There's quite a lot that changed with my recording process moving on from my charity albums. I had actually put the idea of releasing music again to bed. Life was busy, in a nice new way with starting a family with Kate, so there didn't seem to be much time to sit down and start recording. I was still playing and occasionally making new music but without any goals in mind. It wasn't until the lockdown hit that it just dawned on me.
My brother in law, Dave, passed away from COVID. It was very traumatic for the whole family, let alone my sister in law, Helen, my nephews, Max and Oscar and my in laws, Rob and Bev. Dave was only 49 and to see how things went still angers and shocks me. His passing though did make me sit up and think, “What are you doing? You have all this music doing nothing, why not just give it a shot?”
So through the summer months of 2020 I decided it was time to look into releasing music again. But this time for myself. However, after listening back to all my old work I was just not happy with the quality of the recordings. I needed to try and take a more professional approach. But with a limited budget!
There were a couple of paths I could take to achieve this. Upgrade my recording equipment with new mics, audio interfaces and a better DAW. I had been using a free simple program called Audacity for years which had done the job but had quite a few limitations. The other path was the one I took, mainly because I wanted to hear some of my music along with other instruments. To do this with a lower budget you can look to writing music with MIDI.
For those who don't know, MIDI is data not sound. You program in the notes, volumes and pedalling and these can then be assigned to different digital instruments. The problem is that it is hard to get decent quality sounds without paying a fair sum of money for them.
The other bonus to working with MIDI is that if you make a mistake with a note like playing the wrong note, clipping it or playing it too hard or soft, you can go back and edit in what you intended! Trust me, this happens a lot!
So over the summer I set about learning MIDI on a new DAW called cakewalk. It's still a free DAW but is a better spec than audacity. It just takes time to learn everything. I made quite a lot of mistakes along the way but I was very encouraged after recording a piece that is based off of “Burning” by Einaudi. I never released this track as it was more of a learning tool but having listened to it again recently, it's not too bad! I called it “Template” purely as it was a teaching piece.
However, I was trying to record my digital piano whilst using MIDI to imitate strings. This was still problematic as I was getting feedback still from the piano and couldn't edit things how I wanted. I decided to stump up some cash to buy a piano MIDI sound and chose Cinematic Studio Piano. I'm very happy with my choice as I believe it sounds very realistic. So with these issues sorted I started to record the tracks for my new album “Third Perspective”.
I'll discuss the process of this in another post at a later date. I hope this post has enlightened you on the ways recording has changed for me.