Pretend Orchestra and Sore Throat

So I worked on this for a good part of the morning.
Just the Instruments
And I found out I sound like Oscar the Grouch (even more so than on other days).

The "cheat" here is that everything was played live into the Korg Kross' sequencer. What's unusual here is I recorded the drums last, finger drumming on the keyboard. I did not want it to sound like a "pop/rock drummer"; but as pseudo-orchestral, contributing more to tone color than rhythm. The rhythm is propelled more by the bass track.

Kristopher's Kross!

The Kross' cello sounds like a nasal clarinet (ugh!). But the neat thing is there's a switch that changes the sound to pizzicato, and I'm able to use that to record the cello track straight through.

There are two guitar sounds buried in the mix - the Casino and the Telecaster Thinline.

The Orchestra - real and faking it

I watched the Manila Symphony Orchestra last night perform Mozart's Symphony #39 and Beethoven's Symphony #3 (Eroica). Man oh man. Pure music. Time to quit pretending to play.

No effects required

.... Ok, that won't work. There was a time when all I listened to was classical music, and I used to smuggle a lot of CDs (which work as nice coasters today, vintage digital, never thought we'd get to that) as you can't usually find these in the Philippines (or usually mis-classified under "easy listening" alongside Lawrence Welk and his Orchestra).

So I wrote this tune, twenty years ago, and was track#10 in our 1996 album. It's pop, with elements of the orchestra sprinkled in. One record reviewer thought we had a real cello (it was an Emu Proteus)
Afterschool, "Anything But Love"

I'll recreate this today. I still have an Emu Proteus. but I'll use a new toy, the Korg Kross, which seems to have some nice orchestral sounds.

New !

Rough and Quick with Ms Domingo

A cassette has "60 minutes" of recording time - really 30 minutes each direction. The portastudio records in one direction, at double speed, giving 15 minutes of recording. So I'm going to maximize my one cassette.

"Miss Domingo" was track #8 in our 1996 album, inspired by the band Toto's penchant for making songs about girl's names. Here's the original recording :

Ms Domingo

Here's a rough and dirty and quick demo (approx 1 hour)
https://soundcloud.com/rommel-carrera/ms-domingo

Compared to the first four-track demo, the only cheat I did here was to program a drum machine, using an "analog modelling" drum machine this time.
Track 1 - drums, electric piano, organ
Track 2 - background vocals , guitar
Track 3 - lead vocals. guitar
Track 4 - bass
Gear used :
The drum machine is a Korg ER1, a wonderful sounding machine that doesn't pretend to be real drums

The organ is a Voce MicroBii, a "clonewheel" (copy of a Hammond B3) I bought from Seoul last year

The electric piano is from the Yamaha AN1x, another "virtual analog" machine

The AN1x, middle tier keyboard on the left

And the guitar is a Fender Thinline Telecaster