Me and a friend of mine go out gigging as an acoustic duo under the name of Rain Dogs. I play guitar and my firend sings and plays mandolin, banjo or fiddle. We do all sorts of things folkey and irish stuff too (get a bit of work doing 'irish nights').
Anyways, we decided we needed a CD to help market and that's what I've put up here. The tracks are a bit on the large size as they're 320Kbps MP3s. In these days of fat pipes, I think it's worth it for the quality.
There are four tracks.
Quaker : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/quaker.mp3
Quaker is one of those Irish sorta jiggy dance songs. A good standard for the Irish camp.
The Back Door : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/backdoor.mp3
Originally a french cajun song by a guy called D.L. Menard. We do it in english as it works well.
Ride On : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/rideon.mp3
One of our more well known songs A Christy Moore classic. Although somehow it turns Gary Moore at the end ;-)
Chocolate Jesus : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/chocolatejesus.mp3
A Tom Waits number. Although there's no chance of it sounding like Tom Waits vocally, this is a bit more accessible to the unitiated than the original, and I've tried to keep the spirit of Waits in the mix.
Now for the geeky stuff.
I undertook all the production / engineering / mixing etc for this, which was quite a challenge considering I'm playing on it too.
We hired out a small local studio for the day, only spent about 2 hours getting the basics down in order to keep costs low. A fair bit was added during the mixing stage that I did at home. We recorded into Protools through a Mackie DXb (which was really used as nothing more than a fancy pre-amp). Tracking was basically a case of me and my friend playing to create a decent guide/base take and then overdubbing vocals and extra bits as long as time in the studio allowed.
We had two rooms to record in. One acoustically treated and rather dry, and one very live plywood room. We recorded instruments in the live room where possible but also took D.I.s out (all the instruments had very nice pickups / preamps) so I could get a good balance during mixing.
Once we had everything recorded (no mean feat in 8 hours including setup) the tracks were bounced down to WAV files so I could import into Cubase 5 and do the mixing at home. I probably spent a couple of hours mixing each track with the exception of Chocolate Jesus. That took a bit more because we only got two electric guitar tracks, the banjo, and the vocals out of the studio. A fair bit of work was needed to bring the final mix up to something that sounded substantial.
All in all, the thing cost us £80 to make. Considering we only spent 8 hours in the studio, I'm very happy with the results. There was no time to have perfect micing of instruments etc, there was a very limited selection of mics and what have you, although what we were using was pretty much top notch.
I'd love to know what you guys think. I know that from this forum I'll get honest opinions and intelligent debate :icon_thumright:
Anyways, we decided we needed a CD to help market and that's what I've put up here. The tracks are a bit on the large size as they're 320Kbps MP3s. In these days of fat pipes, I think it's worth it for the quality.
There are four tracks.
Quaker : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/quaker.mp3
Quaker is one of those Irish sorta jiggy dance songs. A good standard for the Irish camp.
The Back Door : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/backdoor.mp3
Originally a french cajun song by a guy called D.L. Menard. We do it in english as it works well.
Ride On : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/rideon.mp3
One of our more well known songs A Christy Moore classic. Although somehow it turns Gary Moore at the end ;-)
Chocolate Jesus : http://www.educrate.co.uk/raindogs/chocolatejesus.mp3
A Tom Waits number. Although there's no chance of it sounding like Tom Waits vocally, this is a bit more accessible to the unitiated than the original, and I've tried to keep the spirit of Waits in the mix.
Now for the geeky stuff.
I undertook all the production / engineering / mixing etc for this, which was quite a challenge considering I'm playing on it too.
We hired out a small local studio for the day, only spent about 2 hours getting the basics down in order to keep costs low. A fair bit was added during the mixing stage that I did at home. We recorded into Protools through a Mackie DXb (which was really used as nothing more than a fancy pre-amp). Tracking was basically a case of me and my friend playing to create a decent guide/base take and then overdubbing vocals and extra bits as long as time in the studio allowed.
We had two rooms to record in. One acoustically treated and rather dry, and one very live plywood room. We recorded instruments in the live room where possible but also took D.I.s out (all the instruments had very nice pickups / preamps) so I could get a good balance during mixing.
Once we had everything recorded (no mean feat in 8 hours including setup) the tracks were bounced down to WAV files so I could import into Cubase 5 and do the mixing at home. I probably spent a couple of hours mixing each track with the exception of Chocolate Jesus. That took a bit more because we only got two electric guitar tracks, the banjo, and the vocals out of the studio. A fair bit of work was needed to bring the final mix up to something that sounded substantial.
All in all, the thing cost us £80 to make. Considering we only spent 8 hours in the studio, I'm very happy with the results. There was no time to have perfect micing of instruments etc, there was a very limited selection of mics and what have you, although what we were using was pretty much top notch.
I'd love to know what you guys think. I know that from this forum I'll get honest opinions and intelligent debate :icon_thumright:
