I recorded an album
called Sources of Light, released in October 2024. I started recording it
and finished . Here are
some probably fairly boring details about the recording process, gear and music.
Gear
For all recordings, I used Ardour 6 on Ubuntu Studio. Almost all of the production effects
were from Calf Studio Gear plugins.
All guitar effects, pre-amps and modeling was from a Line 6 Go stomp box. I recorded directly
into a Scarlett USB audio interface.
All rhythym/clean guitars were doubled, one panned hard left and the other hard right. Lead vocals
were also doubled in the same way. Acoustic guitars (except for a few cases) were also
doubled and panned. This hardcore doubling was a bit of an experiment. I think I liked
it, even though it made recording take a bit longer.
To handle all the track doubling during the mixing phase, I would created audio buses
in Ardour and redirect the outputs of the doubled tracks to the bus, and then redirect
the bus output to the master track. All automation was then only done on the buses; the
doubled tracks were not touched except to set the panning. So there were a lot more
tracks/buses to handle in Ardour than otherwise. Basically every instrument that I doubled
would actually have three "tracks" in the DAW interface instead of just one. Which was
obnoxious but I think it made a difference in the resultant mix.
Drums were programmed using Hydrogen 1.x with the flac gcs instrument pack. I did very little
to the drums except increasing the gain of the kick, snare and hi-hat. Otherwise I did
absolutely nothing to them production-wise. Largely out of pure laziness.
In all cases I recorded all instruments, one at a time, from start to finish. Then the
vocals, then I would do a rough mix, then program the drums, then finish mixing and any
other post-production effects (that was pretty rare, though).