Wretched / Serenity In Sorrow
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I’ve uploaded a second, much older track to www.myspace.com/standingwaterband. (insert shameless plug here)
It was recorded in 1999 on a demo CD I briefly made reference to, yesterday. A tiny thumbnail view of the front cover can be seen at the top left of this post.
The demo was my first major foray into digital recording and mixing, something I’d been toying with since I got my hands on an effects unit and four track tape recorder for a few months in highschool. Nothing good ever came of that experience other than a desire to learn more about how these things work, so I can do it myself – like Kurt Cobain, banging away at a guitar. (Kudos and thanks to Guy Greaves)
Wretched however, taught me many things. The gear I was using was extremely crude and basic – I had a couple of $20 microphones going into a beaten up Realistic 4 channel mix board. The mics came from Radio Shack and I’d had them since high school, the mix board was bought a pawn shawp for $35. All that gear somehow managed to survive the punk/thrash “band” I’d tried to have with my old roommate and long-time friend Thrasher. Three guitars in total appeared on the CD, all played by myself in the basement. One was a 3/4 sized Profile electric which had been extensively rebuilt several times – the electronics are worth more than the instrument itself! Another was an acoustic guitar borrow from a friend. Finally there was my Renegade bass with 2 year old strings on it.
Serenity In Sorrow is the only song I’ve ever written that was almost entirely bass guitar. Two versions appeared on the CD, the original one as I first wrote it – a mellow bass sound with a guitar solo in the middle. The second track, which I’ve uploaded, had a looped MIDI drum line played out from QuickTime (using my brother’s PowerCenter 120 Mac clone) and recorded back into the computer. Over that I played in the bass line, then did a second take with the bass guitar plugged in through a Boss MT-2 distortion pedal.
I went back and did several takes of me screaming the song, overlayed and balanced them.
Other than normalizing the vocal levels (mostly by hand in SoundEdit 16), adding a little chorus and reverb I did very little to the sounds. There where several reasons for this. The first being I had absolutely no concept of EQ. If I touched it at all (it’s hard to remember) I can guarantee you I probably tarred it all with the same brush. The second reason being that any effects had to be done in one program, then played back and have volumes adjusted in another.
I was really pushing the limits of what this computer had for audio-processing horsepower and real-time digital effects weren’t available to me as readily as they are today.
I’ve learned many things about mixing and recording since then, but I still have an affinity for the rawness on this track. I wish I had included a guitar bit in as well, but it was getting pretty thick with layers and it was pure luck that it came out as clear as it did.
Okay, I 
A few hours later, still downloading updates to get Windows up to the current version. Those sneaky Microsoft people tried to slip Internet Explorer 7.0 onto my computer. Ugh.
Themocracy