The Death of a Dogma

These are the chronicles of Sestina's most recent adventures into the fearsome world of home recording, from the Fall of 2011 to the Spring of 2012. 

Join us as we bullheadedly try to realize the illusion of high budget studio magic in bathroom & duct-tape acoustics of lo-fi tracking!

Sestina recordings 2011-2012, Part I: The Death of a Dogma

Apologies for the above mouthful of a title. It is a reference to my high & mighty, hot-headed rantings about certain preferred recording practices from a while back.

You see, this time when recording we pretty much decided to take the easiest way and track everything individually. On a click track. Using triggered drums. (ugh)

This method is pretty much diametrically opposed to the aforementioned recording dogmas of the past. Live sound my ass, this time it would be post-processing all the way. Zeroes and ones and computer synthetics. Bring in the robots, bring in the plugins - damn the human element!

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A visual representation of our recording philosophy.

Of course, there are good reasons for this kind of jackassery, none of which are artistic. Rather they are well presented in the age-old mantra "beggars can't be choosers".

Zero budget recordings. This state of affairs dictated our approach when we holed up in our band rehearsal space in October, 2011: No big studio and fancy equipment to play around with - just a laptop, a few mics and a room with the acoustic properties of a high school gym locker room. No matter how majestic the sounds might be coming out of our speakers & skins, in this particular space they promptly transform into a fart in a can.

A veritable cave of inspiration for the budding sound engineer. The job which, as usual, fell on Jaakko to do, for the simple reason that he's the only one of us who can do it well. With power comes great responsibility!

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Make no mistake, we'd still love to record everything live in a million dollar a day studio, in a acoustically contoured hall the size of an airplane hangar, while sipping piña coladas and lazily dissecting the merits the David Bowie's vocal miking on "Heroes". With David Bowie, chatting us live from the control room talkback. However, in this case, we just had to scale down our ambitions just a bit from that standard to get the message across.

In the end, that's what's important, right? Not the package, not the delivery, but what's inside.

Let's delve into that a bit closer next week. Ie. the actual songs.

Until then, here's something for inspiration and general awesomeness:

~Markus




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