Drum Tracking with SK-Drums

 

Carlo tracking drums for a song off the up and coming new Stellas Kitchen EP, recorded at Harpoon Productions.

Twirly-Whirly Tremelo

Jon Romeo from Stellas Kitchen demos the Cusack Tap-A-Whirl V3 Tremlo. He's using an '87 strat into a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe (white edition).

Recording Crazy Makes You A Little

 

Hours of recording in studios does send you a little stir crazy. Not that Dave Grohl needs any extra help! The Foo Fighters decided to record their latest album with as much analogue recording equipment as possible. 

2011 - An EP Odyssey

classified experimental drum setup

Its 2011 and I haven't posted for a while, but its been a fairly productive Xmas and holiday break. We've been able to make a big dent into the recording of our new EP (Stellas Kitchen).  In June last year we formally sat down and mapped out the production of our 2nd EP.  Its been too long really since our debut EP release "Fundamentals". 

Pedal Power

So it begins, my foray into proper effects pedal land.  Where better to start than with your guitar tuner. On the advice of the gherkin gobbling guitar guru I went for the Korg Pitchblack chromatic guitar tuner. This pedal has an all aluminum casing, which means its tough. It has a nice large LED display which lights up pretty well even in daylight conditions.  Its also true bypass, has 4 different tuning modes and so I'm told is much more accurate than the BOSS tuners most people (losers) use.

Sportz Radio Star Recording

At Stellas Kitchen land we're recording our new EP.  So far we've completed the drum tracking and some guitar parts for two of the four songs and to be released on the EP. We've taken  extra time and effort to prepare how each instrument will sound this time through and have done a heap more experimenting.  Once we had the tempo, we recorded basic scratch tracks of guitar and vocals for each song. After they were down, we started trying to get some good sounds for the drums.  Jon is blogging the process here on the Gear Page forum. The aim of that thread to create a bunch of advice and sound samples/reference material etc, for anyone interested in recording and music in general.  Its a little bit into the inside of SK too. 

What No Tomato?

My hands still smell like tomatoes!! On the weekend we did the traditional Italian pasta sauce run.  Its been many years since we last made the sauce.  With no "Nonna Assist" factor I think we did alright. With the new fandangled gear and machines its pretty easy really.  We're at a very delicate stage in the process now... waiting for the bottles to cool down.  Its serious David Attenbourgh bird sitting on the nest waiting for the eggs to hatch stuff!! Hopefully it'll become something we'll do now every year in tomato season.

Stellas Kitchen

I play bass with my brothers Daniel, Carlo and Jon in Stellas Kitchen. We got together in 2007 at Daniel's to jam some of his many original songs.  We'd all been involved in music and playing our instruments over the years but never played together as a rock band.  The catalyst for this was really the emergence of Jon on electric guitar. And can he play! I think when the Hondo II was still alive, Jon came to me and asked me to show him how to play the bass guitar, to teach him (HAH!).  So I showed him some basic finger positions and finger plucking technique along with the little bass bit at the start of "Another One Bites the Dust". And that was it. He then went away and studied the instrument and practiced.