The Linear Canvas

After my mother, Conney (or JoAnn), passed away just about a year ago, I already knew the song I was going to write. I saw the lyrics and melody unfolding right in front of me during that last year with her. I was going to post this song on the date of mom’s death, June 2. But a) I thought that was being too dramatic and b) I couldn’t wait that long.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since she passed away. I know I just went around for a couple of months wondering “How this could be?” It’s easier now, but at times I still think about something only mom could explain and/or even know anything about at all. I still have my aunt Helen Brown. I can ask her, for the time being.

This is the first audio project I have completed with Cakewalk Sonar X1. It is a lot different than the previous versions of Sonar. Even the previous release. I don’t get the numbering system, the last version was v8.5. The envelope tool change has me freaking out a bit. But otherwise I mostly like the new interface. When I start time stretching and synchronizing on this software, we’ll see what I think then.

I wrote Pray For The Sun during the winter of 2001.  I was flying to and from Kansas City when I worked at Sprint. It was an especially bad winter or the Missouri and Kansas highway departments really stunk. I can remember driving to and from the airport in KC sliding from side to side on unplowed snow and a layer of ice underneath. That and the constant flying was getting to me. It was a hard time , but in retrospect that whole time was mostly a good time.

I decided to work on This Place Is Not Your Home because it had been awhile since I had done anything to it. I have made some big changes recently in the way I record and I figured I could do the song some good revisiting the mixing process, etc.

This Place Is Not Your Home  was written about leaving home. Regardless of where you go and how long you stay, you can never be home once you’ve left the only home you ever had.

As I said, many things have changed since the last version of the mix. One thing, I have a sub-woofer on my studio monitors now. The difference is that I can hear the low frequencies better and I don’t need to take a ride in my truck, which has a sub woofer, to hear whether I need to turn down the bass any. Another change is that I probably was using Cakewalk Sonar 7 when I did the last recording. Since then I have upgraded twice. I now have Sonar X1. I just installed it and I just made use of the Pro Channel plug in for the first time. There’s a lot I need to learn about Sonar X1.

The other thing is I am much more experienced using a Digital Audio Workstation than I was even a year ago. Using Sonar X1 may improve my recordings and hopefully will challenge me to learn more about it. All the "Pros" seem to prefer Pro Tools. I am a Cakewalk guy. That’s not changing any time soon. The price of Pro Tools alone is a good reason to stick to Sonar.

I recorded Sorry It Came To This many years ago on my 4 track tape recorder. I had worked on it a couple of years ago, but I thought it was in need of a remix. It was mainly that the vocals were too low, but there were other problems as well. Originally I had to sync all the tracks, replace live drum tracks with near exact MIDI performances and lined up the song to a timeline. Not an easy job for the way I recorded back then. It must have been one of the first I edited in such a way. I put a lot of work in just the timings alone. The beat on a second look is near perfect. It’s hard to tell when you are still working on it. It takes some time to cool down from it.

I wrote Sorry It Came To This about a time when I just couldn’t get it together while others were conspiring to overthrow my regime. Or something like that.

 

 

 

I was listening to this Black Sabbath cover I recorded recently and I just thought it could use a little more work. I just remixed it and I think it has a little more punch now. Especially in the higher frequencies. Here’s your warning. This song is really loud and pretty long. 

Snowblind
[audio:http://www.linearcanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Snowblind BS 20120511_2134mcd.mp3]

I played my Stratocaster through my Line 6 POD 2.0 on this. The bass is my Rickenbacker. The keyboard strings are Dimension Pro played on my Roland slave keyboard. The drums are a MIDI file played through Session Drummer 3.

 

I am not going to claim this one fix will solve all your problems opening project files in the digital audio workstation Cakewalk Sonar. It has solved a problem before for me, when many of my projects created on one computer and/or version of Sonar would not open on another. Mainly I wanted to write this down so I wouldn’t have to find this info again.

This process only takes a few minutes and you should know whether you are successful almost immediately.

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I recorded Ready For Love in about 1999. I have mixed it several times. Hopefully I got it right this time. Last time I mixed it, it came out sounding kind of thin. It made me wonder if I had the dbx noise reduction switched off when I dubbed it from tape. By the time I realized there was something wrong with the recording, I had forgotten it was on tape and looked through every bit of digital storage I had for the tracks. When I finally found it on tape, I could hardly believe that I had done it on tape. It had to have been one of my last analog projects. I had the tape thing perfected by then I guess.

Ready for Love

[audio:http://www.linearcanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Ready for Love 20120505_1821mcd.mp3]

Ready For Love was written by Mick Ralphs and was originally recorded by his band Mott the Hoople. Later after Mick left Mott, he formed the band Bad Company and they recorded it as well. Mott did an extended ending called After Lights. I tend to believe my version more resembles the Mott the Hoople version and I included the ending in spirit, if not form. I sang, and played all of the instruments. The guitars are my Fender Stratocaster electric. The bass was my Rickenbacker 4001. The drums are my Ludwig’s. There are no keyboards on this recording, although I think it sounds like I played one on it. I originally recorded the song on my analog Yamaha MT-1000 4 track recorder. I processed it with Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 Producer and Sony Sound Forge 9.