The Linear Canvas

I was a big fan of the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs in the early to mid 1990’s. I have all of their CD’s and all of singer Natalie Merchant’s solo albums as well.

I recorded this cover of The Big Parade (written by Jerome Augustyniak and Natalie Merchant) sometime around that time. It’s a song about a son being sent to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. by his mother to honor the son she lost in the war.

I recorded the song on my Yamaha MT-1000 4 track cassette recorder. It had dbx noise reduction, ran at 3.75 inches per second, and could record four tracks simultaneously, all on a chromium dioxide cassette. My mix-down technique back then involved a regular cassette deck using dbx too, but the generational noise effect made each mix-down increasingly noisy, even with the dbx. I was able to minimize the noise through computer processing on this track.

I equalized the song to enhance the lower frequencies as there wasn’t much of it in the analog mix. I originally had plans to re-process the entire mix, but that proved to be somewhat tedious work, so I abandoned it. To create this recording, I used an original mix with the percussion, bass guitar, and acoustic guitar together. It was a pretty good mix, but not much low end punch. Then I had the two electric guitars and the vocals that were separate. I did a little work on the mix, mainly with an equalizer plug-in and made the bass a little more prominent than it was.

The Big Parade

[audio:http://www.linearcanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/The Big Parade 20091212_2006b.mp3]

 

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I sang, and played all of the instruments. I think the guitars are a Yamaha acoustic and a Fender Stratocaster electric. The bass was a Rickenbacker 4001. The drums sounds are from a Boss Dr. Rhythm drum machine and were played on Yamaha MIDI drum pads. I originally recorded the song on my analog Yamaha MT-1000 4 track recorder. Recently I transferred it to my Fostex VF-16 digital multi-track and processed it with Cakewalk Sonar 7 Producer and Sony Sound Forge 9.