Listen to my Band: Hellbound Billy

We have posted some rough mixes from the recoding studio.  We are planning to go back and record a real album, but for now you can here the demos we have been sending for booking the band.

A little about the bass you will hear on the tracks: it is a 1950’s Karl Knilling made in Germany.  It has a carved top, and laminate sides/back.  It really projects well–nice mid-tone response and is particularly good when played arco.  If the bass wasn’t so good for playing in bars I would swap it into rotation for orchestral playing, but the laminate construction makes it so much more resistant to getting cracks and it resists feeback so well, that, despite sounding better than my carved bass I will probably keep it setup for playing rock for now.  I picked it up in a trade for a couple of electric basses, an American made Tobias Growler and an Alembic Essence.  It was hard to give up those basses, especially the Tobias because I have had that in my arsenal since 1996 and it was so fun to play slap on.  The strings are Tomastik Spirocore Mediums, not exactly a great choice for playing slap unless you enjoy pain (I do!)  And the recordings were done with just a condensor mic placed about 18 inches from the left F-hole.

I had never recorded an upright bass before, so when we went to the studio, at the request of our engineer, I brought everthing I had to throw at it.  I ran with a magentic pickup, the K&K golden trinity mic, a realist pickup, and the regular condensor mic.  I also had a couple of differnt pre-amps thrown in there too for good measure. No suprise that the studio’s condensor sounded best. What was suprising was that given the nature of digital recording we were able to look at the waveforms from different pickups and see what frequency ranges and phasing effects we ended up with.  It turns out that the setup I have been playing live with is out of phase (the Krivo magnetic and Realist) which explains why it was more resistant to feedback.  Though after being able to hear them compared to various other setups in a controlled environment I have decided to change my live setup once again.

The studio we recorded at was Module Overload in south Denver.  It was wonderful!  We were able to lay down tracks for six songs in a single day, and didn’t go broke in the process.

Enough of my ranting . . . here is the music: www.hellboundbilly.com