12/18/05 HumoursOfLisheen,BunchOfRoses/GrandSpey

[TonyHiggins]

12/18/05 Welcome to Claus Steinort, who writes, "I recorded the jigs 'The Fairhaired Boy/The Humours Of Lisheen' played on various instruments: uilleann pipes (Rogge), concertina (Wheastone), bouzouki (Trinity), flute (Aebi), accordion (Hohner) and guitar (Ibanez). I was playing around with my multitrack recording program (GarageBand) and suddenly got the idea to make a recording with all instruments that I could find in the house. A virtual band! It was great fun. To be taken with a pinch of salt...the file size of my recording is rather big, so..." (saved in u-pipes)

Mark Hillman sends The Bunch of Roses / the Grand Spey on Hillmann chanter / Taylor regulators (saved in u-pipes).

[Joseph E. Smith]

Very nice music Claus and Mark.

Mark, those drones are killer.

[uillmann]

Zan McLeod sent me that recording in an email. it is from a few years ago, and the pipes were misbehaving perfectly. But it is the only mp3 I have of the Taylor Regs, so I posted it. I will try to get anuther recording made, and then this one can (hopefully) be eliminated.

[pixyy]

Very cool recording Claus!!
I have tried on occasion to do multiple tracks myself, but it always turned out a soup :-/
Would you mind telling a bit about the process?
How did you record? First the pipes on the whole set of tunes and then adding the rest and making the 'arrangement' at the mixing stage?

Anyways, very well done.

cheers,
Jeroen

[onkel]

Thanks Jeroen! This is how I've done it: I used GarageBand, which is a free recording and mixing software and comes with Mac's operating system. My rythm is pretty awful, so the most important thing for me was to have a good click track. GarageBand does have a built-in metronome, but I still find it hard to play in time when there's only one tick at the beginning of each bar or half a bar. So I started to record a bodhran, because that's more natural for me to follow to. As soon as I got a few decent bars of bodhran, I made a loop of that for the entire length of the track. Until that point I got away with using the internal microphone of my iBook. But for the real recording I used my wife's microphone. She's a singer and she has a very good mic which is suitable for both stage and studio use. It's a Neumann KMS 105. And I also used a little preamp (M-Audio mobile pre USB), to connect it to the iBook.
Anyway, the first instrument I recorded was the concertina, so that when recording the pipes, I would be able to adjust my pressure and tuning to the concertina notes. There are four cuts on the concertina track! I just don't play it that often... Then I recorded the pipes once through both jigs, no cutting here. For a studio recording, I would surely not have been happy with the track, but for this purpose it was ok. Then I recorded the backing. First the bouzouki on the first jig, then the guitar for the second jig and the some countermelody stuff and additional chords on the bouzouki for the second jig. Some heavy cutting on the latter, because my fingers just aren't fast enough on the bouzouki. Then I recorded flute and accordion, both without cutting. The accordion just adds a but of brightness to the recording, but my playing on that is crap, so I decided to keep it fairly quiet and "hide" it behind the concertina. Finally, I recorded the drones for the second jig. That's about it. The most funny thing for me really is listening to the individual tracks; each track sounds fairly miserable on its own, but all together they sound surprisingly good.

[pixyy]

Thanks for the explanation.
It just sounds really cool and it must be fun to do. Even though I have the equipment I never got round to do spmething like this.

The most funny thing for me really is listening to the individual tracks; each track sounds fairly miserable on its own, but all together they sound surprisingly good.

hehe, sounds like many of the sessions I've been to

cheers,
Jeroen