The Almighty Fret

I'm likely to take an existing tune (such as the Led Zeppelin tune I've got a chunk here for you to download) and cover it over sans vocals. This saves me the time and effort of writing anything, and I get to have a nice creative trip over the existing melody and structure. I have enough programmable gear that I can get the drums down pretty well even if they're complex (though I'm only a beginning drummer, I can edit a drum sequence until it sounds right), then play the bass over that, then the rhythm, and finally the lead, which (for me) is the really creative part. I usually follow the bass almost exactly as it was in the original tune, at least, if the original bass player isn't so much better than me that I can't... :-)

The board is a Mackie 32 channel 8-bus, and it is a great board. I can't say enough about this board. No kidding. If you're in the market for an 8-buss analog recording/mixing board, this is the one to get in the under ten thousand dollar range (way under - try under 5,000.00 with the meter bridge, which is an option worth about a grand). It's quiet, transparent, very flexible, and it gives you a whole bunch for your money.

I usually play a Washburn guitar, an instrument I like very much. I also have a Fender Stratocaster which has been extensively hacked with humbuckers ripped out of a Les Paul (I detest the neck on a Les Paul... too "fat" for my hands.) There is still one single-coil pickup in the middle position on the Strat, which can be switched into various combinations with the humbuckers for interesting variations in tone.

I play a Gibson bass, and sometimes a Peavey fretless, though I'm pretty poor when I don't have frets to keep me in line. Still, it's enjoyable to work on.

The Kurzweil 88-key keyboard was purchased as a midi controller, at least primarily. I would like to be able to play keyboards better, but its a long, hard road for someone without a lot of time to dedicate to such an effort. Maybe someday. In the meantime, I can hack my way about the keyboard, and play a lot of scales to try and increase my dexterity and understanding.

As far as other keyboard stuff goes, I've got a really cool cheapo Casio that actually lights up the keys in sequence in order to teach you how to play; it works amazingly well. I've been having a lot of fun playing some classical pieces that I have always loved, and I probably tripled my keyboard dexterity in about two months of goofing around with it. So there at least there is some hope!

The past few years, I've been concentrating on learning to drum using a Yamaha electronic DTX kit. Also a challenge, but I'm a lot further along there than I am on keyboards, let me tell you! I really like drumming, and feel like I'm making some real progress. I normally use some space-age sticks that can't be broken, with the occasional dip into wooden-stick drumming. I usually have things set up with one bass drum, a high hat, three toms, a ride cymbal, a cowbell and a crash cymbal. These are acoustic presets, no reverb or anything (I add that at mixdown if I want it), they sound pretty much like a basic "real" drum kit.

This used to be a six-track setup, based on the Vestax 6-track recorder (gray unit at lower left)... so I generally recorded the rhythm guitar in mono, the lead guitar in stereo, the bass in mono and the drums in stereo. Didn't leave any room for vocals, unless I "bounced" tracks, which I don't like to do on a cassette... there's just not enough s/n to pull that off and still have reasonable fidelity afterwards. At least, not to my ear. I despise hiss.

Feeling kind of choked in a creative sense by the Vestax, I got a digital multitrack, a Yamaha MD-8, and I have to tell you, that thing is awesome. I held off buying it for a long time, too long really, because of all the buzz about the minidisc compression. You know what changed my mind? I bought a Sony MXD-03 CD/MD player/recorder, and the MD's sounded awesome. Then I thought, well, there are 8 discrete tracks on the MD-8 and I can mix them down to an analog format or maybe to a CD - how bad could the compression artifacting really be if I can't hear it on a final stereo mix in MD format?

To make a long story short, the sound quality on the MD-8 is basically immaculate. When I create an 8-track master on it, then mix down, I defy anyone to pick up on any artifacts resulting from the MD compression. Since each track is basically dedicated to a much less complex signal than the mixed down stuff a consumer MD carries, and there are eight of them, the total bitrate and number of bits involved in representing the music, even with the compression, is very high.