u/imp_op

This is my little basement studio that my wife and I use. We had a flood a few years ago, and it was kind of a blessing in disguise. The basement is no longer a dank place for mold to commiserate. We built out a special room for a studio. Nothing really fancy room-wise, just a room that we could use (we couldn't afford any special kind of sound proofing at the time, there were more important things to take care of). My vision was to create a no-noise room, which was a lot less expensive. We have little kids, but still want to make music in the house.

I sold my maple kit for a vdrum kit, a mishmash of ATV and Roland, with a TD27 brain, going into the computer with Superior Drummer 3 when we want to record. We have two guitar amps, a Catalyst 100 and 200. Those are great, because you can use them as amps for sound, but set them to work at low volume, and there's XLR out, so they're always record ready. I have an Opus as well, if we wanna record with multiple people at the same time.

I've got 10 ins, so there's more than enough room, and 5 spots for headphones. It's very easy to record here and since in-the-box sounds so good these days, it's cost effective for recording (still can't convince my bandmates not to spend money in fancy studios, but what can you do?).

If you look at some of the photos, I took some of these PVC pipes in the ceiling that are holding acoustic blankets. I can drop those down instantly for a vocal booth or recording acoustic guitars.

We've both had full band practices in this space. I like to use headphones, because everything can be controlled volume wise and I have hyperacusis, but not everyone loves that. The vdrum is no great replacement for a real kit, but it's a cozy space as long as the dog doesn't want to join the room and fill it with stinky dog farts.

The skeleton is James. He's only in there because our little daughter got scared of him.

I've been learning to use a sampler, specifically TAL-Sampler. It has four layers, resampling, reverb, delay and some basic EQ, LFOs and a matrix for assigning them. There's some sections I still don't quite understand, but I'm taking in as much as I can.

For this song, I recorded myself playing a C chord on guitar through my amp and pedalboard for Layer A. For Layer B, I used a sample of an organ playing a song in the same key, but tuned it down an octave. For Layer C, I used a shaker and tuned it up a few ocataves and auto-panned it hard L/R. Layer D is another shaker, different sample, auto-panned opposite. I u sed the internal LFOs from the sampler for this. (There's shakers in this song that are percussion that float L/R, but that is not the sampler, just percussion layers).

I added delay and reverb from TAL, and resampled using the Akai algorithm to make it a little gritty. I modulated some volume for warbling vibrato. Essentially I'm was trying to make my own pad that sounded ethereal and dreamy.

I played 4 notes and it immediately gave me a something to work with, so I built a whole song around it.

https://soundcloud.com/kewanee_karlov/drifting-3

I'd love to know more tips for using the TAL-sampler, or just talk about sampling in general. Let me know what you think of the song, too. Happy to discuss other production choices.

My bandmate and I were stuck after the pandemic without a drummer and I was sleepless, with a newborn at home. That moment in time we set aside the songs we were developing for an album and considered exploring other things. For his part, he was learning how to play acoustic and wanted to try his hand at covering some of his favorite songs and I wanted to get into music production. The genesis for him was for his son, a teenager exploring music making for himself. He wanted to be able to have a shared language with him. While I was hibernating on paternity leave, he got busy learning something like 40 songs. So when we got back to making music, I recorded him and his acoustic in my studio. What started as a little demo turned into an album, with all the unpolished, yet intimate performances he gave. I edited the tracks down to 11 songs and mixed and mastered the album, which we put under our moniker, bucking everyone's advice that it would be "confusing". I say this is an effort just like any other that my music partner and I did together, it should remain under our moniker. So, funny enough our debut album is 11 tracks of covers done on acoustic guitar with him performing and me producing. (Our actual debut is coming out later this year.)

The only thing stupid about any of this was the expense of securing mechanical rights to covers. But it was worth it, since it was a DIY project from the roots up.

https://open.spotify.com/album/0BmuTgsek6VxOaeinGW565