How I Did It
My Apocalypse Now (DURDEN ver...by DURDEN
Uses samples from:
Samples are used in:
Tools I Used
Fruity loops producer 7. For sequencing. My guitar thru a DI box and the lovely Guitar Rig from NI. For mixing and mastering Adobe Audition and Waves plugins.
Samples I Used
I have a huge collection of samples, from dvds of individual percussion sounds to complete loop packages I've collected from a looong time. I usually use samples o rloops for percussion to conserve the human feel in drums.
Original Samples
I work with drumloops but I slice them and replace sounds and styles a little to fit my needs and likes. This song has 2 main percussion loops, edited and rebuilt by me, the rest is only me!.
Process
The hard part. First of all when I work with a existing material like a song or pella, I synchronize it with the sequencer and then I slice, rearrange, speed up or down or whatever I need. I use the given tempo and play a loop under to see if it correct enough, then I do a little correction on phrases slicing and moving forward or backwars to fit my feel of synchronization.
Now It's all in synch, so I start to play with the percussion to explore the styles, this one begins as rock, but I then found the punky style fits better. Once I have a percussion loop that slightly identifies what I want, I start to compose melody with a main instrument, if is electonic maybe the bass, or a synth, in this case was the guitar. Once I have the style and main melody I record a demo of what I want to remember how was it. I recordered 3 or 4 guitars and those give me the rock feel to record bass and perc. Once those arranges are ready I replace the demos recordered by the real ones and make at least 3 takes of each one because they are played live and I want to capture the live feel.
So at this stage I was with a bass line, a percussion bassed on loops, kaer voice arranged, and about 15 guitar tracks to drive me crazy.
I then choose and edit in audition the right take for each guitar, and maybe if there’s all perfect but I make a mistake, I can use the other 2 tracks to make a offline “punch in” and repair the take. After this I was with 5 clean dry guitar tracks.
To have a clean sound in guitars I record the clean channel and monitor on my fender amp using the Direct Box link, this save me cpu just recording a mono channel and not recording a stereo guitar rig’s output. This way then I clean the dry guitar and feed the guitar rig, giving me the flexibility to edit the rig and look for the right sound and fx for each track. I used to record my guitars using 2 tracks, one dry that feeds a wet one with the rig to monitor what I want, but my cpu is slow and the real time process was very affected, so I prefer to monitor with my amp, and that gives me the live feel very well including feed back and so on.
After choosing the right sound for guitars, I did a sub mix for guitars to save cpu and started then to refine the bassline (boo bass + real bass). Once this was ready I began the slicing work with the percussion. Look for samples, look for better loops, cut the loop, rearrange and replace the snare, add a cymbal, etc.. all using the fruity slicer channel in fruity and the piano roll, nothing sophisticated.
In some parts I play the drums using a midi controller and replace the hihat for the one in the loop doing a mix between the loop and the recorded in the controller. After all of this process I did the fine tunning in the bass sound (VSTi), and in the rigs for the guitars and did a mix instrumental to work with voice.
I worked very hard on kaer’s voice in melodyne, most of all to centre the vibratos and positioning the pitch in some parts slightly out of tune. I said very hard because kaer voice is difficult to tame, hehehe, the vibratos, notes, lifts, expression are extreme and that’s why I choose the pella, but I needed to correct it, and then compress some louder peaks and frequency peaks and ringings.
With the voice I was ready for the mix. So I export each track with maximum level and minimum spacial effects (reverbs, panoramas, delays) and arrange the song in auiditon multitrack.
Once the mix is done, I mixdown everything in a stereo file and create another session of audition to master the stereo mix file. I use (if needed) this chain: eq, reverb, stereo imaging, exciters, multiband compressor, and limiter or maximizer.
And Voila. Noise! hehehe
Other Notes
I love rock, but It's a pain in the ass to work with analog instrumens because once recorded you can't edit the notes, and in some cases even the sound or fx, so you have to be carefully at the record moment and working with distortion add the hum, ground noise lovely friends. But The live feeling in a song is lovely, worth the effort I think...
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