Prince

Participants

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

Recordings

Production Notes

“The Beautiful Ones” covered by Daniel James

• Well, I fell back on digital drums again, but otherwise relatively au naturale with no quantization.  Mostly I think this ended up being a pretty good vocal exercise, with a mix of falsetto, regular, and louder voicings.  I also just simply can’t hit some of the high notes (alas).
• Gear used:
  • DAW:  Ableton + Mac Mini + Tascam 1800 (*note that the tascam has to be rebooted regularly to get out of bad state)
  • Vocals:  Voices into Audix OM7 and Audio Technica AT2035 mics, side by side.  Used both tracks, and applied compression, filtered delay and added amp sim when the yelling started.  No harmonies this time around.  Just one voice.
  • Guitar:  Self-customized HH Stratocaster, using the JB bridge pickup, into a Marshall JCM601 (and using it’s direct out into the daw).  Applied tremolo in some parts; booster in others.
  • Keys:  Prophet 08 direct in, a few tracks with different voices.
  • Bass:  Warwick, but with single coil Seymour Duncan pickups, direct in.  Added compression in daw.
  • Drums:  909 style in the daw via midi keyboard.  One track for cymbals, another for everything else.  Some compression and quantization applied.
  • Mastering:  Just a limiter.

 “Let’s Go Crazy” covered by Robert Turk

• I need to admit that I’ve never owned any Prince albums, ever.
• When I was singing this, it felt wrong.  Like someone would hunt me down and punch me in the face for trying to do this song.
• I did like dancing to Prince songs in Junior High School, so I did have that going for me.
• Unfortunately, dancing to it and covering it are two different things.
  • Guitars: Epiphone 2018 Hummingbird PRO Acoustic + Fender American Elite Telecaster 2017 with 4th Generation Noiseless pickups
  • Bass is a Fender American Standard Precision Bass
  • Drums is Roland V-Drums TD25-KV model electronic drumset.
  • Vocals.  Oh, the vocals…recorded using a Shure58 vocal microphone
  • Recording rig is an iPad Professional using AudioBus v3 and Amplitube mastering software.  The DA/AD device is a Apogee Duet iMac/iPad model.

 “Pop Life” covered by Mark Haller and the Bra Burners

I’ve always been a huge Prince follower, owned all his albums in the 80s and 90s, and have listened to just about everything out there.  While I spent some extra time on this one,  it still could use some fixing.  I chose this song because it is not well known, interesting jazzy chord progression and hook, and frankly it seemed easy.  I tried to take it a different direction emphasizing the intertwining lines, inspired a great deal by an interesting chord transcription found on Ultimate Guitar.

• Guitars :
  • garage sale cheapo, i’ve been playing for years but i really like it
    • used it for the main chords
  • steinberger 5-string bass
    • was excited that this piece was in B so I could use that low string for something
  • steinberger gm3t :  used this for the lead vamping on the instrumental break
• Drums:
  • newl snare/bass cajon
  • sampled yamaha kit – free ableton download (really like this kit)
• Farfisa Microrgan: http://www.musurgia.com/products.asp?ProductID=2752
  • used this instead of a synth part, though i tried many things before settling on it
• Vocals:
  • My wife, Jody, sang Wendy’s  part.  She feels like it is flat, but she did it all in less than 30 minutes.  I like it.
  • Mics – EV-d257 dynamic mic… thing is 25+ years old, and still sounds decent.  one of these days I’ll try a condenser.