Rated Blue - Turnabout (2020 REMIX)

Hi!

We did an album in 2016 called “Turnabout”, the writing at the time was quite inspired and we tracked it very quickly and then (stupidly) released it the week of Christmas… In hindsight despite the inspired songs the poor release time was only one of multiple issues, I still had much to learn about mixing, my studio monitors at the time were telling lies to me, the vocals needed improvement and the song arrangements were a bit bare for a “listening” album even though they were well received live… So what does one do in a situation like this? Since I’m the writer, producer, engineer and label I thought perhaps a way to redeem the situation (which I realize is only of any real importance at all to me) was to do some Redos and Remixes of the ‘best’ material and in time put out a “Best of” album with tunes from all 3 of our album releases. Our last project “JOY” taught me a lot, introduced me to a lot of new plugins and techniques and a new collaborator brought a whole new pallette of sounds through adding keyboards, in particular the Hammond organ. So here are some remixes for anyone who is interested in listening… These will find their way on to a complete collection this fall but for now they are on my Soundcloud page here:

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I like those tracks! You get a good band sound - is that recorded with mostly live?

1 Like

Hi @jdfight!

Thanks for listening I enjoyed your latest track as well!

We do sometimes track live all at once or mix and match live tracking with some overdubs like this but this album was done track at a time…

We usually start with me sending my guitar to the drummer’s headphones from the control room and getting a ‘drums only’ set of tracks to build on top of… Guitars are tracked from a miked tube amp (an old tweed Fender Pro Junior or a Fender Vibrolux) and most of the time no pedals or effects are used, just turn the amp up to the desired amount of overdrive. Bass is usually a miked amp but with Audio Assault’s ‘Duality’ bass amp plugin we are moving more often to lining in the bass and processing within Ardour. The organ is a Hammond (an L-100 not a B3) and Leslie and the other keyboard stuff is all hardware synths (a Roland JUNO Di). We do track with the same gear we’d play live with so perhaps that makes it sound more live…