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.

[audio:o-lord-how-majestic.mp3]

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.