After years of learning music production, digging into songwriting this year, I’m very excited to announce we released our first album last night, produced entirely on Ardour! As always it made it so easy to bring our ideas to life.
As per usual for our 2 person group, here is our gear:
Jaguar guitar with P90 pickups
Gretsch Jim Dandy parlor acoustic
Roland Juno DS61 Keyboard
Alesis PerformancePad eDrums
Abasketful of random Latin percussion odds and ends
Ubuntu Studio on an old Mac Air
And here are the plugins used:
Hall and Plate Dragonfly reverbs (love these!)
Reverse Delay by Steve Harris (the lifeblood of nearly every track)
Calf Vintage Delay
Calf Multiband Compressor
Calf SideChain Compressor
Calf Saturator
Calf Limiter
Calf Analyzer (This is such handy tool)
EQ10Q Stereo by Pere Rafois Soler (Swiss army knife EQ)
AutoPanner by TAP
Amp Sim (emulating a Fender) by Guitarix
Tremolo by Guitarix
EBU R128 Meter by Robin Gareus (This meter is so handy)
A HUGE thanks to the Ardour and all these community projects. Enabling artists to do what they love! Feel free to reach out and ask any questions you like, I love talking shop!
Congrats on your release! I listened to the whole album last night and logged in here just now to pm you a congrats, but look, a convenient thread instead!
Very cohesive, solid album. Particularly like Don’t Show Your Face as well as the video you did for it.
Wow! Hey! Thank so much for listening through it, and we appreciate the comments! Cohesion was important and many songs were cut for that reason alone. We wanted each song to stand on its own, but it’s also sort of concept album and you get a fuller experience hearing it all together as an album.
And thanks for checking out the live video too. Just trying to get more content out for folks. I’ve been under a rock lately with other side projects.
Hi there. I checked out the album and it is quite nice and well produced. It is the first album that I’ve heard that was made completely with Ardour. It is remarkable that you accomplished this cohesiveness with only the plugins you’ve mentioned. I’ll use this set for future reference.
Calling me Home is my personal favourite, but I think the strongest part of the album are from Don’t Show your Face through Black Hole. Congratulations.
I am curious. Did you record this on a home studio or a more professional setting?
Well thank you so much for the kind words! Much appreciated for sure.
I may have missed a plugin or two in my list (I’m pretty sure the Calf Phaser was used at one point, for example), but thank you! I’m a big believer that plugins generally get in the way and that fewer is better if you can manage it!
Great question, it was all recorded here at home, in a bedroom we’ve setup as a studio. The room is only partially treated acoustically. I direct-in for most instruments, except acoustics instruments I prefer to mic and not piezo/direct in, but i don’t mic amps. Ardour is doing 80% of the work to create a nice sounding room, making up for my unprofessional setup.
I think this is remarkable. I genuinely can’t tell that you recorded in a homestudio.It seems completely professional to me.
It’s interesting because I guess that the common idea is that to actually do a proper recording one would needs to go to a professional studio. Do you have any resource that you use for treating your room or general recording? I usually use the book Music Production: Learn How to Record, Mix, and Master Music by Hans Weekhout.
I’m sure the quality would take a big step up with a true studio recording with somebody who knows better, with the ideal room, and proper gear. But I don’t believe there is some secret magic that happens in one person’s room that can’t be replicated elsewhere, i’m sure with enough research and prep you can achieve 80% of a real studio’s setup from home… and honestly seeing and toured some of the pro places in town, i felt pretty confident i could create something similar on my own.
So I treat The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook by Bobby Owsinski like it’s the Bible and pull most of my ideas and baselines from there. Chapter 2 discusses room and monitor setup but it doesn’t cover it a ton. I found most of my ideas from researching and observing recording spaces. It seemed the most important things were varying materials and shapes to break up sound wave shapes and also varying absorption rates.
I started by visiting a few acoustic panel calculator webpages, getting the average of their suggestions and then building/testing out different options, and moving things around until everything sounded even and undistorted. I made a few hang-able acoustic panels, and i walked the room clapping and stomping to find the bad reflection spots and hung the panels into problem areas. That helped a ton. I also varied the furniture, chairs, wall hangings, drapes, rugs, and pillows around the room to really break up the sounds and reduce uniform reflections. The room is now decently cosy and decorated, as well as being quite acoustically decent. Hanging and placing things in corners to reduce those areas too, (from plants, various cases or gear, etc) to reduce the corners hard angular shape into something irregular.
So that’s all I’ve done, but again, most of my stuff is direct in, using amp sims and room reverbs to create the soundscape I want. My room only needs to be ‘good enough’ for vocal tracks, acoustic guitar, and autoharp.
You made such a great effort. My home studio room is an acoustical mess, ha, ha. A mess in any ways, actually. Congrats for your release. I’m gomma follow you on spotify. i’ve just posted a thread with my links.
Cheers
