For those of you who may have missed it, here is a video of me throwing my alarm clock in the garbage when I became a self-employed musician. I still have no alarm clock in the bedroom and when up when I feel like it. I was looking at it today and became all nostalgic!

Hi everyone!

I have been working hard on my CD. My goal has been to write one new song per week and have all tracks demoed by February 14th. Then I will take March and April to complete all overdubs, mastering in June and release the first week in July.

The CD will be mostly instrumental, but I am planning at least one vocal tune sung by yours truly! I will share more details about the tracks in coming weeks. In the meantime, here is a clip from my song The Third Heartbreak.

Thanks for your interest in my goings on. I will start posting more often on my blog.

Thanks,

Paul Tauterouff
http://paultauterouff.com

I stumbled across a cool idea while experimenting with different ways to track my guitar. Normally I use either a Shure SM57 on my speaker cabinet or a Hughes and Kettner Redbox Cabinet Simulator on the speaker output to record direct.

The idea I came across was to record your guitar direct using the effects send of your amp head and then add speaker cabinet simulation in your recording software via an amp sim plugin. Most of these programs allow you to bypass the amp sim and use just the cabinet sim. This way you get your raw tone from your amp head, but you can change speaker cabinet and mic simulations later on, which gives you an incredible amount of flexibility.

 Try it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks,

Paul Tauterouff
http://paultauterouff.com

Well, here it is - my long overdue recording blog! I figured I’d kick this off with a quick rundown of the gear I am working with.

Electric Guitars:

1979 Gibson “The SG” with EMG pickups and Kahler tremolo
Charvel Model 3A
Ibanez PGM301 (Paul Gilbert Model)

My SG is my baby and will likely be used for most solos unless I am looking for a “stratty” sound. The Ibanez and Charvel will be implemented for clean tones or the forementioned “stratty” sounds since they both have single-coil modes.

Guitar Amps:

Most of the overdriven tones will be from my Peavey JSX head. I experimented with a few different amp modelers and nothing beats a real tube amp for what I am looking for tonewise. I like gain without too much fuzzyness for overdriven tones. That being said I will be using my AMT DT-2 distortion for some overdriven tones. It sounds great and has a nice tube like feel to it.

Bass Guitar:

My bass guitar is a Peavey Fury. It has a thick solid body and long neck and sounds great. I used this on Nick Layton’s Storming the Castle CD. I recently replaced the P-bass style pickup and it is ready to rock!

Bass Tones:

I am using a Tech 21 Sansamp PSA-1 on its Apeg SVT setting direct in for bass with a Behringer Composer Pro XL compressor to limit the peaks.

Drums:

Drums will be played by my drummer Felice DiRienzo on a Roland electronic kit. The actual samples will come from Toontrack’s EZDrummer. This setup offers a combination of ease of use, flexibility during mix and great sound.

PC/ Recording Software:

My recording PC is a custom machine I designed and built myself specifically for running Pro Tools. It has a 2.3G Athlon 64 Socket AM2 CPU on a PC Chips A13G+ motherboard (Nvidia chipset) with 1000Mhz front side bus, 2Gigs of DDR2 memory, (2) 7200 RPM serial ATA hard drives w/ one 200 Gig drive specifically for audio data. The video card is an Nvidia GeForce with 512MB of video RAM. The OS is Windows XP with some tweaks for max performance.

I am using a Pro Tools Mbox with Digidesign’s Pro Tools LE software with various plugins.

I’ll post again soon with more specifics about my recording process.

Thanks for your interest,

 Paul
http://paultauterouff.com