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| I would like to start this page with an enormous 'thank you' to everyone who has encouraged and helped guide me in the right direction throughout the engineering of this collection of songs. It has been no easy task for me to accomplish and has easily consumed a rather large part of a whole year to produce. I have known for several years that what would ultimately satisfy me is to be in a position to be able to perform, produce, record and mix a whole album of original music on my own terms. My lifetime conspirator, Luray (who just so happens to be my all-time favorite vocalist) and I have co-written, co-arranged and performed all of the songs you will hear on this cd. Not all of the songs were written traditionally; for example: Luray had presented me with a completely arranged, yet unaccompanied vocal track that had to have all of the instrumentation you will hear on the song written around that vocal track (Hell in the Heart). Each of us has had an equal part in the final arrangements of all the songs and no 'pop song formula' has been followed or applied. We encourage all of our songs to grow in the direction they choose and steer as many of them as possible from crossing any bridges... no matter how accustomed people may be to hearing a bloody bridge written into every popular song, we refuse to do it. |
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| I am playing all of the acoustic & electric guitars, bass guitar, mandolin and playing a drum set... there is not one single note of computer programmed music on this cd. Everything is being recorded on a Boss BR1600 CD digital multi-track recorder. The '80s vintage Fender Strat-Plus electric guitar sounds I have captured have all been painstaking attempts at strategic placement of a Shure SM-57 microphone in front of a Vibro-World 4 x 12 Marshall slant cabinet loaded with Celestion Greenback speakers and the cabinet is powered by a Ben Fargen Mighty-Plex tube amplifier. For the acoustic guitar tracks I used an Audio-Technica AT3060 condenser microphone exclusively, in relatively close at the neck/body seam of my Martin, and used the same technique on a track or two using a late 1800s Washburn mandolin. The drum set I used is one of the mid-grade Roland electronically triggered sets allowing very little control over the individual drum sounds in the mix, as the whole kit goes to tape in stereo on 2 tracks as you play. The up side was that I disturbed no-one in the neighborhood by banging on this set at full volume and the drum tracks do sound surprisingly good, I am simply a purist and would have preferred the really big acoustic drum sound recorded in a nice sounding room had that been an option. All vocal tracks were recorded using the same Audio Technica AT3060 microphone I used for recording the Martin. I do not recommend this mic for vocal recordings, but I have not had the money to buy the SE Gemini or the U87 and have settled for what we had available to use at this time. The next recording should sound even better as we are planning on using one or both of the aforementioned microphones in conjunction with an Avalon SP373 combination mic-pre, EQ, compressor. Not that this recording does not sound pleasing, it has turned out to be a much better sounding recording than I could have imagined ahead of the project considering the limitations of the equipment used. I'm not sure what else to say here. If you have any questions about any of the methods or settings used in the production, by all means toss me an email and I will reply at my convenience. I am definitely interested in engineering/producing other folks' music if it is interesting to me and would be willing to arrange doing so for anyone interested. As I said, toss me an email!! -John Kuca, Jr.- |
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