(General tip)
The more I have been playing music the more I have come to appreciate a human meter, as when not playing to a click. But in the type of recording we're discussing here it may be very neat to have the recorded audio line up with the tempo grid of the recoding application (Logic 9 in this case), for access to a lot of cool effect treatments that depend on tempo; synced delay, tremolo etc. As Rob, I too use Logic (most of the time) and I tried all this techniques to line up the DAW grid to a recording ("beat mapping" etc). They may work well on drums but I have never actually managed to get it right applied on my music. For example if playing guitar through a volume pedal or looper that you reverse there is no attack to detect. But yet the listener definitely feels where the note is starting (even if it starts with silence to fade in from there).

The final solution I found with Logic is the Tempo List. I put up a dummy drum track for tempo monitoring and then I simply listen and make adjustments to the tempo along the time line. Wherever the recorded tempo goes down I lower the Logic tempo a bit just before that point (this is what tempo auto detect algorithms can NOT do - the don't get the FEEL of where the groove i going, they only detect it as it has already gone wrong).

Hi all,

Here's a new test edit/mix from my CD recording sessions. It's a solo Stick version of the rock tune Differential I wrote a few years ago (which can still be heard on my website). Curious to get your impressions... sounds better turned up louder.

Hi Rob,

About the first recordig :
It sounds very clear, but perhaps indeed a tiny bit on treble side, which makes it a bit cold sounding. I really enjoyed the composition itself, i wish i could play like that !
And at some points, i hear small tempo changes. That can be avoided by using a click track, but since already really don't like recording, i can imagine that you would hate using clicks (yes, they are so harsh and totally honest....)
I must say that it feels really awkward to me to be giving these comments (since I'm just a beginner)
Oh yeah, a question. The player you embedded in the post : where did you get it ?

Cheers,
Bas

Really cool, Rob. Great composition; both hands are really "telling a story". So much going on that's dizzying at times (in a good way). Your chops are in top form, bro. The recording sounds really clear to me, maybe just a little icy on the treble side. Hell, I'd buy it right now.

Thanks for the additional feedback.

Hi Bas, to embed mp3s you just put the url between [gmp3] and [/gmp3] when typing the post and it show up as the player (there is also a button for it above the text window).

I have experimented recording to both a click and no click, and the no click ends up sounding better even though it's harder to edit afterwards. I like music that sort of surges forward and pulls back in tempo in a classical music sort of fashion, although I don't claim that all the tempo changes you hear are carefully worked out! Having a solid "groove" and tight rhythmic sense has never been a strength of my playing I admit, but for whatever reason recording without the click (for most of the album) seems to be working better for me.

Thanks Matt, I've always admired your playing so your words are encouraging.

I've gotten more than one comment about the brightness of the recording- the references I'm using (solo acoustic guitar like Andy McKee, solo bass like Michael Manring and Jeff Schmidt, some other Stick albums) seem to have even more high end then what I'm using, but I plan to listen on several different systems to better judge the balance. Each iteration through the mix seems to get a little better.

Rob, you rock!

And I didn't perceive ANY tempo variation (even if there probably were some).

Now let us don't forget that manhood has been playing music without click tracks until 1980

Thanks a lot for your music. Looking forward to hear more.

Olivier

When everything is recorded and mixed, will you use a mastering studio before making cd copies or will you do that work yourself? A good mastering tech will take care of the hi end and other things if (!) it is a problem.

Mixing is a hard thing since you most likely don´t have the same speakers and the same acoustics in the room where you are mixing as most listeners have at home. I have Mackie HR824 speakers in the studio I run and they sound great and they are VERY revealing when it comes to faults like hi end noise, digital clicks and things like that but when mixing through them, the end result often gets too smooth if not being careful. So I need to mix the sound harder than what I hear. I love those speakers and I won´t replace them with anything else but one needs to get used to them abit and learn how your mixes sound through other speakers and adopt you mixing to what you learn from that. Listen to your mixes in your (and/or your friends) car stereo, through mp3-players, headphones and other places. Make notes from what you hear and get to know your speakers and the room where you work. I have three different speaker pairs in the studio. The Mackie speakers (my main speakers), Tannoy Sixes and small Yamaha NS10MM (mini monitors). I often check how a mix sound through all of these speakers and a couple of different head phones when mixing to get a decent idea regarding how it might sound elsewhere.

I really like how you mix your Stick. Sounds great to me. Seems like you take it more easy on the reverb this time. I like that. I don´t like too much reverb. Prefer delay myself along with enough of reverb.

Sincerely//Jan

Rob-it sounds Excellent!!!
Being a bass player-I would knock a little 450-500 Hz off the track on the bass side-but hey that's me!!!!
Mike L.

Hi Rob,

I think the playing is great and really enjoyed the piece.

I agree with the comment about the high freqs in a lot of modern solo albums. On my system, your recording sounds heavy in the high mids compared to the artists you mentioned. Manring and Schmidt both use a fairly "scooped" bass sound and very light gauge, bright strings, while the acoustic guitar has an entirely different crispness in the highs. If you haven't tried it yet, maybe run some of your favourite artists through a frequency analyzer (I use Waves PAZ or Wavelab) and then compare your own tracks. This is a fairly simple way of pinpointing which frequencies might be missing or too prominent.

Just a general observation; from what I've heard of the P4 pickup, it does appear to have a stronger midrange "presence" than the Stickup or A2 (?).
Comments anyone?

I also tend to agree about going without a click being preferable. In my experience, most (not all) solo instrumental performances record better without a click, as they need to "breathe". There might be slight variations in tempo, but you'll hear the same in recordings by McKee & Co.

Cheers,
Andy