It’s that time of the year again where I go into my cave for a few days to arrange and record my yearly Christmas medley. This year it’s a medley of “Do You Hear What I Hear” – first slow, then fast – and the great 80s song “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses. Hope you enjoy it!
It took me about five days worth of work to arrange, record, mix and master this year’s medley. I pretty much arranged and recorded all the drum tracks in the first two days, then recorded the rhythm guitars on day three, the bass and solo guitars on day four, and did the mixing and mastering on the final day, which was spread over several evenings. Quite atypically I recorded the bass after the rhythm guitars. Usually I do it the other way around, but this year it just worked out that way 😛
Merry Xmas and Happy New Year! This year’s medley contains two different versions of the German traditional Christmas carol “Alle Jahre Wieder”, which roughly translates to “Every Year Again”, and “Sleigh Ride”. Enjoy!
Just like last year, all the guitars in this medley were recorded clean and straight into the computer without microphones. Various guitar amp software plugins took care of making the guitars sound as they do. It’s pretty impressive technology, and a lot less hassle when it comes to recording guitar tracks, because there’s no need for microphones (and with that the hard-to-get silence required everywhere else in the house while recording).
Also, a first this year is that I pretty much worked out and recorded all the drum tracks live, going straight from my electronic Roland TD-9 drum kit into the computer. The drum sounds come from the Superior Drummer 2.0 drum plugin, which conveniently has a MIDI mapping set up for the TD-9 out of the box. In previous years, my drum skills weren’t good enough to do all the fills on the drums, and so I would still set them on the computer. This year, however, I didn’t manually set any fills on the computer, but rather just played them in via MIDI straight from the drum kit, along with the rest of the drum track 🙂
This is the first Christmas medley that my girlfriend actively participated in. She plays the clarinet in the slow part in the beginning 🙂 This year’s medley is a mashup of “Silver Bells” and “Jingle Bell Rock”. Hope you enjoy it!
For the techies among you it might be interesting to know that all guitars were recorded clean and going straight into the computer (i.e. no amp or microphone). All the guitar sounds come from plugins. That’s a first for me, as I’ve always recorded amps with microphones in the past. But I have to say that guitar plugins have evolved quite a lot and they sound really good, so I’ll probably keep doing this for future recordings because it’s a lot less of a hassle.
It took me a while to figure out what I was going to do this year for my Christmas medley. There were quite a few contenders to be included in the medley but I finally settled on “First Noel” and “Carol of the Bells”. It also took me longer to record this year. Normally I record everything in about 2-3 days, but this time it took me over a week to get everything done. I think it turned out pretty well though and I hope you like it! Happy holidays!
This year I had no idea what xmas carols I would use for my traditional Christmas medley until the day I wanted to actually start recording it when my girlfriend said “two of my favorite ones are White Christmas and Winter Wonderland”, so that was the inspiration for this medley. I immediately knew that it would be a good combination. The first part “White Christmas” is all acoustic. I played the lead part on both my nylon and steel string acoustic guitars. One is panned to the left the other panned to the right. For the second part of this year’s medley, “Winter Wonderland”, I went into overdrive mode and it turned out to be quite heavy this year. Hope you enjoy it! 🙂
Who would have thought that I’d actually pump out another song just shortly after last year’s Christmas Medley…well, okay it took two months, so sue me 😉
The rhythm track of this song was a single take jam session I did a few weeks ago that I was lucky enough to record (often times I’ll just jam something cool, not record it, and immediately forget it, which leads to me screaming profanities at my neighbors, housemates, and other random people that happen to walk past the house ;)). I re-recorded the song with a click track, added some solos and – taa daa – this is the end result. I admit, it’s kind of random, but it was still pretty cool to just come up with a 4 minute piece of music while jamming.
Since the music is so random I thought the title “April Weather” was appropriate because in Austria the weather in April is pretty random and the song reminded me of it 🙂
Yet another year where I didn’t record much…well, actually I did somewhat, but none of it is ready for release yet. Ah well, I managed to finish my yearly Christmas medley on time 🙂 This year it’s a medley of the traditional German carol “Süßer die Glocken nie klingen” or “Sweeter the Bells Never Sounded” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”. Enjoy!
I can’t believe it’s been a year since I’ve recorded something. Shame on me 😉 In any case, the Christmas season has caught up to me and as every year I spent a few hours on two weekends to record this medley. This year it’s a medley of the traditional Austrian Christmas carol “Still, Still, Still” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”. Hope you enjoy it and have a Merry Christmas.
This is the traditional Christmas Medley I record every year as a present to my friends. This year it’s a medley of the traditional Austrian Christmas carol “Es wird scho glei dumpa”, which translated means something like “It’s going to get dark soon”, and Mariah Carey’s hit “All I Want for Christmas”. Also I managed to sneak in the “Little Drummer Boy” at the end. Merry Christmas!
I put this little piece together on two weekends in a period where I wished that a time shift would occur and I could jump ahead a few weeks in time (to know what comes next, of course ;-)…this was just before I moved from Austria to California). I really enjoyed recording the verse solo guitar for this one, in particular because of the cool guitar sound that is sort of in between crunchy and distorted and played with the neck pickup in single-coil mode of my 7-string. Also the tapping part of the main heavy solo was quite challenging to get it the way I wanted it.
