May 25, 2009

SUB: Mymassivehead's Alter-Ego


(C) 1993 - 2009
STEREO/HQ HERE
What's better than one mymassivehead? two mymassiveheads! The aforementioned LivingRoom Rock God whips out his guitars and his alter ego to show off a demo his band, Alter Ego, recorded back in 1993 called "Colors Of Autum." Sounds simple enough, but reading through his video description I discovered it's pretty much a technical marvel, since he had to do a lot to fix the original recording, which was on tape. Here's what he had to do to it:
"First thing I had to do was change the pitch on the thing, for some reason the original is about a quarter step out of proper tuning.
I recorded 2 acoustic guitars. Panned one hard left and one hard right. Decent speakers or headphones you can hear the separation fairly well. Recorded 1 distorted rhythm. Turned it up in the mix just enough to cover up the crappy sounding original distorted tin can sounding guitars.
Recorded 2 new leads. Turned them up to cover up as well as I could the original leads. You can still hear the originals, but not bad. Kind of an interesting effect. The new leads aren't great, but they are a lot better than the original.
Recorded a new final chord and edited out the originals out of tune final chord. You can hear where I punch it in, but I couldn't figure out how to completely fix that.

Then I mastered it. Ran it through a noise remover to remove the hum from the crappy mics I used to record the acoustics with. Added just a bit of reverb and then ran it through a compressor to level everything out a bit. Took me about a week to get it sounding alright... not world class studio, but it's not bad in my opinion. All this was done using Audacity. Amazing piece of software.

Hope you guys like it. If you could hear the original track you'd have a better understanding of what it took to make this. It was a challenge getting the tracks to mix properly, and there are still parts where the vocals are lower then I like. But it's about as good as I can get it. I'm fairly happy with it.

Of all the original work I did with this band and the other bands I was in, this is still my favorite song.

Hope you enjoy."
Phew! Talk about hard work, man. Kudos to you, our megaencephalonic friend. It's nice to know this one simply cannot be touched by those record label morons.
Got a video you'd like to submit? Send it over to LRRGods@gmail.com, or the LRRG YouTube Channel with the title "LRRG Submission" or something other to that effect!