A bit of home recording

I’ve been collaborating with singer/songwriter Ell Phillips, who asked me to put some pedal steel on her recordings. This has meant I’ve had to get a bit better at the home recording process. I’ve got a Zoom R16 which is quite handy, although I wish I had a decent laptop. I borrowed some mics of my mate Dave (cheers Dave I got you a bottle of wine!) and I’ve got Cubase LE on my PC which allows to cut the tracks up a bit and do some EQ and effects.

I was hoping to get one good take, but I found the structure of Ell’s song to be pretty hard to learn. So I had to do a few takes and cobble them together in Cubase. This took ages cos all the takes were at slightly different levels and had different timbral characteristics.

Anyhow after lots of EQing, cutting and pasting, compressing and adjusting volume levels, this is how it came out…