Give It to Me

October 21, 2017 5:52 AM

A rough demo mix of a new tune I’ve been working on for a loose band project called The Wishing Well Divers. This particular recording is an experiment in recording and producing only on an iPhone and was recorded, mixed, and mastered in a day or so using only my phone, my voice, and an acoustic guitar and bass.

CREDITS
Vocals, guitar, iPhone piano - Me
Bass, iPhone organ - Papa/Uncle Woodbelly

LYRICS
Now tell me
Did you see the photograph
And did it make you laugh
Until your head fell off
And rolled into the sea
And did the mermaids come
Encircling you
And nibbling on your ears
Until you almost wished
You’d never learned to breathe

And did you tell them all
That you were sad
Secretly hoping that
Maybe one of them
Would come and set you free?
And did you lie
Under the polygraph
Or was it a phonograph
Playing a record that kept
Skipping endlessly

And blaming you for everything?
Well feel free to blame me,
Blame me for everything
And feel free.

posted by saulgoodman (4 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite

Hey, this is kinda great. Thanks for posting this.
posted by limeonaire at 5:17 PM on October 21, 2017


may i inquire, what apps are you using to record, mix & master (and presumably add the keyboardish tracks and percussion)? i think it sounds great!
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 2:47 PM on November 3, 2017


Of course! Always glad to talk shop.

It took me a little extra time to get acclimated to Apple’s quirky, one, not-necessarily-immediately-intuitive-path-per-function UI design approach, but we tracked the acoustic guitar and bass first along to a click track in GarageBand (this was my first time using it though I’ve worked with all kinds of other digital audio production tools) using a two channel digital input box by iRig you can pick up for under $300. It uses lightwire and converts analog to digital at 24-bit resolution.

The only other standalone app I used aside from mic modelers and amp modelers was the Lurssen Mastering Console app, which you can import into directly from GarageBand at 24 bit resolution with no downsampling, keeping all the mixing and mastering in the high fi digital domain.

The keyboard sounds and parts actually came together very quickly and spontaneously as improvs, toward the end of the session when we were getting kinda loopy.

We basically just improvised those parts after tracking the other parts more traditionally, using a couple of the default instruments in GarageBand and playing the touchscreen on my phone as we recorded along to our playback.

I’m not normally an Apple superfan but I was really impressed by how much better iPhones do audio production than Androids. But it’s no exaggeration that it took me at least twice as long to figure out how to actually get the finished mix off my iPhone to share online with other people without using a separate computer loaded with iTunes (which I don’t have right now and don’t really want) as it did to produce, mix, and master the recording.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:27 PM on November 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


ooh, chords?
posted by girl Mark at 2:04 PM on January 2, 2018


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