It's nearly complete - the New Dimaension X album for 2016! This one is a straight up rock album, not very metal or doomy. It's more like my much older music from the early 2000's. Lot's of atmospheric and "percolating" synths, some guitar riffs, rock drums, a few guitar solos. Actually, if you like the band Zombi, it's probably right up your alley. All original tunes based on a 12-tone row series of notes.
The kind of interesting thing for this album is the equipment used. I recently took the plunge and bought myself an actual USB audio interface - a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. It's a very simple, easy-to-use interface, with two inputs that can either be used for 1/4" jacks, or 3-pin mic jacks with phantom power. Direct monitoring of what's going into it, and either 1/4" out monitor jacks for high-quality studio monitors, or a simple headphone out (which is what I use - I send the output to my trusty Logitech computer monitors).
I also bought a new guitar pedal - a Tech21 RK5, with is the Ritchie Kotzen version of the FlyRig. It's a Sansamp with a built-in analog Delay, Reverb, Boost, and a modified version of the Ritchie Kotzen OMG distortion pedal. All analog (except the reverb?), no programming, no MIDI memory, just dial in your tone, plug into an amp or direct (which is what I did for the new album), and it sounds great. This is not a "metal" pedal, but it has plenty of gain for heavy rock stuff, which is more my thing anyway.
I opted to use only one guitar - my trusty red Yamaha SJ-550 HR, which I've had since 1987, loaded with DiMarzio pickups. That's all the guitar stuff I used. Very simple. Standard tuning. No drop-tunings, no alternate tunings, just plain old E standard.
Everything else on the album are various free synths I've acquired. I also decided to NOT use EZ Drummer at all. All the drums are a combination of free drum samples I've collected and loaded into ReaDrum, which is a series of the Reaper software called ReaSamplomatic 5000. Each "instance" of the Sampler has multi-layered samples of the drums loaded. It works very well, except for a few minor glitches and drop-outs here and there, but considering it's all free, I highly recommend it to my fellow recording artists out there who don't want to pay for a boatload of drum samplers.
The other neat thing about the guitar equipment used to record this album. It's all red. The guitar, the RK5, and the Focusrite interface. Red. Shiny Red.
I'm pretty happy with the results so far. The new equipment is VERY simple to use and sounds great. I'm looking forward to doing more recording this spring. I need to work on writing some new music, but for now, I'll be listening to the new album a few more times, maybe work on a few mixes of the songs, mastering, album art, and then I'll post it at the Internet Archive. I may also decide to take the dive into the Bandcamp pool and post it there. Maybe try to see if anyone wants to pay me actual money for it? We'll see.
Any suggestions for the next album?
