32-track Recording on iPhone - a walk-through of While My Guitar Gently Weeps

a few days ago I recorded a version of while my guitar gently weeps a classic Beatles tune from the White Album and the experiment that I conducted because it was an experiment was to see if I could kill this this is the Apple iPhone se witches of 2019 is the base model or the entry-level phone if you will of their range and actually the experiment was a dismal failure because not only could I record 32 things I could play them all back at once with effects all sorts of stuff lots of reverbs delays you name it I thought I'd just put an effect on that see if I can take out the processor on this and I failed now a little preamble 1978 was the year that the 32 channel digital recording format emerged with companies like 3m and Mitsubishi both making open reel reel to reel tape machines which recorded in the digital format those of you have heard the nightfly by Donald Fagen or bot sadly dropped by Wright CUDA will have heard this machine in action there were very early recordings used with the digital machine now 32 channels of digital recording back then 150 thousand dollars for the machine just the machine don't forget there's no that's it's an in and an out with a real going on along the top so you had no processing no mic preamps no nothing so you needed a mixing desk to go with it let's say an MCI board or SSL or something so by the time you finished buying everything cabling everything up buying outboard effects for example reverbs and digital delays and Wow which was expensive back in 1978 if they were existed at all cost you about half a million dollars now if we put that into UK money in 1978 that was about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds and the average house price was ten thousand okay so you could buy an entire street you could just go knock on all your neighbor's doors like to buy your house please and they say yeah fine ma'am and you just owned the entire street that's not really possible in this day and age so I pay 25 pounds a month for this and that's meant to cover the cost of the handset and the cost of the calls which is nothing and text messages nothing so 25 pounds a month for a couple years and then the thing is mine and if you don't upgrade the operating system in now all of that time you're watching this on an old iPhone five by the way which is from 2012 or something and it works perfectly it's videoing in 1080p I've got a little light here and the phone still works now this is a bit like if you've got an upgrade for example it's a bit like having a pair of pliers in your workshop really good pliers you know the comfortable handles they're really good good bit of kit and one night the pliers decides or the owner of the pliers or the manufacturer of the pliers decides that they can to magically upgrade those pliers and in the morning you come down and you go into your workshop and you find that your beloved pair of pliers now has a hammer attachment on one of the handles great oh oh brilliant let's got a hammer oh great all right I can hammer and then when it comes to using the pliers again you can't get your hands around the handles because there's a hammer attachment in the way that's kind of how I view lots of these things if you get something that's free free upgrade doesn't always mean it's gonna be free it might mean that it's gonna cost you a lot of money to sort out especially if it's a computer so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you the processes by which I recorded this tune on this machine I did make a video at the time but it was on a grainy little dashcam and it was nearly five hours in length and of course he captured all the takes and all the swearing and although know all the things that really don't form part of a demonstration so here goes just one other thing before we start I had two little bits of kit but I used to aid me in the recording process and one of those was this this is the zoom I q6 as you can see there are two microphones arranged in well at the moment a ninety degree angle so I used that to record the piano in stereo and the drums in stereo everything else I just used one of the mics which you can select in GarageBand I also had this this is the eirick stomp and I plugged my guitars in there and a lead came out of there to feed the phone itself so I used the amp simulators onboard so those are the two little bits of kit so when you listen to the mic though the the vocal takes or the string takes it was on this mic you can do it with the internal mic on the phone but it's not as good and actually I wanted to try and you know lift it up a bit and also of course to plug this in to see if I could kill the processor by having an external piece of kit recording at the same time as playing back thirty other tracks for example so there we go here goes [Music] [Music] so here we are with my iPhone se and I've just played you a very short excerpt of that tune just so you can see all of those tracks that I recorded I've recorded on all 32 available tracks it doesn't mean 32 discrete things because if you record in stereo you're actually recording on two tracks at once because you got left and right therefore the number of tracks diminishes if you use stereo sounds a stereo source and in this case it was the zoom iq6 that I used for a stereo sound now looking at the left hand side here we've got the mixer pane if I drag that out there you can see that I've named all of my tracks now when you're working with 32 tracks you've really got to get on top of your file hierarchy so you can see nine violin parts there and acoustic guitars bass piano all sorts now the order of recording at the moment is you can see all of the tracks on here are blue they're all audio tracks there we go but I recorded everything to a programs drum rhythm which was actually one of the tracks on GarageBand but because I used all 32 to record audio I had to delete the drum rhythm at the end now when you program up a drum rhythm you have to be really really let's just check the tempo of this just so Anton yes 66 so if I just go into a new song for example there we go now when I recorded this I basically did a drum track find for select a tempo of 68 68 is quite slow therefore if you just use the click at the top there it's not going to give you the resolution to play to so something like this [Music] [Music] yeah okay you can tell my planes not very good on that but what I had was sixteenth notes because that metronome just going tick-tock doc there's an awful lot of space between those beats so basically I programs three drum rhythms in I did an intro one which was just high hats then the verse which was on the high hats the bass and snare like that and then I did this this one and then just put the ride cymbal in to sort of to give that give it a chorus II feel so that's what I did first so if I go back to the other one which is still called my song 15 I think everyone's got a my song 380 on their iPad or iPhone my next job having put the drums down was to put the piano down partly because the piano is recording in a different room is recording in my sort of extension our dining room where the piano sits so if I just go and play that back from the start [Music] now one reason that I recorded the piano first was twofold really first of all you get a nice balanced mid-range sound that you can hear easily it's not you're not recording to a bass or just high hats for example you've also got cords and bass line at the same time you've got cords bass line and some little sort of other twiddly bits that you can record stuff to so the next thing that I did if I just bring in the drums I recorded which are at the top here [Music] those drums I recorded at the end but after the piano I put the bass down now the bass is I recorded this via the iRig and I just plugged into the the phone and just recorded the signal level I didn't use a bass amp simulator I just recorded it as a standard sort of vocal type take on something like this so squeeze is like a compressor and that indeed the bass is compressed here so if I just play back the piano bass and drums [Music] [Music] that gives me enough sort of to play to so the next things I record it with the two acoustic guitars why did I record - well I if I just unsolo the bass and the piano now leaving just the guitars I recorded to get kusa guitar tracks that was as similar as I could get them and then pan them hard left and right so just the drums and the acoustic guitars oh I'll just fast-forward so here they come [Music] [Music] so what acoustic guitars were do in this situation is to give you rhythmic information that maybe the bass and the piano didn't give but it also gives it a nice stereo flavor so now we've got essentially bass drums piano and guitars [Music] so you've got that sort of stereo spread and we've now covered all of our frequencies we've got the bass end with the bass guitar we've got the mid with piano and to a certain extent the drums and mid to top with the acoustic guitars that means that everything else that I put on I can consider in an audio way so that I'm not sort of putting lots and lots of mid stuff down first of all for example it's just getting getting all of those things in one place so the next thing I did was to put the lead guitar down so if I just go back to the the beginning of the verse now the lead guitar recorded using the iRig through a guitar amp in this case it's like the marshall sort of thing that is that is on here you can change this afterwards of course but essentially I just dialed in a sound that would work for me and actually I didn't end up changing it anyway so if I just play you that back [Music] and she won't see the love there that's sleeping and here comes the guitar film [Music] Williams and then as you can hear when I press stop there there was an echo now this is where I started to apply plugins and the reason I did that was because I wanted something to sing to which was the next thing I did the lead vocals wherever they happen to be was all a little bit higgledy-piggledy with the with the order so the lead vocal by solo that out now I'm going to go into song settings which is the cogwheel up here sorry track controls do big bottom and then you've got the track volume the track pan the fact that it's so loud you also got a compressor and some some effects here as well if we're going to plugins an EQ you can see that there are a few effects that I've got on my lead vocal at the floor and a seed beats weepy still my guitar gently weeps [Music] Reverb czar funny one you've just got to be very careful with it because if you go really hammer and tongs with you reverb it can just make a mix sound really tired and actually quite quite hard to mix so in fact my reverb here I can even go a bit less with it nobody told you how to what for Joe maybe a little bit but there we go so you access all of your effects in here now you don't need to go back to your screen - you don't need to go back to your main screen see what the effects on the other channels are doing so looking at this one for example I just that's one of my acoustic guitars so you can see I didn't apply any effects to it that's all apart from the effect EQ which is actually something built into your - the the sort of the the profile that you record on for example this is called fun and clean I think there we go so it's obviously put on and yeah this is the effect EQ this tone it just happens to be in the middle so it doesn't affect the sound so oh this have a look what have I got now then after the vocals I had pretty much the tune ready to tinker out around with with other things like the flutes and the violins extra guitar parts and backing vocals and my pedal steel guitar pedal steel is a very very useful instrument in your studio because you can create all sorts of textures with it if I just go back to the beginning and play the intro without the pedal steel [Music] now I'm going to add the pedal steel and you can hear that you can get an extra dimension without necessarily sort of making it at the forefront of your mix [Music] no it's turned it up there Susi could hear it when it was coming in there okay next up I had my Yamaha YC 45 D you can see a demo of that on my channel or my youtube channel and it's a fantastic double manual seventies keyboard and as you can hear it does give you some possibilities in terms of the what really just keeping that mid-range alive in your mix probably what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a few things away now just so that I can home in on other things now of course there's no sort of master unsolo that you would get on sort of digital audio workstations we must not forget that this is a free plugin a free program rather a free sort of app and although I talked about the 32 travel tape recorder of the 70s being mega expensive it would be perverse to come to compare the quality of that versus this because actually I'd much rather have a 32 track digital machine and a mixing desk because the quality is much much higher and you could in mmm eminently more flexible so if I just listen to the Yamaha R at the beginning the keyboard [Music] it's just an extra nice mid-range glue to get everything to get to sort of work together now all the other supporting parts I've got my strings now strings and I'll come to the flutes in a minute strings are a really big thing to get right not only the tuning and the playing of the violin but also the fact that you can see I've recorded nine parts and why nine well there are three harmony parts but I record each one of those three times now that gives you a nice spatial effect but it also allows you to mask any small inaccuracies with one part and the other two parts would essentially help it along so if I play these nine parts back now if I took violin 1 violin no because what I've done is I've panned them hard left and hard right I've just got to check in my in my settings to see what has been panned where yeah violin 1 violin two's on the right violin 3 is on the left so I need violins 1 4 and 7 to sort of illustrate this point 1 4 7 there we go these are the 3 parts on their own I mean there okay is a sound but when you really when you add these other parts not only do you get a full of sound but you also get a nice stereo picture which is you know important now the same thing happened with the flutes at the beginning are recorded three flute parts that sort of trill on the flute there if you pay it on three different flutes you get a really washy sort of dreamy sound we like this so if I just go and have a look at thee now all of these parts I'd worked out on music manuscripts I just read all of these things off my music when I was playing them now we've got various backing vocals as well now this is kind of a I did a little counter line it wasn't eminently successful but so that's the bat the backing vocals for the the lyrics now I recorded these afterwards I sort of was using up the tracks I actually use the internal mic of the phone to do that and you can hear the difference between something like that and the lead vocal and I've also I've sort of been a little bit previous with my mixing in that I've actually cut the beginnings off slightly now what you can do with these is to select them all and then just drag them move back a bit so just to reveal the beginning so that you get the breath look oh I missed off even more than I thought now when you do this when you record it gives you a 1 bar counting what it's actually doing is recording that 1 bar for this exact reason to capture the very beginning of your take so looking at the other backing vocals that I've got here and where are they where are they here we go and solo those out and find a place where they are there we go I just recorded some harmony parts there that were kind of just making that chorus I don't know her and there were a few guitar parts that I put in using I've got a Yamaha MSG it doesn't stand for monosodium glutamate it actually stands for what I've done and what it stands for but it's a nice Yamaha guitar from the nineties so there are extra parts that I just put on just to help the orchestration of it that's the difficult bit here is how to make the chorus sound like a chorus it doesn't necessarily mean louder but it could mean fuller so I'm what I'm going to do is I'm going to play back from the beginning here I'm just going to play that the verse in the chorus but I'm going to scroll up so you can see what each part is doing [Music] I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps [Music] and look at the floor and a seed needs sweeping still my guitar gently weeps [Music] nobody told you [Music] sure [Music] so I realize I sort of whizzed around the screen a bit there but you can see that the verse and the chorus are treated very differently suddenly things get louder in the chorus and I've strum the acoustic guitars a bit louder and there are other things that change as well now one thing that you can see here is some tiny little edits here in the flute parts that's because I'm not a very good florist and I needed to try and make try and edit out things in fact it was a timing and I got the timing wrong in all three parts so what I did was just to try and nudge that along a bit was to split the track and actually move the parts to my specification [Music] No so if I just solo the flutes out so what I done was I don't actually rush this slightly and I've just nudged everything slightly to the right just to give myself that sort of that sort of security rhythmically now for me rhythm is number one importance when you're recording parts of this if you got parts of rhythmically really tight sometimes you can get away with tuning errors because well I mean you know with violins it's inherently the case that tuning is not always perfect so now on here I've got a second guitar part my one of my yamaha parts [Music] in addition to those counter lines I did I actually put some sustained chords during that guitar solo [Music] now when you mixing stuff like this it's very often the case if you mix something quite low where suddenly you can't hear anymore when you take it away but you don't know what you're missing that's it quite a nice rule of thumb when it comes to mixing especially things like pedal steel or hammond organ those sort of supporting parts if you can hear them or rather you notice when they're suddenly not there but they're not in-your-face that's quite a nice rule of thumb of mixing stuff like that now you can also see that I had some automation here now what automation is is a method by which you can have your tracks to sort of fade out at the end for example now I know there's an auto fade on here but it does what it wants whereas I wanted to do it I wanted it to do exactly as I required now the noise that you would get at the end of a recording you can also see that my flute parts I've actually changed the volume halfway through to make that bump-bump bump-bump bump-bump make that part louder i've just put in automation points there and then at the end i've just put in so just going to the very end [Music] I've now kept the ending really clean there's no noise at the end there's no sort of extraneous switching off of machines or anything like that and I've made the bars that the length of the song 73 bars or basically three or four bars after the end now why would we do that well you want a bit of a gap before the next tune in iTunes starts up so what I did with this when I finished was to go to my songs and then if I click and hold it and press and hold it I get a range of options share and then you get the option to save your song ringtone or project our project is if you wanted to send somebody the whole GarageBand file but I wanted to just save the song there we go now I'm presented with this sort of bewildering range of numbers and and options really what you want to do is to keep it uncompressed and as you can see 44.1 kilohertz 24-bit what does that mean well in real terms it means for every track that you've got and you can do some other things as well every track that you've got will take up seven and a half megabytes per minute so if you've got a thirty-two channel song as I've got here that's 240 megabytes per minute so for a four-minute song you're looking at a gigabyte of data which this little phone has got to throw round itself and get everything right in the right place at the right time without crashing that for me is the miracle of this is that you've just got this you've got this incredible machine that if you use it if you take a bit of care you can see also I've I've done things like editing out the beginnings and ends of phrases so I don't end up with a load of noise in the middle of course with some other some tracks that go all the way through of course you'd leave it as one take but as you can see I've recorded things in one take like the pedal steel is all the way through Newton's the chorus is at-a-glance there so when you're playing think about the the loudness --is that you're sort of conveying there's my drumming TRO and then in chorus and then I'm kind of and then is a quiet bit at the end so and you can see the choruses at a glance with the other parts as well anyway I hope that this helps in some way to for you to be able to realize your compositions on GarageBand or covers as in this case and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Dan Baker

Views: 5,433

Rating: 4.9787235 out of 5

Keywords: While my guitar gently weeps, iphone recording, GarageBand for iOS, audio recording, 32 track recording, iOS mixing, Dan Baker, Musician

Id: h0_ydhoyQkw

Length: 30min 8sec (1808 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019