I got up promptly at 0600 this morning, with one mission: make a Stickist tune for the collab before the end of the year. That is tonight! But troubles along the way! My new Saffire i2 wouldn't take my Railboard signal without a lot of hiss for some reason, so I had to get my old Saffire Pro 24 out of storage, and reload the drivers and restart a couple of times.
Then I was recording Railboard this morning, I had a recurring problem that I noticed when I was at Interlochen. My stereo switch on the R-Block is going out. I have to whack it a couple of times, and jiggle the plug, to get it to work. It will sum both channels together no problem, which is why I never even noticed it lately because I've been plugging it into an amp with a mono cable. It's also why I was having the hiss problem with the Saffire, it turns out. (I did all that driver reloading for nothing!)
But I went to record, and there was no bass side. I got it working long enough to get the C riff, but I had to go to the Eflat and the F on my NS/Stick. The melody side would separate just fine, but the bass side would only sum with the total. Also, the bass side is super-duper low in terms of level, even with the phantom plugins working.
But that's okay. I was determined to rock this mf'er out, and that's what I've done. All Railboard except the bass parts (Eflat and F) in NS/Stick. I was gonna use my Rosewood, but I decided that I like the sound of the NS better.
I'll send the raw tracks later to you Scott. Here's my minute and a half jam of it. By the way, melodic minor sucks ass. I can give you minor or major or harmonic minor no problem. That melodic minor doesn't work well with my melodies-making brain. But I did my best.
The title: I was looking for an exotic place name to go with the flavor of the melody. I took the name from the Drakkar boxed set that the kids gave me for Christmas that I'll never use. I spelled it backwards and it was "Rakkard" or Rock hard. I thought that was clever.
Here it is, such as it is. I started at 600 this morning and just finished the rough track and loaded it to SoundCloud to look at the file. Still needs mixing and mastering and it's only a minute and a half, so....(I'm usually a 4-5-minute-tune guy.)
I'll send Scott the stems. Gonna hang with the family tonight and celebrate the New Year's.
Happy New Year's, all! Rock it out!https://soundcloud.com/stephen-sink-1/rakkard--Steve Sink