In front of me (infected mushroom)

Herein begins the study sessions of my project dubbed “Number 81”. A lot of these will be exercises and reflections on writing, performance, recording and mixing in some hope to make improvements on any or all of the four.

My first undertaking is an acoustic cover of one of my favorite Infected mushroom songs. I aimed for a live, single guitar, single voice track for this session. Stayed fairly true to the structure here, although there is some guitar masturbation on the bridge. Chose this song for kickoff as the lyrics really resonate with the overwhelming aimlessness I’m feeling about life in general. Not that I’m in a bad spot, but the looming tidal wave of uncertainly with where or how I will musically end up utterly terrifies me. Tempus Fugate. I don’t want to give in to lethargy and apathy to have them metamorph into regret. Maybe this is a way to try and fight that.
Okay, enough of the soulhunting.

Lessons learned from performance : low notes are harder to pick up on a cardioid mic, particularly in my vocal range. My guitar playing aim is smoother, when it needs to be louder my hits should aim for fuller, not harder.

Lessons learned from recording / live mixing : Record dry, apply EQ and reverb later. Honesty in the recording is the key to give immediate feedback while performing, instead of masking it with a prefabricated sound. Make the guitar sound as big as possible by running an electric input (it’s an acoustic electric) and a mic input. Cross mix them better. In this case I took only bass from the electric mix and only treble from the acoustic mix. This leaves chance for mid range disparity.

Hope you enjoy! With any luck I will be posting future study sessions within the month.

Cheers,
Number81

#audio #Acousticlive