• Steve Durand blathers on about his home recording process... •

Steve Discusses the Production of the New Track "Minihone"

this tune was recorded in about 2 days. Usually the first day is spent on the creation. ie coming up with the guit/bass lines, vocal melodies/words as well as any other backup harmonies or gay little musical embellishments. this normally requires uninterrupted solitude, as well as several marijuana cigarettes. when the basic structure/ideas have come together in a way that seems to work, i redo it all. because the initial tracks were recorded to a click track or in this song's case a crappy keyboard drum beat, i leave that as the spine on which to hang the flesh and bones. so the bass, acoustic guit.,electric guit, and distorto guit track get redone as does the 3 vocals. now with the ideas down, it is time to concentrate on performance and recording of the tracks. for the bass i used an akgC1000 condenser mic pulled about 2 feet back from the cabinet. the amp is a hiwatt custom100 w/4X12 cabinet. this is one of my most amazingly versitile and beloved piece of equipment. amazing bass amp, incredible guitar amp. the vocals were done with the same mic but through an art 1channel tube preamp strait to tape. (a little reverb and eq was used in the mix to fatten em up a bit) I used an sm57 for the 2 electric tracks with the old tried and true close mic on one speaker in the 4X12 technique. the acoustic was miked with a evPL80 (sort of a suped up 58 style) i use this sometimes for the acoustic because the akg condenser tends to pick up extraneous low end frequencies that my old gibson seems to put out. when the tracks are done, mabeye a few hours before, it's time to smoke again. i prefer a good strong genetic strain of the kind. but it's about when you harvest the plant. later, and therefore stronger is not always the best. euro-style veteren cultivators know that a crippling high is not so useful when ya gotta get busy. so it's got to be'nipped in the bud' so to speak. the mix was done to 1/4" tascam reel to reel. i find there's just nothing like a good hot tape mix to natural compress and basically glue the shit together. basically if you feel you gotta be tracking analog, you gotta be mixing analog. check it out, hope you like. i always put the new tunes up on my site so check ca. steve (Ed's note: we were a bit slow posting this so we offer another one of Steve's tunes in its place. Sorry.)

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Other Resources Related To This Feature Here's a track called Rip Dip Dug Out instead.

Label: Independent

Artist: Durand, Steve

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