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FIFO Studios, Rolleston (2025)

02/06/2025

As per previous post, due to occupational changes, I live in a Toyota Hilux four weeks out of every six!

There's only so much space to chuck music gear into a company vehicle, and since I want anything I record to preferably have all stringed instruments performed by me, I've decided to get a little bit creative with the bass!

I'm not exactly the pioneer of this, but turns out just recording a guitar through an audio interface accompanied by Reaper's complimentary EQ and pitch shifter plugins creates a pretty convincing bass guitar input!

Results after a couple of swing change beers in the vid below 👇

20/05/2025

Slight occupational changes have made it so that I had to "update" my home studio

But as the saying goes...

"Limitations breed creativity"

15/03/2024

Only been a few months...

Got back into it this week after Spotify not working and remembering that I have about 50 versions of this test song saved on my phone.

I fixed up a few wee arrangement issues and got stuck back into playing around with EQ.

This small 5 or 6 second section in the solo is where I mainly focused on, because it addressed a couple of key issues I was having with my levels.

This section was good to focus on in particular because solo aside, it kind of needed the rhythm to have a "build up" feel to it.

Composure wise I did this by just having the drums drop into a basic machine gun double kick beat with the bass just following the kicks. This meant that the kicks and the bass had to really stick out from, but also complement each other. I could never get the kicks or bass to really stick out hidden underneath a guitar solo and rhythm guitar.

I finally worked out that it was the guitar covering up the kicks, presumably by sitting at a similar frequency and making it so nothing was working with each other. With a bit of a guitar and kick drum EQ tweak with no small thanks to some EQ cheat sheets on Google, everything started to separate and find their own space.

For all I know this particular lot of wee tweaks might sound like absolute s**t through a stereo or car speakers, but if nothing else as demonstrated in the video, it's a good reminder that a good way to know how much one particular thing can be heard amongst the rest is by simply bringing in the instruments one by one until they're all playing and have a listen.

23/10/2023

It's been a hot minute...

After far too much time procrastinating, I have finished all guitar and bass tracking! (Takes some time when you're mediocre at guitar at best, and guitar the solo still may need to be done a bit less s**t).

The main thing to note about this part of the process was me recording four of the exact same rhythm track, and two of the lead parts. I'm not sure how necessary four takes was, but I figured better to have too many than regret not recording more. In relation to the video below this actually came in handy to have two separate takes per speaker.

Although I've been mucking around with things such as drum sample sounds, guitar tones etc I'll rekindle things with a bit of an update on editing my recordings.

Here are two notable edits that came to me during the recording process. I'm not sure how conventional it is to start editing and chopping recordings up before even finishing recording but hey, doing it on the fly made sure I didn't forget. If this is the dumbest thing to do in music production feel free to let me know lol

First off,

RHYTHM GUITAR PANNING

First up in this video, I had this idea for the rhythm guitar under the solo to have the gallops in the riff alternate from left to right speakers to create a call and response effect, and to build some suspense/anticipation for the climax of the solo.

I achieved this by first cutting out parts of the left guitar tracks and pasting some "void" in their place. I did this for the first four bars in the eight bar section that I had decided to do the effect.

I then did the same cut and paste technique for the last four bars, except this time with the right hand guitars, giving off the call and response effect I was going for.

By themselves as shown in the video, they sound pretty rough.
But I feel with all four guitars together they sound good enough, and with the drums, bass and solo added back in any wee imperfections are virtually inaudible.

CUTTING/TRIMMING GUITAR AND BASS

The second effect shown in this video I feel is a relatively cliché technique. Basically to create a bit more of an impact, I took a two quarter note section of a 4/4 bar that had the bass as well as all four guitars doing one big long open E, and cut it to only have two guitars doing the sustained note.

Because, (as I'm sure I've mentioned in an earlier post) the classic two guitars panned hard left and hard right trick is kind of for all intents and purposes "one guitar", this leaves this small two quarter note section feel like everything has dropped away bar one guitar and the ringing of a lone crash cymbal from the drums.

The two other guitars, bass and drums return for the second half of the bar, all together doing an (also) cliché sextuplet roll to carry the song on.

To my ear this creates a "more is less" effect and gives the second half of the bar with the sextuplets a bit more punch.

Sounds terrible? Bad practice to start editing before finishing recording? Riffs suck?

Roast me.

31/07/2023

I can't imagine anyone is super concerned but lack of activity on this page has been due to me pretending to be a carpenter, engineer, mechanic, s***t shooter, and skater, instead of pretending to be a John Deere parts advisor and music producer like usual. Alcohol consumption may have also increased with the week away from work.

10/07/2023

Below is the video I wanted to include in the previous post, that is more or less a scratch track/demonstration of where I'm up to in the recording process. I'll do more on drums later, but for now this is what will probably be the final step in recording the bass as far as tone goes.
All that will really happen with bass after this is whatever I need to do to get it to sit well with the drums, vocals and guitar.

There's roughly recorded guitars in there, just lead, rhythm and solo straight down the middle, no panning, one track per role just for reference sake. Just loud enough to hear to know where the song is at while I'm playing.

Check out the single take video below. I'll also add a link to the video I mentioned in my previous post in the
comments here.
Love the sound of it? I'more than happy to share you the exact amp and EQ settings for you to use with your own projects.

Otherwise, does it sound like absolute s**t?
Is my bass playing so bad I should quit Scizerac and SWARF?

Roast me.

10/07/2023

BASS RECORDING/TRACKING

Here's an update on where I'm at with bass. I couldn't nut out how to include both video and pictures in one post so I'll include the video I had for this one in a separate post.

I am tone deaf as hell when it comes to setting up an amp, no matter what instrument. It took a bit of Youtubing to get this to sound half decent, but I feel after some tutorials and trial and error, I've found that sweet spot between bassy and twangy with the right amount of distortion that doesn't muddy up the notes, at least to my ear.

Below are some screenshots of the final set up. I'd say pretty odd for some, but it worked for me. If you want a more in depth look at this method follow the link in description to a video by a channel by the name of Osiris Guitars. It also explains how to route all the tracks I've written about in this post to work together as one to make up the whole bass track.
I've skimmed over some other videos from this guy and he seems great for producing metal within Reaper.

Here's what he covers in the video in as basic terms that I can explain, along with how mine differs from Osiris Guitar's video.

The idea is to have three separate tracks that make up the main track. One for low end, another for mids and "fuzz" and a third to get that final bit of heavy distortion without overpowering everything else.

Mine differs with my track with the actual recording in it also having a bass amp on it instead of it just acting as a "DI", therefore I've named mine "AMP".
This just seemed to give it some more low end. just a straight clean tone amp and cab.

Other than that, this method is executed by first adding a "low end" track with no effects whatsoever except a high pass filter with Reaper's built in ReaEQ plugin to boost the low end frequency.

Next is a "mid"track. I think exact same amp and settings as my "DI/AMP" track but with a bass distortion pedal added. It also has a high pass filter with the ReaEQ plugin that boosts the mids frequency.

Lastly, there is the distorted high end. Again, uses the ReaEQ plugin with a high pass filter, and exact same EQ settings. The difference with this layer is you add a guitar amp with high gain instead of a bass amp. By itself a very ear piercing sound, but mixed in with the rest? Sounds like some good ol nasty modern era bass.

My method here is record the parts on the red "BASS REC" track (routed the same as "AMP" track) which is identical to the "AMP" track, and when I'm happy with a take, cut and paste it into the "AMP" track and continue recording another section.

Most overcomplicated way to produce a good bass tone within a DAW? Kind of stupid that the most successful I've been with music is professionally record bass yet can't dial in a good bass tone without assistance?

Roast me.

10/07/2023

PREPPING THE INSTRUMENTS

To make my recording instruments sound as good as they possibly can, I have restrung them all.
This is pretty much recording 101, but I also ensured that action and intonation was as good as can be, and particular attention was paid to the LTD being floyd rose.

I removed the strings, cleaned the guitar in every nook and cranny and lubed up all moving parts (tuning pegs, bridge tuning k***s, etc.)

Video on bass tone and recording coming soon.

09/07/2023

Slightly off topic, but for a bit of a laugh and an experiment I pumped out a song as fast as possible in a completely different genre than what I'd ever write or play.

I did this to try have no sentiment to the song or to overthink things. Purely just to say I've finished a song. If it was a song I'd spent months writing I feared that I'd probably never be able to call it finished, so I did this to get me across that first song boundary. There's virtually no techniques in this apart from a bit of compression and EQ, and I'm pretty sure it's rendered a lot quieter than other media on YouTube, it's far from perfect.

But hey not a single part of this song existed until 9am yesterday. No riffs or nothing. I composed it roughly, made the drum beat in Guitar Pro, extracted it into Reaper, made all the guitar tones from scratch, recorded everything, and then simply adjusted levels to make it sound not too terrible.

I've chucked this on YouTube and gave myself a country musician alter ego cos I thought it was funny lol

Roast me.

06/07/2023

GUITAR PRO MOCK UP/DRUM MIDI TRACK

Unfortunately this came out looking like I captured all of the video with a potato, but either way here's a compressed look into my next stage of writing a song and building up my drum track.
I'll do another video showing me exporting the drums from Guitar Pro into Reaper later.

This step in the process develops the final song structure, gives me a scratch track to practice parts to, note down any changes later down the track and most importantly, this is where the drum track starts to take it's form.

Usually I'll write out the initial riff. From there I keep adding as much to the song structure that I've thought out already, then add drums and bass.

In this video you see me (in about 240p) add guitars, bass and drums to a project.
From there it demonstrates a small section of Neurillogical being fleshed out in it's early stages. From main riff, to rhythm, bass then drums.
At the end I've included small samples of how the project sits to this day after a lot more development, ready for the drum MIDI to be exported into Reaper, and for the final Guitar Pro project to be used as a backing track to practice bass and guitar parts before recording.

Few things to note specifically about techniques I've used in Guitar Pro in this video;
As you may have seen, a lot of copy and paste goes into this stage of development with me.

I try keep the drums to the most basic they can be to begin with to cover as much of the song as they can unless I have specific ideas for different parts right from the start.

It's not always appropriate, but in this video if you look closely, I copied the entire rhythm guitar and pasted it into the bass track. I then highlighted the lot and "rested" all the notes. This eliminated the melody but left the rhythm. Because the bass follows the rhythm guitar exact in this particular section of the song, this meant that all I had to do is go through and add what fret the bass is playing to tab out the bass line.

If you happen to want to know more about Guitar Pro feel free to comment or message the page.

Do you have a better way to use Guitar Pro?
Am I an amateur to even use Guitar Pro in the first place? Have you got a migraine from squinting at your phone screen trying to focus on a blurry video thanks to my incompetence at using a computer?

Roast me.

05/07/2023

FIRST SONG - THE INITIAL COMPOSITION

WORKING TITLE "NEURILLOGICAL"

To begin with, I wanted a song that was easy to play so that less time was spent trying to get recordings as tight as possible, and more time and energy was used learning how to mix and master a song.
It's a song that's purpose is basically a learning tool, but I feel I've slowly developed it into something that's at least kinda cool.
Think not? .

This video is the riffs that make up the bulk of the song as it was in the first few weeks of writing it.
I haven't bothered to play this perfectly or in time, nor spent more than about 2 minutes making a good guitar amp tone in Pod Farm to give an impression of the early stages of the song's development.

This started out as just a wee 100bpm mess around riff to play while I was jamming with a beginner drummer one day.

It's not something I would usually bother to write down since it was a very basic and bland riff, but I decided since it's easy to play, it would be perfect to expand on and use as a base for a basic song to record.

The structure I built around this riff is very simple and cliché, kind of on purpose, but also it just came naturally as I worked on it.
It's more or less the metal standard; Intro>Verse>Chorus>Bridge>Verse>Solo>Outro with some minor differences.

This first riff in this video is the base riff. I quickly decided this will be the intro to the song, as well as a "main riff" that would appear in the choruses.

The second two are the transitional riff from intro to verse 1, and the verse riff itself.

Next up is the chorus rhythm. Just an easy chug riff going between E and A to go underneath the main riff.
This also doubles as the solo section rhythm, I may cover the composition of the actual solo in a later post, but I just noodled around playing some basic licks with this riff on loop in Guitar Pro to write the guitar solo itself.

Next in the video is the bridge riff between chorus 1 and verse 2. Nothing notable about this really, it's just used to break up the chorus and verse.

The last in the video is just some basic power chords that fit with the main riff, sort of works as a final chorus and climax.
From a purely functional perspective with this section, I wanted a part of the song that gives the bass a bit of room to be heard and play something completely different to the guitars to help me get a better idea of mixing guitars and bass together.

S**t song writing process? Hilarious that it's the most E minor bashing 4/4 basic riffs you've ever heard?

Roast me.

FIFO Studios

02/06/2025

20/05/2025

15/03/2024

23/10/2023

31/07/2023

10/07/2023

10/07/2023

10/07/2023

09/07/2023

06/07/2023

05/07/2023

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