I’m glad to announce that Jack Merlot is a part of the 2009 RPM Challenge.
The challenge:
Record an album in 28 days, just because you can.
That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February.
You can read the Jack Merlot blog over at the RPM Challenge site, but I’m reprinting it here since this is the “official” Jack Merlot website.
From the blog:
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Well, I’ve gotten off to a good start on the Challenge, but as I’m listening to the CD-R’s I’ve burnt of the tracks I have so far, I’m picking out little bits and pieces that aren’t quite as perfect as I’d like. Which is ok, since I still have plenty of time, but still, I wish I’d either learn to let go of the little things or discipline myself during tracking so the tracks would turn out “better”.
I’ve got 8 songs finished, which means that I’ll probably end up re-recording four of them for the final album. It’s little details like polishing up the codas on a couple tracks or wanting to capture solos with better phrasing that I’m getting caught up in, but at least I feel that the songs are solid enough to be listenable even without virtuoso performances on each and every part.
I’ve been getting a lot of bang for my buck out of my Yamaha DD-55 Drum Druid on this project, which makes me happy. I’ve had it for years, but it’s only recently that I’ve sat down and read the manual and explored all the cool functionality it has to offer. It’s fully MIDI-capable and programmable, so you can create custom kits on it to match the feeling of the song, and it has around 200 individual drum samples on it, so it’s pretty easy to create kits that are tuned to the song.
I’m running the Drum Druid through my Digitech rackmount units; I’ve got a GFX1 Twin Tube pre-amplifier that has some pretty sweet tonalities, which I then run through a seriously old-school DSP256 multi-effects processor. 16-bit, yo.
I like being able to add a little tube crunch and saturation to the drums sometimes; it makes the kits sound more like real drums (well, real drums that aren’t being mic’ed properly, perhaps ;-) and makes them sound a little more “dangerous”, which is what I’m shooting for. I usually track snare and bass on one track, and cymbols on another, and toms on another, but it kind of varies depending on the song.
I also run my (well, it’s actually my girlfriend’s, and it’s a long story) electric bass (it’s a “Matao” bass made in Japan; I’ve never heard of them, have you?) through the GFX1 because it’s got a nice compressor section in it, and sometimes put a little chorus or tremelo effect on it with the DSP256.
I’ve got a Washburn 12-string guitar that I’m using for most of the guitar parts; sometimes I use an Epiphone acoustic my cousin’s ex-girlfriend left over here, but it’s pretty rare. The 12-string is strung up with only six strings, and it sounds pretty decent to me when I spend the time to mic it properly (and running it through the GFX1 pre-amp doesn’t hurt, either.)
I’ve got three microphones involved in the project, too, which I use for guitar (I only have acoustic guitars right now, dammit, but I mic them and run them through the Twin Tube for a little distortion now and again), and for vocals, which is working out pretty well. I’m using an Audio Technica ATM61HE for most of the vocals because it has a pretty wide dynamic range for a dynamic mic, and also because I can’t afford a condenser mic right now. I’ve got a Shure SM58 on loan from my cousin, Nick Christensen, which works pretty well for acoustic guitars, and another Shure mic that I think is super low-end, but hey, it works.
All my tracking is being done on another seriously old-school machine, a Mac G4 tower. I’ve upgraded the RAM and hard drive on it as far as it can go, and I’m able to get about 8-12 tracks recorded in Audacity with it before the software starts crashing on me. (I try to limit all my songs to 10 tracks for this reason; crazy, isn’t it?)
The Mac actually works pretty well, though, overall, and I’m able to record 4 tracks at once at 24-bit, 48Khz, which is impressive (well, impressive to me, at least) considering the age of the host machine. I attribute this success to the Tascam US-428 unit I’ve been using as my interface. It’s only USB 1.0, sure, and it’s only got 4 ins and 2 outs, but it works.
For monitors, well, I couldn’t afford monitors (or a proper reference amplifier, for that matter) so I’m using a very old Marantz “Stereophonic Receiver” (seriously, that’s what it says on the front!) model SR3100 (it’s not even a tube amp, dangit, but it sounds ok to me from here) to power a couple massive Fisher speakers (I’m too lazy to turn one around to find a model number right now.)
So. To summarize, I am extremely proud of the results I am getting from my extremely low-budget setup. It’s really gratifying to be able to burn CD-R’s of my works-in-progress and listen to them on other systems, where I can really take some time to analyze the tracks and learn what is working, and what is not. When all is said and done, I’ve found that my favorite recordings aren’t necessarily my favorites because I tracked them particularly well, but mostly are my favorites simply because I spent a long time crafting the song.
It takes me a while to write songs, because I spend a long time on the lyrics, the melodies, the harmony parts, the bass line, tuning the drums, making multiple takes of each song to find the tempo that works best, and really, trying to capture the feel of a live band with the limited resources I have. It’s definitely a challenge, in every sense of the word.
Thanks for the kick in the butt, RPM Challenge! I needed that.
I should have some tracks available for download sometime soon; in the meantime, if you go to http://www.jackmerlot.com you can find some seriously unpolished “early work” to download. ;-)
Happy tracking!
- Jack Merlot