Quality Audiogeekery in Northern New England
This is a new song published to youtube that I recorded and mixed. I’m not biased at all, nope not even a little bit, when I say that Morgan Lindenschmidt is a very interesting young artist.
This recording was a pleasure. It was a simple as it gets, a good performance in a great room, all played live, no overdubs. Her guitar is a very small bodied guitar so capturing it was a challenge. Overall I’m very happy with the sonic result.
After a long, long time of production I’m happy to make these 3 songs from my old band, Freakwitch, available.
These recordings began in 2010 when we recorded basic tracks at Jonathan Wyman‘s studio. As always he did a great job getting us set up with fantastic drum and bass sounds, and even a few guitar keepers. From there we started overdubbing to the basic tracks, slowly over time, with me doing all the subsequent engineering. Most of the overdubs were guitars, acoustic and electric, and vocals. Finally, we started mixing in 2013 and finished up the last mixes recently. Mastering was a collaboration between Chad Boyer and myself.
Enjoy the tracks, and if you want to download the songs you can get them straight from the Freakwitch website in various file formats.
My good friend Harper Meader is an interesting guy. I learned to make mead from him. He built his own cordwood masonry home by hand. Turns out, he’s also a musician and a songwriter. After he had a particularly inspirational year he’d been writing a lot more songs, and wanted some help recording them.
I was happy to oblige. I’ve been wanting to record in Ironwood Hollow — the space he built by hand — because it has wonderful acoustics. It’s a good sized room with tall ceilings, no parallel surfaces, and remains the best mead hall I know.
Anyway, Harper had his songs well-arranged, polished, practiced, and even a few harmony and lead guitar lines. The result is a very fine debut EP. Check it out. You can even get a copy of the CD from Harper.
Recorded, Mixed, and Mastered by James Lindenschmidt for Crafted Recordings.
Last summer I had the pleasure of recording Dark Follies, an award winning vaudeville style variety show based in Portland, Maine.  Family friendly while still keeping an edge, Dark Follies  features the live music of the Dark Follies Rhythm Orchestra, dancing, juggling, side show acts, fire performers and more.
This session was over a year ago…. and the best news is, I’m going to record them again very soon. This time I’ll have a larger room, and my new mobile rig with my mic collection. To say that I’m looking forward to the next session is an understatement!
For the first session last year, the instrumentation was very interesting: violin, accordion, nylon string guitar, and 4 percussionists. We ended up booking an afternoon at Peapod Recordings to have a nice quiet spot to record, and they were well-practiced. We recorded all 4 songs in the same session, and the mixing was finished within another couple of weeks.
For this session I took advantage of having several ribbon mics available to me, utilizing both their old-school sound and their off-axis rejection properties to record the entire ensemble in one small room.
We recorded 4 songs that day: Uskadar, Rast Kars Lama, Jovano Jovanka, and Dobriden.
In the meantime, here is a playlist for their previous work. You can find them on Dark Follies Reverb Nation.
Recorded and Mixed by James Lindenschmidt for Crafted Recordings.
This site hasn’t been updated in a while. I have been doing more audio recording lately, but have not been updating the site. I’ll add a few entries as I get time.
These days my mobile production strategy has evolved and I have a nice portable rig for recording. I’ve downsized physically (less gear to haul) but my capabilities are more than ever.
In the coming days I’ll write about sessions I’ve had recently with Dark Follies, Harper Meader, Freakwitch, as well as some voiceover work for Studio Comic Kaze.
I will also have some audio samples as well, though you can hear some of the recordings I’ve done on Dark Follies and Harper Meader’s sites above. More samples (from Freakwitch) will be coming up soon.
I did some remote recording at Occupy Wall Street on Oct 22 when I was there. There were some drummers playing, and I got much of a talk about student loan debt refusal. Download the mp3 directly, or play it in the player below. Enjoy.
Here is the Music Player. You need to installl flash player to show this cool thing!
Last summer, I had the pleasure of doing sound at a show in Unity, Maine. Among the performers was 1476, a band from Massachusetts that had a fantastic sound. The main thrust of the day was to do front of house sound for the show, but I also did a quick and dirty multitrack recording as well.
1476 played a great set, and contacted me afterwards wanting to get a copy of the gig. I listened, did some tweaking and a quick and dirty mix, and sent the set off to them. It was a great performance, they are a duo of an acoustic guitar/singer and a drummer and have a very full sound, good songs with great arrangements and a singer I believe (I’m notoriously picky about singers… heh).
Everything ended up working out well enough that they had the set pressed to CD, and gave a copy away with the first round of orders for their new EP. I just got my copy of it today, and it’s cool!
Here’s a sound sample, a track called “When The Curtain Falls”:
Here is the Music Player. You need to installl flash player to show this cool thing!
From all outside appearances, the outside of the studio is…. finished! Of course there is a ton of work left to do, but definite progress is being made. Feels good.
As a reminder, here’s what I began with:
And here’s what it looks like now, after a year and a half of (very) part-time work:
From a different angle, including where the side door used to be:
And a closeup of the new front door, with the trimwork installed:
And finally, a view from inside, showing the new door install with the framing:
The new siding on the outside is much lighter in color than the rest of the siding, but once it ages for a year or so it will be a much closer match. You can already see the shed, which was installed last year, looks very close to the garage.
This is very exciting, lots of visible progress.
Next steps: real electricity into the garage. Need to get the trench dug before the ground freezes. Also, I have to “beef up” the outer shell, especially on the side that faces the house. This step will be the first step that does not follow conventional construction techniques and instead uses techniques specifically designed for stopping sound. I’ll be sure to document this carefully!
Once the beefup is done, it will be time to insulate the garage.
Had some help today, and got the framing (almost) finished for the front door:
I made a mistake somewhere in the framing, visible in the above pic. Can you spot it? Just have to fix that mistake (quick), then lock down the framing, do the trim work, remove the garage door, install the front door, then I’m done with this step.
Well, after half a year off from the studio build, I’m back at it. Several factors contributed to this, not the least of which is that we seriously contemplated moving. But, we’ve decided to stay put, which means the studio build is back on.
Next step was to remove the side door. Did that today. I still need to put the trim work up, but here is what it looks like from the outside:
On the left is the trash bin I had to build a while back (can’t store trash in the studio). In the middle you can see the now-plugged doorway, and on the right is the door I removed. I will most likely re-use this door for the outside of the studio (outer leaf). It will be beefed up a bit for security.
From the inside, the old doorway now looks like this:
That’s the doorway, with new framing and a new cut piece of siding, toward the right where the side door used to be. You can still see the open garage door; that’s next.
Next step: remove the garage door, frame up the opening, install the side door in its place, and then finally put more siding in place to cover it up. Once this is done, it will be time to beef up and insulate the outer shell. Also, need to get electricity into the garage before winter hits. Not much time left!
Managed to finish up just in time for a beautiful sunset through my woods:
