Jhonn’s Angel

Last Updated on June 13, 2022

Album: The Big C

A little history to build on the original description….

Recorded at Bebside Hall, the beginning has always been a kludge to get over a cock-up after all the bounce-overs and recording had almost been finished.  The first few seconds had one channel accidentally scrunged to bits….  Who did it?   Aye….nuffsedd.

Not wanting to redo the whole thing, Jeff and I built created pre-echo onto the front and “sort-of” monoed it with slightly different EQ to try and hide the imperfections before widening the stereo and fading off the echoiness whilst simultaneously twiddling the EQ…  Four or five hands were needed and it was the best we could do, then.

It was never right in my ears so I’ve made an improvement, digitally, something that was unavailable in 1984.  I’ve been meaning to do it for years  🙁

Of course, had we had the technology then, the cock-up would never had been possible (at least using Reaper, which is what I’ve used) because of the copious edit-undos.  And it would’ve been better because of larger muti-tracking etc.  But there again, it may not have got done at all – sometimes things are best done in a blast and not thought about too much.

Anyway, rambling over, here it is.

p.s. Reaper is pretty good, especially for free-ish (I pay anyway).  With its nondestructive editing, throw 8 cores at 4.4Ghz using SSD discs with 32Gb of memory in a 64-bit OS and it will really use the technology – you can watch the 8 cores churning independently with their different assigned streams.  Some of the plugins work very well with multiple instances, yet, latency just disappears…..  [I’ve normalised, trimmed and de-noised each channel, independently, companded for a better sound, changed the volume envelope and remixed the stereo, all the while trying to make the beginning intro better.  The fade-in intro was never supposed to have been there – the track was supposed to start with drum clicks and then power in at max volume.  The version I’ve done almost does this in a short shock volume ramp, with the missing channel inserted as a cut from later in the recording.  I still had to include some lead-in echo though as a straight stereo cut and paste didn’t sound right].

[SP.  Stakeford, 21/05/2015]