Rural Delivery

Rural Delivery - cover art
Design: Linnae daSilva

© 2013 Michael A. Bedrosian ℗ 2013 Plutonian Music (ASCAP)

Links

The Left Hand Set

  • Michael Bedrosian – Vocals, Instruments

Songs

  • Why the Road is Long
  • Four of Us
  • Here and There
  • Crystal
  • Great Sad Face
  • Gardener
  • Blew Up My TV
  • The Other
  • The Holy Mountain
  • Before It’s Illegal
  • The East Gate
Great Sad Face (short version)

Recording

Notes

A memoir. For RD #1 Mt. Airy Road, where I grew up, learned to love music, became myself, forgot myself. A semi-wild, wonderful and scary place, very isolated between woods and fields, that no longer exists.

I thought Totally New was basically a success, recording wise, so I tried to get the same sounds on Rural Delivery. But it seems impossible not to push further in the same direction, so the drums are hotter, the guitars are middier – and the mix is using up more headroom. I remember seeing overload lights on several channels on most mixes, but I didn’t want to back off the levels for fear of losing the excitement. Could there have been a middle ground? Of course . . .

On this project I doubled down on something I’d started with Totally New: making the cheap compressors work their output amps really hard (without bringing up too much noise). This can definitely be overdone, but there’s something I like about it (again, excitement). However, hot signals to the mixer require either padding or more headroom – and the Scepter’s line level pots were all the way down. To keep working this way, I’d need a mixer with a wider input level range, and more headroom on the stereo buss – but this would have to wait.