Monday Drum Day: Like a train

This is a track I recorded for the @radioliquorice show that @daniellemurray puts together for our local community of musicians. People submit three songs. I had a couple of recent videos that I could extract audio from, but I wanted to do something with drums on. I picked Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash as I know it fairly well and the drum part is relatively simple.

I was only recording audio and decided to use my Zoom H4 recorder that I have had for many years. This is really a whole music studio as it has decent microphones and you can plug others into it. You can even apply various effects. It can work as a four track recorder so you can layer sounds and that I how I used it this time. I recorded the guitar (Taylor acoustic) first and then the vocals. Finally I added drums using my Tama Club Jam kit. I just put the H4 nearby rather than trying to figure out the optimal location. I was just using the snare and bass drum to try and sound like a train. I found the notated part on Drumeo, but played it by ear for the recording. The bass is a little low in the mix, but it is there. It was actually harder to play this through the whole song than I expected, but I only did one take due to lack of time.

I loaded the tracks from the SD card into Audacity for some mixing and added effects. The latest version does real time effects and can use those I had set up on my Linux PC. There were some issues with the user interfaces on those, but I just needed some reverb and compression.

It all came out fairly well, but I treat it as a learning experience. You have to try things to develop. There are so many variables when it comes to making music from the actual playing to the sounds you use, the way you record it and then how you produce the finished track.

I was going to do this via 3speak, but the upload was not working and it took seconds on Youtube. I could have put the audio on Soundcloud, but last time I tried the player was not embedding on Hive. I just want things to work and getting media into posts can be tricky.

Rock on!