Recently, I have been going through mandolin (and octave mandolin) recordings I made while living in Halifax between July 2023 and July 2024. At this point, I’ve forgotten all of the ideas in those recordings–no idea if there’s some gold in there or just coal.
These recordings happened in two ways.
The first was quick, ad hoc recordings I did when I had an extra moment, and I picked up one of my instruments. The idea being that if I’m going to noodle on the mandolin, I might as well record it because it might wind up being a useful idea and even a useful recording. This often happened when I was waiting for my wife when we were about ready to go somewhere or if she wasn’t around and I needed a break from something. I made the recordings with an Izotope Spire Studio, a great, affordable all-in-one recording studio that I would recommend, except that it was sadly discontinued, or a Tascam Portacapture x8, my favorite field recorder.
The second way I would do recordings happened when my wife was out of town (she worked at home). I would set up the field recorder as an audio interface to my laptop and go to town recording for hours, trying to get as many ideas down as possible for later review and, maybe, use. The advantage of this setup was the ability to get good mic placement (i.e. better sound) and use a DAW (digital audio workstation software)—Bitwig Studio, in this case—to add effects to the mandolin audio (a way to inspire ideas because you additional sounds created by the effects, like delays, stutters, and reverbs) and add a drum track to provide rhythm. I’d record both the dry audio of the mandolin (i.e., no effects) and the wet audio (i.e. effects added). That way I could decide to use either or both.
All of the mandolin and octave mandolin recordings on my album Regretfulnot were recorded in one of those two ways. I think more than half of the mando material was captured the first way—random quick ideas that I didn’t really think I’d use. It’s validation for recording as many jam sessions and random noodles as possible, using any mic available (including a phone). (The best mic is the one you have.) You don’t have to use a recording studio or well-treated room to develop inspiring ideas or even useful sounds (though you might have to do some fancy audio processing).
Last week, I extracted this little idea from a multi-hour recording. Here is the dry audio.
The plugin I used for the effect was Arturia’s Efx Motions plugin.
Nothing earth-shattering, but some potential!
I was rather kind to my future self because the idea was a perfect 8-bar melody in 4/4. I’m very liable to come up with an idea in a weird time signature like 7/4 (which was the case for the ideas I extracted for this session). Not to mention, I managed to play it through five times pretty cleanly and with some slight variations for continued inspiration.
I extracted those 8-bar clips and the audio of the drum track I had recorded them with and imported them into Loopy Pro on the iPad. Loopy Pro was designed for doing live looping, but I am finding it to be an amazing tool for coming up with and developing ideas. So in this case, I wanted to add a new drum pattern (inspired by the original) using my Polyend Play+ (my drum machine of choice right now) and come up with some ideas using my Guild Starfire bass and Northfield Ele-Octo electric octave mandolin. And because I like to add spoken word samples and try to get myself to extract spoken word samples at least once a week, I brought in more samples from the Federal Unionist Network “Save Our Services” mass call, which was where I got the samples for this session, too.
I try not to worry about whether those additional ideas are “good” or not, but rather record what comes to mind, even if it’s simple or “obvious.” After a couple-hour session, I recorded several ideas that make it worth further developing this tune. I then went back and used Loopy Pro like a digital sticky note canvas to re-arrange the clips into a bit more of an organized (to me) fashion so that I could attempt a live mix to create a sketch arrangement to review later (when deciding whether to push on with the track and how) and to make it easier to import the audio into my primary DAW if I decide to go ahead and arrange a tune from this material.
Here is a video of me arranging the clips like a bunch of audio sticky notes.
Here is a video of the live mixing of the ideas to create a sketch arrangement to review later.
As you can tell, I didn’t quite succeed in preparing myself to make a concise arrangement that used most of the ideas I recorded. I’m still getting the hang of this approach. But certainly, it’s enough to review later when deciding what tracks to keep developing. And it’s enough to share with you how my sound and approach are developing!