this is an old song from 1995 or so that i played guitar and sang on. i remixed it just for fun. it was originally recorded on an 8 track reel-to-reel. all drums were recorded in stereo down to 2 tracks.....talk about committing to a mix!

the guitars were tracked direct through a rocktron chameleon that i tweaked a bunch. you can probably tell that i have had pretty much the same tone for many years, no matter what gear i played through.

the vocal was mic'd with a Shure sm57, no special outboard gear.

the whole song was done live in our practice room. i added an extra guitar track and background vocal track later. we were fairly tight as a three piece band. my lead was off the top of my head (in one take) which means it was sloppy. oh well, that was then, and i don't know what i was thinking back then. i was all about what we could pull off live without anybody extra or any tracks running in the background. boy was i wrong about where the future was going.

https://soundcloud.com/singtall/purple-heart-who-cares

Sounds good! Man, 19 years. I hate what I mixed 19 weeks ago. I can't imagine 19 years' worth of "I should have done...." type of thoughts when listening.

good stuff man, love the mix and tune. I recently did the same thing with a song idea from about12 or 13 years ago. I originally used a Fostex analog 4 track! I like digging old things up and working on them with today's technology.

saxon j

this band was christian metal. it was a hard road. clubs didn't want us because we didn't pimp alcohol, and churches thought we were too loud and God wasn't in metal music.

So Analog, so warm sounding, your vocals are really good

recording on a reel to reel at hot levels really fattens things up.

thanks, i never really thought of myself as a good singer, just a guitar player that got tired of flaky singers.

Dude that song was awesome you sing really good you remind me of a fellow named Jimie Bennett who is the lead singer for the Christian band "King James" with the guitar player from WhiteCross Rex Carol. I so would have bought this about this if it had been for sale back then.




Yes the reel to reel does kind of fat and things up there is a band you may have heard of called "Eternal Decision" and they used a real to real to master their three CDs they put out and it has great mastered sound.


You will think these guys are Metallica or sepulture or both together:

Nice stuff Singtall! I did not know about christian metal.
I have old tapes of what I used to do 20 years ago, but I cannot read it any more (my Yamaha 4 tracks died 10 years ago). But to be honest, I am not sure I really want to hear that

Cool stuff, singtall.

Clearly your ear for creating guitar tones has been an asset of yours for quite some time. In that regard, I'm curious - I think your tones here are very good, but with modern technology, would you change it if you recorded this song today? As you stated, your tone is still similar.

Also I was curious about your comment saying you were wrong about where the future was going. Were you referring to gear and tone production, or music in general?

On the latter, I think it's awesome today there are countless bands like Flyleaf, Skillet, etc. that are Christian yet do appeal outside that demographic.

lol - I wish my leads were that 'sloppy'.

thanks guys.

i was wrong about how music production was going. i thought it was all about performing everything live yourself (especially after the Milli Vanilli thing), but as it turns out, many bands now use some type of backing track or pc to fill in the vocals and keyboards.

i am actually pretty happy with the tone i had on that cd. i haven't been able to really top it. i believe my tone nowadays is very similar though.

it is cool that there are many heavy christian bands out there now. the thing is that it seems like christian music is always behind as far as the latest styles. it's like artists get saved and after 2-3 years they try to keep doing what they were doing stylistically and it's almost dated sounding by the time it comes out. that's how it was in my day anyway. there are some exceptions to that though: Flyleaf seemed to come out and do something fresh (to my ears anyway).

sounds good i wouldn't have guessed you were only working with a stereo drum track.

i was listening to an album by a band called cry of love for years before i even realised they were a christian rock band..lol

I'm of the opinion that there was more chicanery going on back in the 70's and 80's than we knew about, since it was easier for acts to conceal certain things; especially with no YouTube.

For instance, I was at the concert Motley Crue filmed the Home Sweet Home video, and that piano part was clearly pre-recorded. Tommy Lee was running back to his drum kit and the piano was still playing.

Bands like Kiss were using guys like Gary Corbett behind the stage adding keyboards and triggering backing vocals.

And it turns out the entire first Warrant album was done pretty much by session musicians.

I also seem to recall a major lawsuit when Electric Light Orchestra was caught using pre-recorded tracks in a live setting.

I'm sure these are but a few examples and the practice was more widespread than we knew.

I see what you're saying about Christian bands sounding dated; I would imagine it would have something to do with the fact Christian radio is not known to be a trendsetter. So anything too far from the norm doesn't stand a chance of getting much airplay.

Some of the more mainstream Christian bands are sometimes more with the times. For instance, I really dig Paramore.

Sounds great, I did some songs where we had to mix down the drums like that. Guitars are NICE! It don't seem "direct" like the Eleven Rack stuff. Maybe I'm used to hearing a lot of this kind of thing from listening to a lot of bands that did it, but it sounds very realistic in comparison. Very full & as if the "mics" are set up perfectly. There's always that factor that everything is now captured crystal clear in the digital recording realm too. I wonder with your ears if you could take the Fabfilter Saturn plugin & get that tape sound just like on the "reel thing." Gotta be the tape saturation that makes the difference & makes it breathe...

\m/!!!!!