So, we experimentally determined that Reaper can happily record 16 tracks at a time at low latency for hours on a Microsoft Surface Pro :-)
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In late 2019, after a seven year break from playing together in bands, me and an old bandmate went into a hacked-together DIY studio space for a day and came out with the bones of a new album, and we built a live set around it.
The project - Spectral Gates - plays energetic, ethereal and apocalyptic electronic beats, dub and post-rock. The first track, 's9c28' is out now.
The sessions were tracked live into Reaper through a Focusrite Saffire synced to an OctoPre over ADAT link, with an absurd collection of gear including a guitar rig through a Mod Duo running custom DSP and a couple of loopers, a synth and modular setup driven by the Deluge, a RC-505 live looper synced to the Deluge, an 0-coast, and a full drum kit.
The mixes mostly just used the material from the live improvised sessions but were pretty heavy on post-processing - there are *tons* of effects on everything, and there is a ton of Floaty dub delay and Valhalla Vintage Verb automated everywhere.
I had a listen to both s9c28 and sunfish on Bandcamp.
I enjoyed both although I am not familiar with the genre. I think that the closest I get to this in my own music collection is Massive Attack's Mezzanine.
So how much is post processed? Regardless, I think there is still a great live vibe to the tracks. If you played this live how close do you intend to get to the post processed versions?
Does your drummer play to a click in order to sync to the electronic stuff?
So many questions haha!
I would have loved to have done this in the past in the band I was in some twenty years ago. But a lot of our "trickery" was created "in the box" so I ended up recording stuff we couldn't play live onto a hard disk. When we enlisted a live drummer I created a click track with additional cues to help the drummer keep time then the rest of us played along to that.
Not great, but it worked, until some of us got bored.
Anyway, sounds like a good setup you have there. Good luck with the project
The recording session really was just four hours of letting the tape run while we dorked about with instruments.
This one ... I think we started with the percussion (which was a dodgy old cymbal played into an rc505 looper) and bass loops (C64 "sid guts" eurorack through a polyvox clone filter, plus a drum machine and some other bits off a Synthstrom Deluge). Then Steve just drummed over the top of it live, no click and we edited it down. The atmosphere chords were one of the only overdubs on the whole album.
Every element went to its own recording channel though, so I was able to build it up in the mix pretty easily.
Live, we run the bass loops through the Deluge, there are live drums on the top, and I play the chords and synth parts on a guitar through a EHX Synth9 pedal on the Solina preset. We do run a click track to the drummer but it's mostly insurance against poor onstage sound.
** SPECTRAL GATES ** - s9c28 single
Linear Mode
