Aug/092
Sorted “You Look Like Hell, My Belle” into RB tracks
We settled on a first RBN song, "You Look Like Hell, My Belle". It's a peppy little jam with some nifty riffs and hooks that should be fun to play along with.
Followed instructions from Harmonix and sorted the raw tracks, all 30 of them, into just 7 tracks for the game:
SNARE (mono)
KICK (mono)
CYMBALS (and all other drums, stereo)
BASS (mono)
GUITAR (playable guitar track, actually a mix of guitar & synth, stereo)
VOX (lead vocals, stereo)
TRACKS (all other tracks, like 2nd guitars, Rhodes, and backing vocals)
Before the edits, 30+ tracks
After much consolidation, down to 7 tracks.
This didn't take all that long, pretty much a full day once I set down to it. I'm using ProTools with the new MBox Micro, a little USB dongle that allows me to mix on my laptop. No input capability, but since these songs are already tracked that's fine.
Hardest part today was deciding which parts to make playable for the guitar controller - most Bon Savants songs have lots of instrumentation going on without a clear "lead guitar" part. We can always change our mind on these details and the most important thing is to make progress so we can get some experience with Reaper and the other Harmonix tools.
Incidentally, for the benefit of other audio geeks out there, I'm really digging the Cytomic compressor "The Glue". Super flexible with a really broad range of sounds. Using it mostly on drums so far but no doubt I'll find other uses. Inexpensive, too.
-Thom
Jul/090
RBN VidBlog Ep1
In the first installment of the Bon Savs RBN VidBlog Thom talks, at some length, about what it's all about and why the band is doing it. If you've ever talked with Thom you'll be surprised it's this short...
Jul/090
Drum Editing
We just finished an album, so we have fresh tracks to throw at this thing... stuff you haven't even heard of yet. That's good news and great timing for us.
However, there's still some mixing and song tweaking to be done. As a first step I'm doing some editing of the drum tracks and consolidating them into the "playable" tracks in the game. For instance, if you miss a hit on the drum pad that goes with the snare then the snare drum drops out of the song for bit, the crowd starts hating you, and you develop some serious self loathing. I've seen it happen to kind, decent people. Like my sister.
So the first step we're taking is to sort the 12 or so audio tracks from each of the drum microphones (2 on the kick drum, 2 on the snare, 2 on the rack toms, 1 on the floor tom, 2 overhead of the entire kit, 2 further back in the room, 1 in the hallway) and group the tracks to correspond to the 5 parts of the RB drum kit - 4 pads and 1 pedal.
There are different ways to assign the drum tracks to the RB kit, but there is a common approach in the current RB songs that we'll use as a starting point - snare, hi-hat, toms, and cymbal crashes get one pad each, and the kick goes with the pedal, of course.
If you know a bit about audio recording, and if you're fortunate enough to have the tracks ready to go, this part shouldn't be hard but it will still take some time.
So less writing and more editing for now...
-Thom