Come On (The Budda Budda Song)

    This is the 5th song on my little personal goal for 2018 of writing / recording something each month. This is May’s song which I posted around 3 mins before midnight so it was still in May. Honest :).


    I bought some Selah Sounds profiles lately and like them a lot; the wah sound is one of their Fenders with a Kemper wah up front and the main little riffy thing is the highest gain one in their Matchless pack. Guitar here is a PRS Stripped ‘58 which has lowish output vintage style pickups and, for my taste, this makes a nice sound with the Matchless.


    Hope someone out there likes it - it’s very much a pop song so, if you’re expecting hardcore or blistering solos look away now :)


    https://doubleyou1.bandcamp.co…e-on-the-budda-budda-song

    Thank you for the kind words - really glad you like it :)


    I actually bought a new audio interface 6 weeks back and I recorded the last song / this one with it. The preamps on there are soooo much cleaner than my old one which means that, hiss free, I can get a decent signal through the Shure SM7b. I can now set this appropriately for gain staging and find that, if I peak everything going into the computer at -12dB then Neutron, Ozone and all the simulated tape / desks that make me pretend to know what I’m doing sound there best. I can then cheat outrageously and they do a good job. I just pan it at that point, nothing else! Also liking the fact that I am now getting much quieter Kemper into my interface..... my previous FireWire always gave me more noise even though I was using spdif. Strange but true. I am deeply in love with this new one - one of the best buys I have made in a long time.


    Another thing that helped is a really useful meter in Neutron 2 called Tonal Balance Control - it’s brilliant. I’m still getting used to how to fix tracks that are not ‘tonally balanced’ according to this meter but, in this song, it was spot on anyway and the fact it just fell into place and sounded ‘right’ is giving me more confidence in what this meter is saying! I know there is the old thing about trusting your ears and of course this is true but when you’re writing and recording alone it’s really helpful to have another opinion and this thing seems to have taste that agrees with my own so I’ll keep using it :)

    Thanks Waraba,


    It’s the Focusrite Clarrett 4 usb. They’ve only been out a few months now and I really like the preamps on there. They claim to model some much higher end preamps and have an ‘air’ mode. I’m not sure what it’s actually doing but you can hear a relay clicking in the box when you change from air mode to normal. The mixer software is a lot simpler as well vs the old Safire I had which required a degree from NASA to do anything :)


    For the acoustics, I have an SE Electronics condenser mic that actually clamps onto the acoustic guitar. I got it well under half price a few years back but it’s never sounded this good! All I did with this track was record a take for the left channel, another take for the right and hard panned them. I did squirt them through Neutron on it’s automatic mode but TBH it actually did almost nothing - these sounded ‘right’ without any real work at all. Just a bit or reverb and that’s it.

    Quote from Gary_W

    Thank you for the kind words - really glad you like it :)


    I actually bought a new audio interface 6 weeks back and I recorded the last song / this one with it. The preamps on there are soooo much cleaner than my old one which means that, hiss free, I can get a decent signal through the Shure SM7b. I can now set this appropriately for gain staging and find that, if I peak everything going into the computer at -12dB then Neutron, Ozone and all the simulated tape / desks that make me pretend to know what I’m doing sound there best. I can then cheat outrageously and they do a good job. I just pan it at that point, nothing else! Also liking the fact that I am now getting much quieter Kemper into my interface..... my previous FireWire always gave me more noise even though I was using spdif. Strange but true. I am deeply in love with this new one - one of the best buys I have made in a long time.


    Another thing that helped is a really useful meter in Neutron 2 called Tonal Balance Control - it’s brilliant. I’m still getting used to how to fix tracks that are not ‘tonally balanced’ according to this meter but, in this song, it was spot on anyway and the fact it just fell into place and sounded ‘right’ is giving me more confidence in what this meter is saying! I know there is the old thing about trusting your ears and of course this is true but when you’re writing and recording alone it’s really helpful to have another opinion and this thing seems to have taste that agrees with my own so I’ll keep using it :)

    Nice! Glad you're liking the new interface. I use Izotope too, great stuff. If you're ever finding a volume issue with the SM7B grab yourself a Cloudlifter, it work wonders!

    I actually bought a Cloudlifter at the same time as the SM7b and it’s brilliant. It’s just that, with my previous interface, the noise floor came up a lot too. It was fine(ish!) until you then added compression plus a bit of saturation then stuck Ozone on the master bus to maximise the whole thing. At that point the shush you got was really noticeable but this new one is spookily silent.