[FrankHudson]

The Parlando Project is designed to have varied music, most of which I need to come up with. Some pieces just have solo acoustic guitar and the vocal, others have a larger multipart orchestras. There are also tracks the use an indie rock band, but most of them don't have acoustic guitar on them.

I'm the engineer, producer, utility session man, and tea boy for all the recordings and the composer for most of them.

There are others here who are much more accomplished recordists, but to my taste I find that there's often an inverse relationship between the quality of a guitar listened to from the playing position in a room played solo and what fits in an arrangement with other instruments. Big, full, deep-toned, overtone-rich guitars seem to need to get EQ'ed out of their glory. Crisper guitars need less EQ and seem to fit in better.

For example I have nice sounding rosewood b&s dreadnaught that rarely gets used for recordings. My old Seagull Folk (maple-ish laminated cherry) gets the call a lot. I have another small bodied guitar with Elixir Polyweb strings on it--a string set that a lot of folks don't care for when they play their guitars, but I do like the reduced string squeak when that becomes an issue.

When I decide which to use, I try to decide quickly (my production schedule is insanely fast), but often when I'm playing the part if it has important bassy-register notes I'll choose a smaller guitar with a tight bass so that I can more easily bring those out in the mix.

Nice to hear that others are making use here of the range of colors that VI and MIDI allow. I often use bowed strings in my arrangements triggered from my electric guitar with a MIDI pickup or a cheap little plastic keyboard. And my personal nostalgia zone gets triggered when I use the inauthentic but flavorful Mellotron VI instruments out there.


I'll sometime spend more time on the drum/percussion section that any other track. Even when one uses MIDI drum patterns it's kind of nice to mix in small hand percussion. I've even have a ride and crash cymbal that I'll mic and play with MIDI drums. As to patterns, I kind of like how Logic's drummer instrument can be coaxed into doing what you want my manipulating the parameters including the "follow" feature which lets you use another track that the bass/snare will react to (and that track can even be muted, just something you want to use to "conduct" the drum groove).