adjusting the latency can be a really time consuming process, you make a tiny adjustment, and then listen to it until you cant hear any timing differences except the occasional natural fluctuation as you played the track against the other tracks.
This is definitely a labor of love here!
Here is the link to the track on my soundcloud page. I hope you enjoy the song!
I'd like to thank Serena, AKA
If you aren't already following her, you should be!
Also, check out her music too, she has some really awesome original songs on her page.
Thanks for stopping by my page to check out this song, eh!
