Prometheus

You should check out Kjaerhus Audio and Voxengo for free plugins. They have some fantastic Pro quality stuff that they give away for nothing. SSL also give away a VST recreation of their famous talkback compressor that Hugh Paghdam used to make the Phil Collins drum sound free of charge. I agree with you, experience is far more important than a perfect studio setup and a veteran with two stage microphones and a laptop is certainly going to do a better job than a rookie fumbling around in Abbey Road. That said, I'll still stick with my high fidelity capacitor microphones, my rack of outboards and my 24 Bit state of the art A - D converters that sample well above the human Nyquist Rate. As a veteran sound engineer, I've found that there's a certain sparkle you get with exhorbitantly expensive signal processing equipment that's far more difficult to achieve working in an untreated box room with cheap stage microphones and a high latency, high noise floor soundcard on a laptop. A Neve Audient doesn't cost $50,000 because it has a slightly higher build quality than a Behringer Eurodesk. That said, I have a Behringer Eurodesk in my workshop here. It's a handy gadget to have for location work...

Pro Studio recordings made on $500 worth of equipment? At first I thought that was quite a boast. Then I noticed, Wavelab, B4 Organ, FL Studio and the rest? You've included a lengthy list of Pro Apps here. The three I've mentioned above are alone going to cost you the guts of a thousand dollars and there are over a dozen more. I don't see how you could get all this for $500 unless it's from Pirate Bay.

One thing I've learned is that you never stop learning. Even going back and reading the article about using compressors I did for this site a few years back, there are a couple of things I wrote that I actually wouldn't agree with now... lolol

I'll be looking forward to hearing that one Donna

I totally agree with that Donna. Recording is very demanding in terms of performance, more so than jamming live, especially if you're working to metronomes or drum machines... Any errors you make are preserved for posterity...

I use Ulead Video Studio 7.0... I'm old fashioned too and believe in licenses... It's a reasonable packeage. It does good cross fades, has a number of interesting effects. I don't know how much it costs because I got it free with my video capture card...

Done

I always feel in danger of coming across as sounding like a sufferer of the sour grapes of the guy who just never quite made it, but in this highly homogenized age we live in, it's a very tough world for the aspiring musician. I for one would rather be a maverick sitting on the sidelines for the rest of my life than start paying teenagers who can't sing to track a wall of autotune and get myself on the radio. That said, I have had several songs played on the radio. Quite what that says about the songs I'm not sure...

Very interesting stuff...

That's the trouble. Scientifically proving you wrote a song is very difficult.

The trouble is that you can register it all you want and never be able to prove that you wrote a song. In the highly improbable event that a song I wrote was stolen by Andrew Eldritch, for example, he would undoubtedly re-record the material in order to pass it off as his own. With my instrumental style replaced with Doctor Avalanche and some suitably obsidian sounding keyboards and synths on the new recording, it would very likely sound like his work rather than mine. Even though I've registered my song on the 9th September 2008, the jury could be forgiven for being convinced that the hugely popular and critically acclaimed Eldritch with a string of hits behind him over an illustrious career spanning the last thirty years was the victim of a bizarre publicity stunt that I was trying to pull when it was taken into account that I am creating what to very few people other than me is wonderful music using a cobbled together studio built into a rather insalubrious room in my council flat where people can drink in the heady ambience of computer spares and sundry mixing equipment that my girlfriend finds about as attractive as syphilis. In short, a jury will look at the evidence available and judge on what seems probable. Sure, I can provide demos, drafts, handwritten notes, witnesses, my girlfriend whom I wrote the song about. I'm pretty sure anyone could cobble a paper trail like that together if they put their mind to it. The trials can get very complicated as this extract from a wiki article will demonstrate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Harrison "Harrison was later sued for copyright infringement over the single "My Sweet Lord" because of its similarity to the 1963 Chiffons single "He's So Fine", owned by Bright Tunes. Harrison denied deliberately stealing the song, but he lost the resulting court case in 1976 as the judge accepted that Harrison had "subconsciously" plagiarised "He's So Fine". When considering liable earnings, "My Sweet Lord"'s contribution to the sales of All Things Must Pass and The Best of George Harrison were taken into account, and the judge decided a figure of $1,599,987 was owed to Bright Tunes.[94] The dispute over damages became complicated when Harrison's manager Allen Klein changed sides by buying Bright Tunes and then continuing the suit against Harrison. In 1981, a district judge decided that Klein had acted improperly, and it was agreed that Harrison should pay Klein $587,000, the amount Klein had paid for Bright Tunes - so he would gain nothing from the deal, and that Harrison would take over ownership of Bright Tunes, making him the owner of the rights to both "My Sweet Lord" and "He's So Fine" and thus ending the copyright infringement claim. Though the dispute dragged on into the 1990s, the district judge's decision was upheld.[94][95]"

Beautiful plugin. This will be a valuable addition to the tool kit...

Just about any audio sequencer will have the capability to mark sections and jump from one section to another. I know Cubase and Pro Tools do. I'm pretty sure Logic and Cakewalk will too...

I think that would be an excellent idea...

Absolutely. Learning is the name of the game. One of the best ways I've found of learning was to watch a lot of music videos from the past and present day and steal steal steal... The good thing is, if you're putting stuff up on youtube it really doesn't have to be HD or Blueray or anything like that. I was lucky that the capture card I bought for the PC came with Ulead VideoStudio 7.0, which is quite a powerful package... It does good crossfades and it can be used to take control of gamma, colour, brightness and contrast as well as having a number of nice psychedelic effects and old school film plugins and stuff like that.

I think the video you for all Our Yesterdays, is much better than the Take Control video. I think the video for Soul On Fire is really good the way it is, I thought that video really caught the vibe of a Scottish working band perfectly. Incidentally, I think your songs are excellent as well. They have that kind of uplifting good time rock and roll / pop feeling that you got from bands like Del Amitri. The problem I had with the Take Control video was that it was too abstract and I thought that there was far too much camera panning and effects used on it. I think these kinds of effects and pans are far more effective when used in moderation. I kinda got the feeling that video would have been more at home over some '70's Acid Jazz Prog music or something.

Software, you can get some VST software pretty cheap. This is well worth checking out for multitrack recording. http://www.cockos.com/reaper/ And this: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ Is a freeware program that is really quite good for mastering.

I don't know what kind of budget you have available, but there are some pretty cheap hardware options out there that would help you a lot. This bad boy: http://www.dv247.com/computer-hardware/lexicon-alpha-stereo-usb-audio-interface--36113 Would be infinitely better than trying to interface through one of those high latency low spec cards that comes with a laptop... You'll also be looking 24 bit dynamic range in the face with this interface, a huge step up that puts quantization errors down to the atomic level. And this gadget here: http://www.zzounds.com/item--BEHXENYX1002 Gives you routing options for XLR, 48V Phantom Power, Phono and 0.25 inch Jack. You'll also have FX sends with pad switches, a basic EQ, trim controls, panning or odd / even routing controls... To own both of these items would cost you less than $150 dollars, money well spent.

For what it's worth John, I've always thought Songstuff is a heroic and more than worthy effort to introduce a bit of idealism and civic mindedness into a very poorly run industry. I think you should be very proud of what you've achieved here.

It did somewhat restore my faith that the two people involved in the escapade refused Cowells offer of a well paid job in his promotion department.

Well, I have been thinking of writing an quasi autobiographical book about the Scottish music industry using barely disguised monikers to avoid being sued. I think that might make me feel better about the whole thing... Some of the antics that have occurred in my career have been hilarious. The time I told half a dozen executives that Mozart couldn't analyze a piece of music in thirty seconds for example. It's not often you have to run for cover from a bunch of grey suits...

I did a MU-TECH course a few years ago, Musical Theory and Audio Technology with a qualification equivalent to what you'd call a College Degree in the states I think. They had a system where the Diploma contains passes and merit passes, which is a good way of proving your calibre. The pros: You can get a lot out of it, if you're willing to put work in. If you go in with a view of scraping by with bare passes you can do so and learn nothing, but if you go in with a view to learning all you can and pushing yourself to your limits you're in the right place with the right people to really learn a lot in a short space of time. The cons: You're not going to do a college course, get your degree or diploma and then jump straight into George Martin's chair at Abbey Road. If you want to make money out of music, you have to figure out how to make it by yourself...

This... ...and this are pretty much why I've been on the forum less of late. In the last couple of years I've become jaded to the point where trying to keep my head down and work in the music industry requires a degree of self abasement that I no longer feel capable of. All I've done for the last twelve months is do projects with local people for fun and produce my own songs, and sadly fun and producing my own songs doesn't pay the rent.

Excellent... You have an amazing sense of rhythm...

One from my latest project. Filmed on location at Old Auchans House near Dundonald, Crosbie Kirk near Troon and Anwoth Kirk near Gatehouse of Fleet. Apart from the intro and outtro shots, the whole thing is filmed freehand. We wanted to make the video very dynamic, possibly to draw attention away from the two middle aged and slightly out of shape musicians in it. The sub zero temperatures and inch and a half of snow on the ground helped in that respect since it was far too cold to be sitting around playing guitars without being well wrapped up. The narrative through the song about Lady Suzanna dining with the rats is true, she turned rather eccentric in her old age. Another interesting fact about the house is that it belonged to the Cochrane family, one of whom, Thomas Cochrane, was a famous Admiral believed to be the inspiration behind the "Hornblower" character. After she died in 1780 at age 90, the old house Lady Suzanna lived in that we filmed in and around fell into decline. It was ruined almost totally in the 1940's when army explosives exercises conducted during the war brought down the roof. These exercises damaged the structure beyond any hope of repair, in my opinion bringing about a sad end to a colourful piece of Scottish Heritage, but giving us a great location to shoot in. The picture of Lady Suzanna that fades in and out is also authentic. It still hangs in Culzean Castle on the South West Coast of Scotland. The other point of interest is the Memento Mori shot at 1min 37secs. It's the same Memento Mori that appears in the 1973 version of the Wickerman after Howie's (played by Edward Woodward) confrontation with the schoolmistress. I made a road trip to Anwoth on the South Coast of Scotland near Dumfries to get that shot. As a fan of the Wickerman, that was a fascinating experience, visiting several of the locations where the film was shot and seeing how little that part of Scotland has changed.