anomie life

Trying to record music on a shoestring budget with little to no instruction or experience is an extremely difficult task. Well, I guess the actual recording isn’t that difficult, but actually making it sound half decent is.

I remember the first song, or rather piece of a song, was “Crossing Guard”, written by Scott and Aaron. The song itself was really quite depressing: “Hope was lost/ in a blur of flaming yellow / cause the crossing guard / wasn’t there to save them” It ended up forming sort of a cult following at CYT (now Spiritual Twist Productions) despite its sad lyrics.

Recording equipment-wise, I had a Creative external microphone input, a Shure SM86, and Adobe Audition 1.0.

Instrumentally, we used my Schecter C1 Elite electric guitar, OLP Musicman 4-string bass, Scott’s Violin bow, and my mom’s old Yamaha keyboard.

We started off by recording the electric guitar directly into the computer and I don’t even think we used a metronome. Then we just went straight to the vocals. I think one of us heard somewhere it sounded cool to layer multiple takes of the vocals on top of each other. It ended up sounding pretty cool, but we probably could have achieved the same effect by applying a simple chorus effect.

One of the coolest things we did in that recording was using a violin bow on the electric bass. It actually sounded really great and gave a very smooth and sort of depressing sound to the song.