Excuses

My voice

After I emigrated to Canada in 1981 (I was 31 and leaving my last band), I didn't really sing again until 2002 (now I was 52) when I began recording. Surprise, surprise, I had lost the top octave and a half of my vocal range and I couldn't sustain a note perfectly on pitch to save my life. As one of my old friends (Gillian) said on hearing my new songs of the 21st Century, "Your voice has seen better days!" Brutal but true. No high harmonies like I used to sing and I had to write songs to fit my new voice which was pretty limiting. Even then, you can hear the strain on some of the "high" notes. Tempus fugit!

I don't have an isolation booth so, after recording each vocal track, I had to use noise reduction software to get rid of the room noise and the fan noise from my PC's. That cleaned up the background noise but made my voice (and guitar) sound much different.

If you've never tried to record yourself singing while being your own recording engineer, you don't know how difficult doing both at the same time is. It's particularly tough to get an emotional vocal line with the creative side of your brain while the logical side of your brain is watching dials and adjusting sliders.

Guitar technique

In the 1990's I smashed the ring finger and little finger of my left hand pretty badly where they join the hand. So I'm missing those two knuckles. My little finger ended up maybe half an inch shorter than it used to be and my ring finger is a bit shorter as well. The little finger particularly is still a bit "lazy" and doesn't stretch as well as it used to. I more or less had to teach my left hand to play again. "Muffing" the odd note in faster (for me, these days) licks and muting strings in big chords is unavoidable despite my best efforts. I was lucky though - I might never have played guitar again.

Guitar tones

On the "Lucifer" CD, I mostly used a Gibson Les Paul Custom plugged direct into my PC through a POD 2. On some songs (Death Dance on the Lucifer CD, for example), the Gibson was the wrong guitar; I should have used a single-coil pickup guitar but I didn't have a decent one. So instead of being bluesy, many of the guitar tracks just sound "heavy" or distorted.

On "The Pit", I mostly used a Burns Brian May through the POD 2. The POD 2 is an amp simulator. First mistake! I knew I should have run the guitar through one of my amplifiers and put a microphone on the amp but it would have been louder than the neighbours would have put up with.

Even using DI (direct-inject) for guitars, I had to run the resultant recorded tracks through noise-reduction software which changed the tone a lot.  I used a lot of software, once the guitars were recorded, to try to get a better sound back - it never really worked. So the recorded tone of my guitars isn't what I would like.

It's been tempting to re-record all of the guitar parts using my newer guitars and amps but I decided to just leave the tracks alone so far because I had other, orchestral music to write.

Arranging

In the earlier versions of much of my music, I had so many ideas for the arrangements and orchestration that I put the kitchen sink into every piece of music I did. In the most recent remixed versions I've posted, I've reduced the over-orchestration quite a bit. Somebody once said to me "It's not what you put in, it's what you leave out that makes the difference." - so true.

Tracking

(Recording)

In the first couple of CD's I must have made all of the recording mistakes possible. I recorded vocals and guitars with the EQ (tone) fixed which didn't allow me much opportunity to "fix it in the mix". I even recorded with reverb and other effects on the vocals and guitars so I was stuck with the reverb and fx that I'd tracked. Part of the reason was that I had a PC that wasn't really up to the job. I had to economise on its resources, but a lot of the problem was just a feature of how new I was to the business of workstation recording - dumb.

Mixing

I'm a little better in 2010 at mixing than I was when the first versions of these CD's were "released". But I'm still not very good. I still have a tough time setting the relative tone (EQ) of each instrument so that the overall sound is balanced and each instrument is nice and clear and sitting in its own space in the mix. I know some of the theory about dipping, ducking, complementary EQ and so on but I'm far from being a professional mixing engineer. However, if you have some of the original CD's, I think you'll notice an improvement on the most recent versions that I've posted on my web sites. I'm still learning.

Mastering

If I'm not much of a mixing engineer, I'm even less of a mastering engineer. I have neither the ears or the top-notch hardware and software that professional mastering engineers have. So the finished product isn't really finished to give that big shimmering sound that the pro's get.

Also, both sets of my audio speakers have given up the ghost so I had to mix and master on headphones and some old Bose bookshelf speakers. This is a definite no-no in the recording world but I was stuck with it until I bought new studio speakers in 2010. So now that I can hear the tracks properly I'm remixing everything.

MP3's

I've uploaded MP3 versions of my music in 128 kb/sec form (the 2010 remixes are in 256kb/sec so they're a bit better). That's the standard for Internet streaming MP3's but the difference in overall tone compared with CD-quality sound files is very noticeable to me. Much of what studio engineers call "air" (high-end brightness) is gone and there's also a noticeable reduction in the impact of low-end instruments like bass guitar and kick drum. In the symphonic work, the low-end sounds muddier in my MP3's too.