Spaceships in the Sky

This is a continuation on my (unintended) Space theme.  When I started this "series" on space themed songs, I didn't really anticipate that I'd actual do such a theme.  It just so happens that the last two songs I did both had space themes: Killing Time (Roger Taylor) and Spaceman (Believable Picnic).  So as I was listening to a bunch of songs in my catalog of songs and came across this song by "The Tories", I thought, why not make a series of them.  So I decided to record this song, "Spaceships in the Sky".

This is a song about UFOs, conspiracy theories on aliens on Earth, and the various stories related to them, including lyrics like "Little Green Men with oversized heads, are they real or make believe" and "On a Dakota farm where the woman was abducted from, she's still furious, 'cause her husband called the shrink", this song is tongue in cheek and hopefully a fun one to listen to.

From a recording perspective:

I used both the Nashville Telecaster and the Epiphone Traditional Pro II guitars with different settings on the PreSonus Ampire Guitar VST.

I also (as usual) my Pearl Mimic Pro drum module with my Roland v-Drums kit to get the drums in place.  I used the baseic "Rock" preset for the drums.  I recorded this to MIDI with minimal modifications before printing the audio - mostly to resolve velocity issues.  I added a reverb from the BReverb plugin on the snare drum to add additional space to just that drum.

I also used the RODE NT1 mic with the standard pre-amps from the PreSonus Studio 1824 preamps.  I also used the Waves CLA Epic plugin on the lead vocal for a combination of delay and reverb and also the Waves Abby Road Plates for the verb on the background vocals.

Notably, this is the first time I've used a Slide in my guitar playing.  I used the Epiphone Les Paul for this.

For the Bass, I used the Variax 705.  I think this is the first time I've used this bass on a song even though I've had it for years.  As a "not so accomplished" bass player, I have stuck to the easier-to-play Ibanez up to now, but this one required something a bit lower throughout the song, so I used the Variax 5-string for this.  In this case it's the "Manta" setting, which emulates the Music Man Stingray.  I also added the "red Light District" plugin to this to get a little bit of grit on that lower end bass sound and thicken it up a bit.  This a Studio One included plugin.

I also spent a good bit of time making the PreSonus Mai Tai synthesizer work at the beginning of the song with the Frequency sweep - call out to "Jemusic" on the PreSonus forums for the assistance with the creation of that Sweep patch for the synth.  This was one of those situations where getting the right tone was really important in creating a version of the song that really work.  I actually got this help way back in October 2020 - hard to believe that it has taken me this long to get the rest of this one done.

I also mixed this in my new room configuration.  I didn't really have issues with this from a mix perspective, but I am still working through how to deal with the mastering and loudness things - though I think I finally got that resolved.  The new room location seems to be working fine for the mix itself, but getting the final output to sound the right level and true to what I created is still a challenge.

I didn't really do anything else new or different on this one from what is listed above.  Hope you will enjoy: