pursuing faithfulness to the Word of God and fullness of the Spirit of God
Archive for May, 2005
Song – O Lord, How Majestic
May 28th
OK, here’s another song which I have recorded as part of my quest to improve my recording and mixing technique. This was one I started a few years back as part of a collection of songs that people in my church (which was then West Street Baptist Church in Dunstable) had written. I never got round to finishing them because I had planned to get some other people to do the vocals but I moved to Southampton before I got the chance.
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This one was written by Katrina Peacham probably some time in the 1980s, and is based on Psalm 8. The melody is simple but effective. Its perhaps a bit dated now, but I still like it.
Lyrics
O Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth
O Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth
You have set your glory high above the heavens
From the lips of little children
You’ve established praise
When I see the heavens, the wonders you have made
How majestic is your name,
How majestic is your name
How majestic is your name in all the earth
Recording
I started with the original I made a few years back, and stuck with the arrangement I had decided on back then. I completely re-recorded all the parts, as they were either out of tune or had mistakes.
- The rhythm guitar effect was from my Behringer V-Amp which did a good job of recreating the original Boss ME-8 patch I had used.
- The guitar solo was recorded completely clean, and I used the excellent Free Amp SE VST plugin for the distortion.
- The piano part was from the Yamaha P200, and I tried to follow the advice people gave me from “Holy Spirit Will You Be” not to put too many bass notes in.
- Vocals were of course me (sorry), and I realised a little too late that it would have been good for me to raise the pitch of the song by a tone to suit my vocal range better. Effects were my new Kjaerhus GUP-1 compressor plus the free Anwida reverb. The vocals at the end used a band pass filter (courtesy of Kjaerhus Classic Filter) plus a delay with automated mix level.
- As usual, the drums took up far too much time. Again I used the Natural Studio kit lite through sfz. This time I decided I would bounce each part down to a separate audio track before applying effects to each one separately. Big mistake – it was a painfully slow process. I now know why people shell out the extra money to get drum samplers with multiple outs. Once they were finally out, I used GUP-1 compression and a Cakewalk room reverb. I was able to set the compression for each drum separately, but I still struggled to get the kick drum to cut through the mix the way I wanted it to. Percussion (tambourine and bongoes) were provided by hypersonic. I did record my own tambourine but the hypersonic tambourine’s jangle was at a much higher frequency which sat better in the mix. You will notice that it is more or less the same drum loop throughout the song. I had used some drum-loop WAVs when I first put the song together but they were never going to be used for the final thing as each variation seemed to have a subtly different snare, and also I couldn’t find a single-hit crash that matched for the transition to a slower tempo at the end. However, recreating the loop in MIDI took so long that I decided I wasn’t going to program any pattern variations for different parts of the song.
- Synth sounds were provided by Hypersonic, and the arpegiated synth for the third verse is an example of how the tempo-syncing just works with soft-synths in a way that was far too much hassle with hardware synths (maybe I’m just lazy though).
- Bass guitar was my Yamaha plus GUP-1 compression
- Final Mixdown: Reverbs were done on the 2 aux busses in SONAR rather than per-track, which was a first for me. Kjaerhus Classic Master-Limiter added the finishing touches.
I thought that this was going to be a fairly quick track to do, but it ended up taking slightly longer than the last one. Still, I feel I have learned a lot, and am slowly edging closer to being able to make mixes that I am actually happy with.
Song – Holy Spirit Will You Be
May 8th
Sometimes when I am having a prayer time, I will open the hymn-book up and sing a hymn. I like to turn to the section on prayer, and if I don’t know the hymn in question, I tend to make up my own tune rather than trying to learn the one in the book. So as a result of my recent urge to do some home studio recording, here is my version of Holy Spirit Will You Be which I originally wrote and partially recorded a few years ago. The hymn is from the Praise hymn book (number 604), and the words are written by Martin E Leckebusch (© 1999 Kevin Mayhew Ltd.) I like this hymn because it explores a rarely thought about theme of the Spirit helping us in our praying.
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See below for details of the lyrics and recording process.
The lyrics
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes for me
When I wonder what to pray
How to phrase the words I say
Come in might and majesty,
Help me in my frailty
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes for me
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes through me
When I lack the words to tell
What my feelings say too well
Speak through every sigh and groan
Making my emotions known
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes through me
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes with me
Come search my heart and mind
My desires and motives find
Take my deepest thoughts and cares
Turn them into fervent prayers
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes with me
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes for me
You alone can understand
What the mind of God has planned
And within his will you will lead
All for whom you intercede
Holy Spirit will you be,
One who intercedes for me
The recording
Recording was done in SONAR 2 using my Audiophile 2496 soundcard. I had recorded a version of this a couple of years ago, but never finished it off, but this is a complete re-recording. I only recorded at 16bit 44.1kHz mainly because I forgot to switch the old project to 24 bit before I started recording the new material. The original had a very strong acoustic guitar part, but I decided to build slowly and have the piano as the lead instrument this time round.
- Acoustic guitar – I recorded my Yamaha acoustic guitar both direct (piezo-electric) and miked using my Senheisser Evolution 845 dynamic mic. The miked version was dull and boxy and the direct was trebly. As it happened, I didn’t use the miked track in the final mix as the acoustic doesn’t play a very significant part in the mix and the direct one fitted better.
- Shaker – This is one of my children’s toys. The secret to playing a shaker is not to think about what you’re doing. It goes wrong otherwise.
- Drums – I recorded myself four times on my acoustic kit just to get some ideas down. Then I tried to program it in MIDI using the excellent NSKit (lite version) sounds through sfz. It mostly went well, although there was one thing I played on the real kit that I just couldn’t get to sound right with in MIDI (where the stick bounces on the closed hi-hat twice before hitting the snare).
- Piano – This is simply my Yamaha P200 stage piano. I have yet to find a sample library that is as pleasing to play as this.
- Electric Guitar – I originally recorded it clean, and tried out a host of VST amp and cabinet simulators before getting frustrated and using my trusty Behringer V-Amp to give me a nice patch with tempo-synced tremolo. Its about time I got myself a new electric guitar though – the intonation is miles out which is a real pain in the neck when recording.
- Bass Guitar – As usual, my Yamaha bass was DIed but I used the compressor on my digital mixer first rather than software compression. I had to tail off the treble quite a bit to get rid of an annoying 6kHzish hum.
- Vocals – I tried my best, I really did. But I have a habit of getting ‘high’ (well, high for me) notes slightly flat with depressing regularity.
The mixdown
The dynamics and EQ effects supplied with Cakewalk are not very intuitive to use, so I relied again on the trusty Kjaerhus Classic Compressor and Classic EQ on most tracks. I did use the Cakewalk reverb, which sounded better than the Kjaerhus one. The free Voxengo Span spectrum analyser plugin was useful for choosing EQing frequencies.
- Acoustic Guitar and Shaker – just a bit of reverb on these
- Vocals – some compression, EQ and a room reverb. It was in danger of getting lost in the mix in the fourth verse, but I think its just about OK.
- Bass Guitar – was already compressed, so I just added a bit of EQ
- Electric guitars – were thinned out with Classic EQ so they didn’t trample over the piano. The two parts are panned hard left and right.
- Piano – left entirely untreated (it already had reverb)
- Drums – I had programmed each drum on a separate MIDI track so I could bounce to separate audio tracks and apply different effects, but too be honest I had spent a very long time mixing already and just wanted to finish things off. I simply put a bit of compression and reverb onto the output of sfz. If I had the time to bounce down to separate tracks I would probably mix the cymbals slightly lower and get the kick drum to cut through a bit better.
- Mastering – I used the Kjaerhus Classic Mastering Limiter just to boost the level of the track slightly, but no additional reverb or EQ. Oh yes, and thankfully I remembered to cut the beginning and end tails off the recordings and fading things out properly (rather than my usual accidentally leaving in the recorded sound of me walking across the room to press the stop button).
Overall, doing this recording was a good learning experience for me, but I still feel I have a long way to go. I’m hoping to find the time next month to do another one.
Home Studio Recording
May 7th
A week ago I had the opportunity to record a bass line for one of the tracks on a forthcoming church album. The experience inspired me to make a bit more of an effort to finish off some of the many recordings I have started over the years but never finished.
I have been thinking about what the factors are that cause my recording projects to flounder.
- Inadequate planning – Only after hours of recording do I decide that it should have been in a different key or tempo, or that the song structure should be dramatically different. I then lose enthusiasm to go back and re-record the base material.
- Mediocre takes – Rather than keeping going until I have a well-performed part, I often get bored and move on to another instrument, leaving a take containing some subtle mistakes. The motto should be “get it right”, even if this means playing something slightly less demanding, or spending a whole evening getting one part to disk. This also means carefully listening to takes that you think went well to make sure that they actually are as good as you imagined.
- Vocals – I can sing in tune (most of the time), but to be honest my voice isn’t up to scratch for released material. But unless you’re a good singer living in the Southampton area who would just love to come round to my house for some unpaid recording sessions, I just need to make the best of what I’ve got and get on with it. Either that or do lots of instrumentals.
- Drums – Although I have an acoustic drum kit, I don’t have the facilities to record it adequately (and in any case it is a very cheap kit and I don’t play it that well), so I have to rely on drum programming. Loops are of course an option, but loops rarely just fit a song – you’re better off composing or arranging around a loop rather than searching for ones that fit an existing song. The range of fills is very limited too. But drum programming is tedious, especially if you want to get human timing and dynamics into the performance, and there are some things you can do on a drum kit (flams, chokes etc) that are difficult to program convincingly.
- Hurried mixing – By the time you’ve got good base material, you’ve already listened to this track hundreds of times. Now you have to listen to it hundreds more times, each time subtly different. Especially if, like me, you are a complete novice with compressor, EQ and reverb settings, this part of the process can be very time consuming and requires great patience and perseverance.
So I have decided to revisit a few of my old recording projects and take a disciplined approach to completing them. Hopefully this will be a good learning experience for me, and maybe help to speed up the process for future tracks. I’m almost finished my first one and already I have noticed myself making some of the old mistakes again. Expect a new track on my site shortly.
Book Review – The Message of Hebrews (Raymond Brown)
May 7th
Posted by Mark Heath in Book Reviews
1 comment
This is one of the first volumes in the Bible Speaks Today series, and was in fact originally published separately under the title “Christ Above All”. The introduction sets out Brown’s working theory that Hebrews was written to believers who were tempted to give up or compromise to avoid the persecution they were facing. The letter is an appeal to endurance, and specifically warns against the folly of giving up Christianity to return to Judaism. Brown briefly discusses authorship but proposes no favourite candidate.
Hebrews draws heavily on the Old Testament, and the author is keen to stress the understanding of the Old Testament from a Christian, and especially Christ-centered viewpoint. The background information he provides concerning the relevant OT passages will prove helpful to those who do not immediately recognise some of the connections and significance of the various allusions.
On quite a few occasions, Brown goes on the offensive against a liberal watered down christology, as well as critiquing liberation theology, Catholic teachings and various secular writings. He quotes books such as “Honest to God” or “The Myth of God Incarnate” as illustrative of contemporary challenges to biblical Christianity. He occasionally interacts other commentators, mainly Bruce and Hughes.
Hebrews contains a number of important passages which relate to the controversial “once saved always saved?” debate. Brown carefully manages a blatantly partisan approach, but his general interpretation of Heb 6 is Calvinist friendly. He also endeavours to provide a more pastoral perspective, considering the situation where friends who had an apparent genuine faith fall away.
As usual with the Bible Speaks Today series, the emphasis is on contemporary relevance rather than technical linguistic or theological arguments, and this will benefit those who find Hebrews a difficult book and want some devotional help. Immensely practical subjects such as facing death without fear, and understanding God’s discipline are explored helpfully.
The size of the book makes it slightly too long to be read alongside a chapter a day of Hebrews, but it is well suited to those who want to take a bit longer to study the book, or who want to use it as an aid in preparing sermons or studies for others.