Category: Studio

Dancing Barefoot (Patti Smith cover)

dancing barefoot studio session

Raw Studio Footage “Dancing Barefoot” (cover)
(no shredding here, only good old fashioned acoustic guitars 🙂 )

Yesterday someone I got to know trough Facebook, Herman, and I came together in my home studio to record the basic tracks for a set of cover songs we both like. Including this one, by Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot”. Audio you hear is taken from the smartphone we used to record the video.

We also recorded Daniel Amos Band’s “Shotgun Angel” and U2’s “40”. All in one session! Drums, one guitar and vocal. Now it’s up to me to re-record the vocals and also add bass.

This song will have female vocals, to be recorded later. Making music with someone you’ve only known online for a few years can be a little tricky — but we had a lot of fun today and worked out very well!

That’s the basic idea of the ‘Solid Rock Blues Band’ concept. While it’s a one-man-band, I love to work with others to play and record music. We might be doing a few additional recordings in the future!

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New song release – Mountain High

Mountain High Song Release Solid Rock Blues Band

Mountain High (Valley Below) is an uptempo song, countryrock and bluesrock influenced, by the Solid Rock Blues Band project. Inspired by a short holiday trip to the Harz region in Germany.

While on holiday this song was written by Rudy and it took a few months before the melody and music were composed. After that was ready, recording and mixing the song was done in one day. Recorded, mixed and released on May 2, 2021 at The Loft Studio.

Video Mountain High

Audio only (Soundcloud)

More details about this recording

Recording
Drums – Digitech Trio
Bass – Harley Benton MM84ASB
Acoustic Guitars – Samick Greg Bennett (Electro Acoustic)
Electric Guitars – Ibanez AS53-TF Hollow Body
Vocal Mic – AKG C900 Condenser
Audio Interface – Behringer UMC404HD
DAW – Harrison Mixbus6

Video
Free stock video from https://www.pexels.com/nl-nl/videos/ and footage shot in the Harz region, Germany. Edited using Flowblade

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Don’t Say We’re Over. Out now on Spotify!

Don't Say We're Over Album pre-releaseIt’s here! Don’t Say We’re Over has been officially released this week and is now available on Spotify and other online streaming services! Of course it is also still available on BandCamp since that’s where we have made our complete (back) catalogue available.

The official album release was done trough Amuse. We are considering re-releasing some older albums trough Amuse also, making them available (again) to the public trough services like Spotify and Amazon Music. Our experiences with DistroKid were fine so far but didn’t turn out to be successful in terms of sales. So we’re giving Amuse a try for distribution! So far, so good! Amuse has delivered the album to all platforms we’ve opted for and all went perfectly well.

Download or stream from BandCamp
https://barkingaunts.bandcamp.com/album/dont-say-were-over-2

Listen for free at Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/0tLnwkIbovvo0fAXgWWgQy

 

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Studio upgrade: Acer Aspire (Intel i5-9400, Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” and Ardour6)

The “LoftStudio” has gotten a major hardware and software upgrade. Because of the fact the old coputer, a DIY Intel i3 computer, decided to call it quits after having been a trusty companion for many years we had to buy a new computer. We bought an Acer Aspire with an Intel i5-9400 Hexacore(!) cpu on board, 8 GB of RAM, a Saumsung 256GB SSD and Western Digital 1TB Sata-disk.

We’re not going to bore you with lots of technical details but in the end we decided not only to upgrade the hardware but the software also. So we’ve installed Linux Mint 20 as well as Ardour6 and of course re-installed Mixbus5. For those that can understand Dutch, here’s an unboxing, test & review video.

ARDOUR6
For those of you interested: Ardour 6.x now comes with Linux 20, for free(!). It’s available in the Linux Software Manager as a free download. They do ask if you want to support them and as far as I’m concerned I’d say: Do so! If you use it on a regular base, just pay them for their efforts. It’s great software.

STUDIO SESSION
Of course we did some testing, after installing all the software. Here’s a video of a short recording session. Including a tip on how to get a nice, full, guitar sound.

NEW ALBUM
It’s been quit here because we’ve been working on recording a few new songs. We finished them the day before the old computer broke down! The new album is getting close. Some of the tracks are available at Soundcloud (some are free downloads!) at https://soundcloud.com/barkingaunts.

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Lay Lady Lay – Classic Bob Dylan song

Bob Dylan has been an inspiration to me and many, many, other musicians for decades. His music has been sung and recorded by thousands of singers and bands and inspired many people to start a career in music and write songs. So far he’s also the only artist who ever won a nobel prize!

For me, Dylan has been an inspiration ever since I picked up a copy of “Shot of Love” at a sale. I was only 13 years old and had read a review of this album in a Christian magazine. They were raving about it but, as I later found out, most fans didn’t like Dylan’s “gospel years” at all. This has changed btw. Even Rolling Stone Magazine is now raving about it, after he rereleased the music from this period including a lot of live recordings. Anyway – I bought the album and started digging back. I ended up buying almost all his albums, visiting his concerts (Groningen, Rotterdam) over the years that followed. And still do.

Dylan is a master of words. Many of his songs are pure poetry but also show the raw side of life. Hurricane, anyone? And also in this song. Lay Lady Lay. It sounds so lovely, but listen to the words! I always loved it. I also recorded it. It is with some restraint that I post it. This is, for now, as it is and it is a work in progress btw. Some changes in the drums need to be done (by another percussionist). But I’d like to post it now. Hope you like it!

Drums, Bass, Guitars & Vocals: Rudy, Solid Rock Blues Band
DAW: Ardour

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Figgy Pudding – Free Christmas Song

It’s the time of the year again, Christmas is almost here! So here it is: Figgy Pudding. A free Christmas song. You can download it for free at SoundCloud or listen at Drooble.

ABOUT THE SONG

The song was written many years ago and recorded in 2014 using a Fostex 4Track Tape-deck. For the backing (drums, bass, keyboard) we used Chordpulse; vocals and guitars were recorded straight into the Fostex and mixing was also done on the Fostex. After that it was exported to digital format and mastered with Mixcraft. So basicly this is as analog as it can get these days.

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Acoustic Home Studio Sessions – Bob Marley’s Redemption Song

Bob Marley is of course a well known reggea singer and songwriter. I like many of his songs a lot, especially ‘Redemption Song’. So, while testing some improvements on my studio (video) I was playing it and decided I wanted to record it for the ‘Acoustic’ series.

For this track I used the following:

  • Guitar – Samick Greg Bennett GD-101 SCE/N
  • DI – Behringer Ultra-DI DI600P
  • Vocal Mic – MXL770
  • DAW – Harrison Mixbus5

I duplicated the guitar on two tracks to widen it more and put some reverb on the vocal. On the master bus I put a limiter. That’s all 🙂

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AVL Drumkits with Mixbus5 and Ardour

Recording Drums using Harrison Mixbus5 or Ardour with AVLDrums, a free LV2 plugin for Linux Audio Workstations (DAW) offering professional drumtracks.

Mixbus5 & AVL Drums (LV2 plugin). A video by the LoftStudio, Home Recording Studio Project and home of the Solid Rock Blues Band, the One Man Band Studio project. AVL Drumkits offer you professional sounding drums for Mixbus and Ardour. Manual editing, playing drums trough a midi-keyboard or even a midi-drumkit.

In this video I show you how you could use AVL Drums to record drums – live drums using a midi-keyboard or manual editing a drum track. The midi-keyboard was bought years ago at the ALDI supermarkets for less than 120 euro. It has pretty nice sounds available, as well as good midi out. Allowing you to use it to record professional sounding midi tracks, including drums!

AVL Drums offers two different drum kits with several velocities, mic placements (in Ardour) and a lot of instrument/kit pieces available. I record drums using a cheap midi-keyboard running trough my Behringer UMC404HD.

Video by the ZolderStudio (LoftStudio), https://www.zolderstudio.nl

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Mixing bass for lofi equipment – home recording tip! Hint: EQ and distortion!

How to mix bassguitar for Lo-Fi equipment like smartphones and laptop speakers? These simple tricks will help you create a mix that sounds fine on them!

Ever considered this: many people listen to music using (cheap) earbuds, a smartphone or laptop. Does your mix sound good on that equipment? Most of ours didn’t. Not until recently that is. Except for those where we use the Digitech TRIO pedal.

We discovered a cool plugin for Mixbus5 that enhances the sound of the bass in such a way it sounds better on cheap speakers. But of course it should be possible to do this without a plugin – and we wanted to do so, especially since the plugin was software that needed a license..

Many people use smartphones, laptops, ipads and lo-fi earbuds to listen to music. These speakers and earbuds have a poor audio quality and lack low and hi end. So, how can you create good bass sound on them? By “moving” the bass sound into the right frequencies! Here’s a little trick I use for mixing the bass so it will sound better on earbuds, laptops and smartphones and still sounds fine on high end equipment.

Recorded using Mixbus5, Sony Cybershot and video editing using FlowBlade.

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New album (EP) “The End Of The Street”

Songs with Blues, Rock & Roll, Country Rock and Indie Rock influences and with a touch of Post Punk. Guitar oriented songs using Gretsch and Telecaster electric guitars as well as acoustic guitars, an occasional keyboard and even tambourines.. the Solid Rock Blues Band at it’s best!

Proud to announce another EP from my one-man-band-studio-project was released on BandCamp, SoundCloud and of course on Drooble!

The album consists of original songs only and one of them was a co-write with my friend and fellow Drooble user James Zheutlin with vocal contributions of singer Judith S.

Available on BandCamp of course and also on CDBaby and (soon) on all major streaming platforms. It contains three songs already on Drooble (but I’ve now updated them with the mastered versions of course).

Hope you like it as much as I did writing and recording it.

The album is available for download (only $4.95) and free streaming at BandCamp. It is also available for free streaming at Drooble and SoundCloud.

CDBABY
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/solidrockbluesband4

BANDCAMP
https://barkingaunts.bandcamp.com/album/the-end-of-the-street

DROOBLE
https://drooble.com/l/2mx1c

SOUNDCLOUD
https://soundcloud.com/barkingaunts/sets/solid-rock-blues-band-the

All rights reserved ©2019 Solid Rock Blues Band.
Recorded & Mixed at the ZolderStudio (Loft Studio) using Mixbus5.
Mastering by BandLab.

 

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