TV Themes

* TV show theme songs with actual lyrics

Participants

• Gabi
• Daniel James
• Bryan Finley-James
• Robert Turk
• Andy Roach
• Mark Haller

Recordings

Production Notes

“And Then There’s Maude” covered by Mark Haller and the Bra Burners

• Bea Arthur’s work is dear to my wife, Jody, and I.   Jody showed me the beauty of the “Golden Girls”.  She and I even went to see Bea perform her one woman show at the Paramount theatre back in 2001.   This song is funny and funky, so tried to keep that vibe.  Jody helps me out with backup vocals, and I liked how that turned out.  She hopefully will join me on future pieces.   I don’t think you’d want to hear my falsetto alone.  This was all done with Ableton Live – Intro, and probably would have benefitted from a proper “takes” feature, but we got it down nonetheless.  I wouldn’t mind trying Logic Pro out.  I really wanted to get a funky feel with this and my fingers hurt for a week after playing the bass part 50 times.  Fingers just aren’t used to that!   One of my goals is to try to be a more listenable singer.  This one was in my range.  Still sounds karaoke.  Donny Hathaway may be one of the smoothest singers ever, so a tall order to copy him.
• Gear used:
  • Interface/Preamp:  Behringer U-Phoria
  • DAW: Ableton Live Intro
  • Drums:
    • Cajon – a split one with a bass and snare.  Played live with a wee bit of quantization and lots of compression.  Mic’ed with my ancient Electrovoice N/D257 mic.  A bit of quantization.
    • Ableton rock kit from one of the downloadable packs for cymbals and a little kick drum doubling.
  • Bass: Steinberger Spirit 5-string.   Played as funky as i could muster – no copying but a tiny bit of quantization.
  • Guitar: Steinberger GT – just playing inverted chords on the top 4 strings.  Running through old DP/4 effects processor’s “Compressed guitar” patch, which lives up to its name.
  • Organ:  Ableton’s rock organ
  • Effects:  most tracks have compression, though I’m not sure that’s good.  Vocals, and organ have a little delay.
  • Vocals: Electrovoice N/D257 cardioid mic… i wonder if a condenser mic would be better.    Backup vox have some reverb which worked out nicely.  I normally avoid reverbs.
  • Mastering:  On the current version I used LANDR with the lowest setting.

“Green Acres” covered by Daniel James

• I had actually started off trying to record live drums, but it wasn’t coming together.  Will try again on next song.  Generally speaking, though, I’m trying to head in the direction of using less midi or quantization in favor of more live audio capture.  I changed over to Logic Pro for this recording, as I had been using Ableton for the previous ones, just to see if it made much difference.  Will probably go back to Ableton for the next song, as I don’t think it made that much difference, and there are aspects of Ableton that make the overall production a tad easier.  I also changed over to using a dynamic mic to see if that makes much of a difference as well.  No quantization or pitch correction used unless specified below.
• Gear used:
  • DAW:  Logic Pro + Mac Mini + Tascam 1800 (*note that the tascam has to be rebooted regularly to get out of bad state)
  • Vocals:  Voices into an Audix OM7 mic through a Line 6 HD500x, which had EQ (low freq cut) + compression on.  Applied additional multi-band compression; kept dry.  (Note: Ableton’s delay/reverb options seem a little better than Logic’s, at least for me).
  • Guitar:  Self-built “frankencaster” with an $18 humbucker bridge into an Orange Micro Terror + custom 1×12″ cabinet via Sennheiser e609 mic.  Ended up applying a Vox-like virtual amp + compression on the track to help it cut.  Might have done some light manual quantization for a couple of notes.
  • Keys:  Prophet 08 direct in, two tracks with different voices.  Arpeggiator set to match bpm for one of the voices.
  • Bass:  Warwick, but with single coil Seymour Duncan pickups, direct in.  Added virtual bass amp + compression in daw.  Duplicated to have two tracks, one with deeper frequency response than the other.  Might have done some light manual quantization for a couple of notes.
  • Drums:  909 style in the daw via midi keyboard.  One track for cymbals, another for everything else.  Some compression and quantization applied.
  • Mastering:  Picked one of the rock presets.

“Come on Get Happy” covered by Andy and the Reubens

• I picked this one so that I could push myself to sing in a different key than I normally do. This song is in B-flat and I resisted all temptations to transpose it into C. I will try to re-record the vox at some point to get to a smoother vocal sound. Some of the production was rushed too. I think there is hope for this one at some point when I go back to it.
•  Gear used:
  • Logic Pro X for recording and mastering on an iMac
  • Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 Audio Interface
  • Vox: AT3035 Condenser mic, pitch corrected in some places using Logic Pro Flex Pitch, 5 separately sung tracks for harmonies and “group” sound
  • Background Vox: some sung, some programmed using the Logic Pro Dream Voice instrument
  • Geetar: Fender American Standard Strat with Wet Splinters effect
  • Bass: Fender P-Bass with no effects
  • Drums: “Kyle” Logic Pro drummer Half-Pipe rhythm, using Italo Disco drum kit, augmented with programmed midi fills
  • Keyboards – mixture of live playing and programmed notes, using an M-Audio Keystation 61ES
  • Mastered using Compressor, Channel EQ, and Platinum Verb (to give a slightly lively sound)