Nothing Fancy - How it all comes together

I thought today I would post something more along the technical and physical setup side of things, and how it comes together in terms of equipment and process.  Every now and then I'm asked, "How do you record your songs?" Well to be honest, I use a very simple setup of equipment that I've had in my life for many years, and has become second nature to me as an extension of my creative process. It's rare a new piece of anything joins the "crew" with the exception of the occasional microphone or updated software. The keyboard I use is a full weighted 88-keys Roland HP-800 that I've had for more years than my adult life, and is what almost all of the instruments you hear in each song are played on. The actual instrument sounds you hear come from another unit I've had for almost as long now, and is a true favorite of mine, the Roland JV-1080. Yes I'm well fond of Roland equipment. This fab synthesizer module has become a well known and much loved piece of sound equipment for many artists from film score writers to you-name-it. Strings to piano, bass to percussion, and brass to whatever-else-I-like-that-fits, the creativity in terms of the instrument side generally starts here. To give you an idea of this machine's importance in my music, the current track I'm busy working on right now titled: Welcome to the Show, is 20 tracks of instruments and sounds (not counting vocals yet,) and of those 20 tracks, a full 16 are instruments from the JV-1080 that I play via the piano. Important indeed.


For sequencing all these instruments I use a standard PC with Win7 64bit OS (Oh Nooos say the Mac lovers... meh) and SonarXL Producer Edition 8 as the sequencing software. Sonar is a great piece of software that allows me to layer all the instruments, with fine control over each including note corrections, key velocities and so forth. It also allows me to record my vocals into the sequencing sessions as audio tracks, and as such I'm able to layer each of my vocal tracks in the same manner. Add to this any other audio effects that I desire to use (such as the children playing and the street noises in the song Home as example,) and voila, now we're on to something. When I do sing my vocals however, I don't sing them directly into Sonar as I have my own methods (right or wrong,) that I have become comfortable with. At current I use an AKG Perception 220 microphone that is connected to a Roland VS-880 digital workstation. I like this microphone because of its ability to pickup subtle nuances when singing songs that require such. I received this microphone as a gift after finishing Release Her, and so to date it has been used on Your Song, Home and Who I Am. Sitting right behind the microphone, attached to the same stand,  is this wonderful piece of mobile sound-booth equipment that does an incredible job of recreating the environment within a sound booth without having to actually build one, and because of this, I am able to control all equipment easily as I have them laid out in arms reach of one another.

So the VS-880 is what I first record all my vocals into. I do this because of the fast seek ability, built in high quality reverb and delay effects, and mainly because of the vocal layering I do when singing a song. As I sing all of the vocals you hear in my songs (to date,) I strongly believe in harmonizing in order to pull out richness and depth, be it the main vocals harmonizing to an instrument, or backing harmonizing to the main or another backing vocal. With the VS-880 I am able to quickly switch between the various vocal tracks in order to sing each part and then hear them back together quickly. Given that I also tend to improvise lyrics  on-the-fly in most cases (IE make up the words as I sing,) this method and ease of use has become essential for me.

As all equipment is connected to each other, everything now in motion plays back in-sync and in musical unison so I can easily grasp where things are going both musically and vocally, and can adjust, re-write or correct as necessary. A joyous process when all goes well! So, once I have the vocals as I like them, I then strip all effects and EQing from them, record them into Sonar as a track per vocal, and the process of mixing it all together begins.

Well I think that covers it. Each song of mine you've heard to date has been written and performed per the above. Nothing extravagant, no huge studio or production process, or team for that matter. Just one musician and his gear. So what does that all look like in terms of layout? Well... really simple and certainly nothing fancy. See for yourself...