Final Mix of Symbolic Dog Blues!!

At long last, here is the final mix of my first song! It’s called “Symbolic Dog Blues,” and it has been my learning project all year, a sort of self-guided senior thesis in audio engineering. It’s goofy and silly, and not typical of my other ideas, but that’s what it takes to keep me interested for twelve and a half months

The featured solo instrument is an electrified kazoo that I call the “Kazooka,” and you will hear character voices chatting about it overtop of the song.

New in this final version: drum fills throughout the last half of the song.

Symbolic Dog Blues, final mix

The purpose of this song was to learn how to record and mix a diversity of sonic elements:

• acoustic guitar
• electric guitar
• electric bass
• keyboard (rock organ sound)
• Kazooka (ordinary plastic, played like a sax, processed like an electric guitar)
• bottle clinks (tequila and Mexican Coke)
• handmade drum (bought at a tai chi festival, played with bare hands)
• spoken character voices
• singing voices
• programmed drums

I wrote and performed all parts of this song on the above instruments in my mostly-soundproof studio in my basement. All the sounds are from live, actual instruments (as opposed to loops or computer sounds), except for the programmed drums, since I don’t play the drums.

Recording equipment used

• Shure 57 microphone
• RØDE NT-1A microphone
• Apogee Duet FireWire interface
• MacBook Pro laptop computer, running Mac OS 10.4
• Apple’s GarageBand ‘08 recording software

Educational sources for recording and mixing techniques

• The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, by Bobby Owsinski
• Acoustic Design for the Home Studio, by Mitch Gallagher
• EQ Magazine
• Sound on Sound Magazine
• prior experience playing in bands and getting frustrated with poor recordings
• prior experience with signal processing concepts as an electrical engineer

Other blog posts on this song

• The original Kazooka video
• All posts about “Symbolic Dog Blues”