For the Identity album, I wanted to start small and end huge, with complexity and volume building over time. To do this, I felt the first song had to be elemental and essential. What better way to convey this than with the most fundamental musical instrument: the human voice? That song would become “Angel”.
When I first started sketching the piece out, I sat at my keyboard with a notebook and a pencil. No complicated samples, just my voice and a simple piano sound. I needed to figure out the chords, the melody, and how the verses would shift from minor to major. That piano sketch became the blueprint for everything that followed.
I originally intended to sing all the vocal parts myself – four voices, stacked and blended. I created a lead sheet and rehearsed the main vocal with piano daily. But as my self‑imposed recording deadline approached, I realized that I was running out of time. I had never actually tried singing the other parts, and I wasn’t confident that I could get the blend and consistency I wanted in the time I had left. I needed a better solution.
Then I discovered Mervyn Warren’s Choir library (Spitfire Audio) during a Black Friday sale. That changed everything. Suddenly, I had a real‑sounding ensemble that could support my lead vocal without overpowering it. I ended up using the choir throughout the entire piece, from start to finish – introducing different sections of the choir at key points (bridge, final chorus) but always keeping a choral presence underneath.
Once I had a rough mix together, hearing everything blend together, I knew this was going to work as the opener to the album that I had originally imagined. Mixing and mastering this piece was pretty straightforward as there weren’t too many tracks and everything was sounding really good with some minimal processing.
Special Recording Notes
Lead vocal: Recorded in Logic at 24bit/96kHz.
No external processing during recording – captured dry to leave flexibility for later.
Special Mix Prep Notes (Post‑Tracking, Pre‑Mixing)
Clip gain: Adjusted every vocal region to around -18 dB RMS before any processing.
Melodyne: Used for both pitch correction and the sibilant tool – far superior to FlexPitch.
Hardware Voxbox: Ran the lead vocal through my Manley Voxbox as a hardware insert. Settings:
Input: 1:00, Gain: 48, HPF: 80Hz
Compressor: Threshold 12:00, Attack Fast, Release Medium Fast (“Classic LA2A”)
Choir: Mervyn Warren Choir, programmed via MIDI and rendered as audio, placed on its own fader groups. Created submasters for each choir section (e.g., soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and wrote automation to build dynamics across the song’s sections (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro).
Lead vocal chain: After the hardware insert, I set up two sends: one for parallel compression using a Fairchild 660, and another to a dedicated instance of Black Box using the “Airy Vocal” preset for some “dirt”. I blended both in with the main vocal track.
Reverb:
Lexicon 480L with the “Dialog 2” setting on one send.
Air Studios Reverb Essentials with the “Cathedral Strings” setting on another send, used during the climax.
Blackbox: Added to master bus with the “16 Mix Bus 1” preset – gave the whole track a subtle, warm glue.
Special Mastering Notes
Target LUFS: Aimed for -15 to -16 LUFS (intimate, natural, breath).
Ozone settings:
EQ: Made small adjustments – +0.8 dB on high shelf @ 10.5 kHz
Identity is now streaming everywhere and on Bandcamp. This is how it was made.
While doing an annual year‑end review of 2024 and planning for 2025, I started jotting down ideas on my whiteboard for a new music project – things that might be fun and interesting to try.
My initial brain dump
Some ideas were based on tools I wanted to use and/or get more familiar with (Spitfire Audio’s Fragile String Evolutions, Abbey Road Strings, Abbey Road Percussion, Universal Audio’s Luna and mixing plugins, Tone Master, Superior Drummer, Omnisphere, and Dorico). Others were genres I wanted to explore (Texas guitar, Motown‑ish funk bass, gospel chords & changes, a Nine Inch Nails‑style synth piece, an acoustic piece, a Radiohead‑meets‑Soundgarden song, a guitar texture looping piece, and a long textural orchestral composition).
I started by creating an abstraction of how I imagined the album starting and finishing, with some artist references to draw from.
Initial ideas for the album contour abstraction
I then fleshed out the abstraction to get an even clearer picture of what happened in between.
Filled out the abstraction by defining each piece from start to finish.
The working title was Harvest. I gave myself three months (June 1 to August 31, 2025) to finish it. (Spoiler: that didn’t happen.) For the most part, I stayed true to these abstractions and musical sketches I put together in that first week.
The album became Identity – nine tracks that start small and elemental (a cappella) and end huge, bombastic, ornate, and broad, with everything in between. To prepare, I listened to and studied artists I’ve long admired: Todd Rundgren’s “Pretending to Care” (for the a cappella piece); Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” (gospel); Ry Cooder, Jedd Hughes, and Lyle Lovett (that lonesome Texas guitar feeling); Joe Dart’s playing on Vulfpeck’s “Dean Town” and James Jamerson for Motown funk; Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics (guitar looping); Nine Inch Nails’ Tension 2013 tour (Pino Palladino on “Sanctified”) and their collaboration with David Bowie (“I’m Afraid of Americans”) for a hard‑hitting synth piece; Ligeti and Penderecki (aleatoric and textural ideas); and Peter Gabriel’s New Blood Orchestra versions of “Signal to Noise” and “Rhythm of the Heat” (which informed my approach to the orchestral piece).
Again, my initial timeline was more than a little optimistic – “Vantage”, the orchestral piece, took on a life of its own. It grew from the Radiohead‑meets‑Soundgarden rock song into a large symphonic piece with a notated score and full orchestral instrumentation. It had so many challenges: compositionally (many metric modulations & meter changes), technically (maxed out rendering memory in Luna), and emotionally (it seemed to never end). It was a massive undertaking.
I created numerous spreadsheets to handle project planning, tracking, and observations along the way – things to remember next time. They were invaluable in helping me to get my thoughts clarified and progress tracked. Here are some screenshots of a few of them.
Songwriting status spreadsheet
Pre-Production tracker
Chigiana-styled composition planning spreadsheet for the orchestral piece, Vantage
Production tracker for all songs
Mixing and mastering prep tracker
Below is the monthly summary of how the whole thing unfolded – the good, the bad, and the metric modulation.
2025
May – Planning & Listening Parties I spent the first week just listening and imagining. A cappella, Texas guitar, gospel, looped/texture guitar, funk, acoustic guitar, NIN‑style synth, Radiohead‑meets‑Soundgarden, orchestral – I wanted nine distinct genres that would somehow feel like one album. The working title was Harvest. I felt inspired.
June – Songwriting Drill Downs Structured writing sessions, daily acoustic rehearsals, and “Cafe Show & Tell” (CST) performances for my wife. The Open D piece (I-40) started to feel real.
July – A Slow Month I dove into the ThinkSpace BBCSO course as well as an InsideTheScore composing challenge. Little direct album progress, but my skills improved.
August – Intensive Writing & Research Deep dives into Todd Rundgren, Aretha Franklin, Robert Fripp, Ry Cooder, Jedd Hughes, Lyle Lovett, Joe Dart & Vulfpeck, Robert Fripp, Nine Inch Nails, Radio Head, Sound Garden, Peter Gabriel & New Blood Orchestra, as well as the composers Holst, Ligeti and Penderecki. Daily work on all songs in rotation. By the end of the month, I had most song structures as well as full lyrics for the Gospel and NIN pieces. “Yes!!”
September – Daily Rehearsals & Charts Wrapped up writing of structures and lyrics. Rehearsed all songs six or seven days a week. Started doing deep‑focus rehearsals: Angel section by section for 50 minutes, Fields and Gospel for 30 each, etc.. Lead sheets in Dorico underway.
October – Charts, CST & Logic Templates Finished charts for Angel, Gospel, and RadioGarden. Restrung all guitars. Created Logic template files for every song – tempo, meters, markers, chord track. Continued performing at CSTs.
November – Production Begins Recorded scratch tracks, primary guitar parts, and vocals. Re‑amped Fields through my pedalboard – “sounds amazing!” Also added more Spitfire libraries, UAD plugins, and Superior Drummer SDX to my system.
December – Vantage Takes Over Everything came to a halt due to metric modulation and orchestration issues for Vantage. Eventually figured it out, after losing a lot of momentum. Then completed notation of Vantage – 2nd verse, chorus, strings, bridge, outro, transition. “Made significant progress – feeling good about the piece again.”
2026
January – Orchestral Scoring & Logic Transition Exported Dorico MIDI to Logic. Assigned articulations for every instrument. Fixed tempo errors where “.500” had gone missing. Discovered that Horns 1‑4 share samples (legato nightmare). Used Tim Davies’ approaches for string and woodwind arrangements – spread out arpeggios became a lifesaver.
February – Articulation Hell → Breakthrough Created SHORTS and LONGS track stacks. Then the workflow adjustment that saved me: Humanisation → Quantisation (40%) → Copy to SHORTS → Re‑assign articulation → Delay offset. Applied to every instrument. The result? “Can’t express how relieved I feel … sounds so much better.” I rendered virtual instruments to audio and never looked back.
March – Vocals, Melodyne & First Luna Mix Learned Melodyne (YouTube and Groove3). Started mixing in Luna, with “The Gospel” being the first song. Discovered clipping before the second chorus – a poorly edited comp region. But then: hardware Manley Voxbox on lead vocal. Huge difference. My vocal recipe became: clip gain → Melodyne → Voxbox → parallel Distressor → Shadow Hills + Pultec. Blackbox on the master bus – “sounds amazing”.
April – Album‑Wide Mix Prep Mixed Angel, Fields, X9, Us, I‑40, Freedom, and Disintegration in Luna. Built a repeatable template. Added to my plug‑in cheat sheet: AMS doubling, Cooper Delay (default for widening), Oceanway in reverb mode.
May – Vantage Deep Mix, Mastering & Burnout DeepSeek helped me generate tables for tape machines, console emulations, summing, reverbs, and delays. Then I created a Mix Processing Bus – all submasters → processing bus → trim bus. This let me keep my tone while hitting -6dB peak for mastering. Vantage went through multiple iterations. I was exhausted. I made a Plan B (only Adaptive Limiter) and a Plan A (full Ozone processing). Plan A sounded better.
June – Submission & Release June 1st: Submitted the audio files to CDBaby. June 5‑8: I went back and updated Vantage Dorico score with timpani, bass drum, piatti, tubular bells, tam tams. June 9: CDBaby passed inspection – album appeared on Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify and other streaming services. June 11: Set up Bandcamp release. Announced album release on my website.
Things I Want to Remember for Next Time
Abstractions for everything! – for albums, songs, lyrics, arrangements, mixes, mastering.
Parallel processing – work on all songs in rotation. Prevents getting stuck.
Keeping a project log was super helpful. Often I lost track of what I did and/or when I did something and having the log helped to put things in perspective.
Whiteboard word dumps – adjectives and emotional arcs before writing lyrics.
Modeling after other songs (e.g. Afraid of Americans) was super useful
Songwriting Status Table before notation, huge help!
Created Chigiana-like spreadsheet to identify everything I might want to do in Vantage. Definitely helped to give clarity.
While notating challenging parts, determine rhythms first then add pitches
Having a piano reduction for Vantage was key, particularly for the arpeggios in the WWs.
Having the Chord Track in Logic was super helpful, even just for reference while playing parts in live.
Rehearsals: 1) Extended focus (repeat one section at a time until locked) 2) Going over all songs for a couple of months was huge
Remembering Confidence on opening line is everything
Performing @ CST (Cafe Show & Tell) – weekly creative sharing. Uncovered every blind spot.
Re-Amping with two amps rules (Tone Master + Landau = Amazing)
Stereo pair mic’ing for room tones worked beautifully (watch for positioning and phase coherence)
Tim Davies approaches – string & woodwind arrangements, spread out arpeggios.
Shorts/Longs + delay offset – essential for realistic sample orchestras.
Remember to keep original MIDI tracks with Virtual Instruments removed after bouncing to audio. Hide, but keep them around.
Clip gain to -18dB RMS on all audio tracks.
Melodyne – superior to FlexPitch. Sibilant tool is a lifesaver.
Hardware Voxbox – massively better than software. Use it.
Parallel compression on acoustic guitar is awesome! Loved the Fairchild 770 on Us (Time Constant set to 5, cranked the input gain and the threshold so that -10dB of compression was applied.
Using different Studer A800 machines and tape formulations/setting per instrumentation group made a huge difference to create space EQ wise. See project log for specific settings.
DeepSeek was invaluable in figuring out which tape machines, tape, & settings to use in Vantage (orchestra & rock instrumentation). Also gave really helpful guidance in delays and reverbs to use on all instruments other than the vocals (see project log for specific settings). Really great.
Blackbox HG-2: “Mix bus 1” preset is pretty excellent on just about anything
Other plug-in mentions: AMS vocal doubling, Cooper Delay (default) for widening and giving presence particularly synth bass, and Oceanway in reverb mode on a send
Mix Processing Bus – submasters → processing bus → trim bus to -6dB. Decouples tone from delivery level.
Plan A / Plan B – always have a safety net. Saved me multiple times.
96kHz workflow – record/mix at 96kHz, then convert: 24/96 → 24/44.1 → 16/44.1 with POW‑r #2 dithering.
The making/creating is the prize/goal. I’ll never be this intimate with these songs again.
What to Avoid (or Do Better)
Never skip the metronome during rehearsals – even if not recording to click. My timing suffered.
AI isn’t always great at doing musical analysis and often makes mistakes on advanced usage of music and audio apps.
Need a way to circle back to/review original intentions – e.g., The Gospel drifted from its original meaning. A one‑page abstraction for the lyrics might have caught it.
Create a tempo track before layered recording – I‑40 drifted because I had no click.
Need to remember to voice lead better when writing on guitar and transferring to other instruments
Practice in the recording setup – outside noise and unfamiliar mic position ruined takes.
Hit a roadblock w/ orchestrating Vantage. I think I was making it too important.
Don’t let burnout drive decisions – when exhausted, make a Plan B, rest, then do Plan A properly.
Identity is now available on all streaming platforms (such as Spotify), or you can also listen to it on Bandcamp.
At the start of 2025, I decided to revisit a set of songs I originally wrote in March 2016. Back then, the writing process was unexpectedly fast and cohesive—about nine songs came together in a single week, including melodies, chord progressions, lyrics, and charts. This was a stark contrast to my earlier experiences, where writing music felt difficult and slow, often yielding only a few scattered ideas over the course of a year.
The turning point came from a simple question my wife asked: “Why can’t you make an album in a week?” At first I looked at her with an expression of “you don’t know what you are asking…” but stopped and really considered “why can’t I”? I decided to act as if writing music was easy. That mindset shift resulted in a burst of creativity, and it’s a technique I’ve continued to use on subsequent projects, including Music Sketches, Realworld Beatcamp, Equinox, my Berklee degree, the Chigiana Film Scoring Intensive, and more.
Songwriting Process
I made early handwritten charts and lyric sheets for each song, which proved essential—without them, these songs likely wouldn’t have been recorded. While I didn’t document the process step-by-step, I know that once ideas started flowing, they came quickly. My daily studies of scales, chord scales, and resources like the Songwriting Sourcebook often sparked chord progressions and melodies. For lyrics, I relied on timed free-writing sessions followed by focused work on the song’s theme.
At the end of 2024, my wife and I committed to making 2025 a year of personal projects, which prompted me to finally bring these songs to life.
Arranging and Notation
For lead sheets, I used Dorico (which I absolutely love to work with). Its logical workflow made the process efficient and clear, particularly when working with lyrics. When I encountered challenging syncopated rhythms, I turned to targeted ear training with Ear Master, which has improved my overall musicianship.
Early on, I practiced songs in a freeform way and only used proper recording setups on the day of tracking, which was stressful and rarely yielded satisfactory results. I changed my approach to rehearse with a microphone, audio processing, and a click or drum track from the start of each week. Recording rehearsals and focusing on looping tricky sections helped clarify arrangements and improved the feel of each song.
Recording Workflow
Before recording, I made sure to define the essentials for each song: key, meter, tempo, and rhythms. I found an effective microphone position for recording guitar and vocals simultaneously—placing a condenser mic at shoulder height, with the back pointed toward the right corner of the room.
I used templates in both Luna and Logic, which sped up the technical side of recording. This was my first project entirely at a 96kHz sample rate, which struck a good balance between clarity and manageable file sizes. I also used Logic’s chord track feature and recorded the click to an audio track, automating its volume to minimize headphone bleed during softer passages.
While I enjoyed recording in Luna, I returned to Logic for its strength in working with MIDI in case I ever wanted to add any additional instruments. The songs are ready for further development if I choose to revisit them.
Mixing and Mastering
All songs were mixed in a single Luna session using consistent signal routing and templates. I relied on plug-ins like UA Voxbox for de-essing and Brainworx SSL 9000J for clarity on both vocals and guitar. Parallel compression, distortion, and reverb (using Capitol Chambers) added depth, while UA’s Studio D provided stereo width. The mix bus chain included SSL G Bus Compressor, Fairchild 670, ATR-102, and an 1176 used as a limiter.
Final mastering was done in Logic, with level matching and Ozone for polish.
Cafe Show & Tell (CST)
My wife and I created a weekly “Cafe Show & Tell” to share the progress we were making on our respective projects. These regular deadlines provided accountability and helped us stay on track. For my project, in addition to rehearsing and recording a new song, I performed two songs each week—one that was recorded and one for the following week.
Performing for someone else, even a close partner, felt very different from solo practice and highlighted the importance of preparation. Small details, like avoiding shirts with sleeve buttons (which can create unwanted noise), became apparent. Warming up 30 minutes before performing, closing my mouth when not singing, and pushing through mistakes were all practical lessons learned.
We also had weekly review meetings every Sunday night to help us reflect on progress and plan next steps, that made a significant difference in maintaining momentum.
This project has reinforced the value of mindset, preparation, and incremental progress in creative work. Revisiting these songs has been both a technical and personal journey, and the process itself has become as meaningful as the finished recordings.
The album is now available on all streaming platforms (such as Spotify), but you can also listen to it here on Bandcamp.
A few months back I got some plug-ins from Universal Audio and man, they are something. Sonically and visually, just fantastic. And now that they have native versions through their Spark platform that don’t require specialized hardware to run, things just got even better.
I’m still getting familiar with each plug-in’s feature set so as to find the right settings for the right situation, but I love what I’m already able to do with them. To help things out, UA has some fantastic tutorials on their YouTube channel, I particularly like their quick tips series.
The other day I went to a local guitar store with a friend of mine and came across “the one that got away”. I was beside myself when I saw this thing. I didn’t bother playing it right then as I had a strong feeling that it would be mine if I did.
You see, I have been thinking about this amp since the one and only time I heard it way back in the late 90’s. I assumed that this was a new model that would be made for years and years. Little did I know that this was a Custom Shop amp with a _very_ limited run. I never saw it again, until last week.
There isn’t much information about it online other than this from the owner’s manual:
The Fender Amp Custom Shop is dedicated to creating high quality amplification to serve top artists and discriminating players. The Tone-Master is a unique amplifier with many possibilities. On the surface it is a 100 watt, 2 channel switching “Head” amplifier. Upon further inspection one will notice many features which set it apart from anything offered before.
The Tone-Master is a hand-made, point-to-point wired, tube instrument amplifier. There are no solid- state (transistor) devices in the signal path of any kind. This amplifier was created from the efforts of a handful of top craftsmen, players and designers who saw a need and envisioned a new amplifier. Like the other Fender custom amps, the Tone-Master is painstakingly built, one at a time, by a select group of craftsmen at the Fender electronics factory in Lake Oswego, Oregon.
The Tone-Master was created for the discriminating player who requires a high powered, high volume amplifier capable of clean tones, overdriven vintage amp tones as well as heavily overdriven distortion. It has 2 independent channels, switchable via the front panel A/B switch or the footswitch (provided).
Before taking SF Guitarworks’Custom Guitar Workshop I was in one of their Guitar Setup and Maintenance workshops. It was a really good experience and I learned quite a bit. I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to be more familiar with their guitar and how to get it feeling and sounding just the way they want it.
Here are a couple of screenshots of the workshop PDF.
I bought this guitar years ago after learning the hard way that if I find something that I really like I should grab it before it is no longer available. At the time I was looking for something “a little different” and this fit the bill. Part stratocaster, part telecaster, part precision bass, the ’72 was one of the “Fender Pawn Shop Series” models introduced in 2011 and only in production for a couple of years.
“The Pawn Shop Fender ’72 presents an unusual combination of classic Fender design elements, not the least of which is its semi-hollow Stratocaster body with an f hole. The result is a truly distinctive instrument with a huge sound, with other features including a U-shaped Telecaster neck, rosewood fretboard with modern 9.5” radius and 6105 frets, Fender Wide Range humbucking neck pickup and Fender Enforcer™ humbucking bridge pickup, early-’50s Precision Bass-style dual-knob chrome control plate with master volume and center-detented pickup blend controls, ’70s-style hard-tail Stratocaster bridge, ’70s-style Fender “F” tuners, mint green pickguard, bullet truss rod, three-bolt neck attachment and deluxe gig bag.”
The other day I pulled it out of the case and put some new strings on it. Forgot just how much I really love this guitar. Feels and sounds great, plus it looks really cool!
Photo was taken at a SF Guitarworks setup workshop a couple years back.
Last year I put together a custom electric guitar, all aspects of it were to my specification. Everything from the parts, the materials used, the look and wear/aging of the paint and hardware, even the type of wiring used for the electronics. I called it “The Duke”.
I love this thing. Honestly, it turned out way better than I thought it would. Essentially it’s all my favorite things in one guitar: mahogany Fender Jazzmaster body & neck, ebony fretboard, extra wide neck (for my big fingers), locking tuners, stainless steel frets, throaty P90 pickups and the amazing Mastery Vibrato.
I point out the vibrato because I was originally given another (inferior) tremolo/bridge and was really not enjoying the way the guitar turned out as much as I had hoped I would. Once I got the mastery installed it transformed the guitar into a completely new instrument. It feels so smooth, solid and dependable. Stays in tune without needing a locking nut and looks bad ass. It’s fantastic. This is without a doubt one of my all time favorite guitars. Thanks Mastery!
So glad that I found this channel on YouTube, it has so much useful information on it. Thoughtful reviews on all sorts of pedals/amps/guitars, comparisons of pedals by type (overdrives, distortions, fuzzes, wah-wahs, reverbs, delays, tremolos, vibes, etc.), thorough explanations on pedal related topics (e.g. pedal order, gain stacking, using buffers, power requirements, etc.), interviews with great players, pretty much anything you can think of related to electric guitar is on this channel. Also, they seem to be a couple of genuinely nice “blokes”.
I’ve had various incarnations of my pedalboard over the years. In the past I had ones that were designed specifically for acoustic guitar. Others were to be used with either acoustic or electric. This one is a side project that I’ve been working on for quite a while and it’s all about the electric guitar.
It’s pretty large when compared with what’s popular these days, but hey, I’m a large guy with large feet and large hands. Given that I’m not gigging out much these days I decided to go with comfort and ease of access on this one.
Aside from it’s substantial footprint, the biggest feature of this pedalboard is that it is set up to be used with two amps, either one at a time or simultaneously. (I had no idea how good two amps could sound when blended together. It really is quite remarkable.)
So far I’m pretty happy with how it is working out. Sounds really good and I can access everything/make modifications quickly and easily. Now I just need to program the loop switchers and it will be good to go!
