The new album cover
Here you can listen to a sneak preview of th 6th track of the upcoming album “Il capitan Pepito Amarilla e altre storie samba” by Orchestra Rosichino , an italian band where I play guitar that does a strange genre that we call “spaghetti samba”, because we would like it to sound like samba… but with a touch of spaghetti western.
The album backing tracks have been recorded onto analog tape with a tascam TSR-8 recorder. It is one of the latest analog recorders produced; it records eight tracks into half inch tape.
With it I recorded all the band toghether (drums, bass, fender rhodes piano, electric guitar and cavaquinho) into a small room with some acoustic treatment. I used three microphones on the drums (kick and two “overheads”) and one mic for every other instrument.
Playing toghether greatly improves the groove. In the previous album we recorded every instrument alone and while this approach gives the best separation, the interplay between musicians is negatively affected. This time we choose the opposite and played almost everything (except voices and trumpets) toghether. I think the result is far superior in terms of groove.
Then I trasferred all the analog tracks directy from the recorder to the ardour DAW using the excellent RME hammerfall/multiface soundcard. The tracks sounded already very good with no effects or processing, but I added some compression and eq (invada mono compressor and the LADSPA triple band parametric eq).
At this point we recorded the trumpets (two trumpets with a ribbon EHX microphone, for the most part) and then the main vocal part, with a sennheiser MD441 through a TC helicon Voiceworks processor. Finally we added some backing vocals (again, two voices into a single microphone).
The mixing has been done all inside ardour, and we exchanged some three versions via internet until we found the good balance that everyone liked.
Mastering has been done with mhwaveedit recording the L+R sum which passed throug a FMR Really Nice Compressor.
Here is the final result, all the process has been very quick; we recorded, mixed and mastered 7 tracks in little more than two weeks:
Hope you like it.
linuxaudiostudio 