Delfino Plaza, New Equipment, and Flower Garden Preview

Hey everyone!  I just now uploaded Delfino Plaza!  I think on my lag blog post I rattled on about how cool the harmonium was, and I’m actually still really excited about it.  It was a lot of fun to record, and I’m looking forward to using it again soon.  But in the meantime, I decided to tackle my favorite track from Yoshi’s Island, Flower Garden (preview link at the bottom of the page).

New Equipment

A long time ago I was looking for a cheap way to create some basic bass and snare sounds, so I bought a Pearl cajon, which was capable of creating both tones in a concise package.  However, now that you guys have given me some money to play around with, I decided to seek out some other ways to create some bass and snare sounds so that I can have some different tones to choose from for my future recordings.  My studio is tiny, so I was looking for some instruments that wouldn’t take up a lot of storage space, and also bass drums are really expensive, so I was looking around for cheaper alternatives.  I finally settled on a Remo Rhythm Pal Snare Head and a Meinl Bass Box, both of which I have employed in my Flower Garden recording.  Here are some pictures!

This is the Remo Rhythm Pal Snare Head.  It’s basically just a drum head that is designed to attach to the top of a standard 5 gallon bucket, and it comes with a snare clip that’s designed to hang on to the rim of the bucket and press against the bottom of the drum head.  The result is a nice, punchy sounding snare drum-like instrument.  The drum head has a pretty nice action to it, so now I can finally execute some more intricate drum rolls and flourishes that wouldn’t have really been possible with my cajon.  The best part about this instrument is that I can take it apart whenever I’m finished recording, and the drum head fits nicely on my instrument shelf, while the bucket can be bucket can be removed from my room completely and stored out in the garage.  Remo also makes three different tom heads, which are tuned to different pitches.  I’m not sure that I’d have any use for those, but it’s cool to think that I could potentially store a whole snare/tom kit in one little cubbyhole of my shelf if I so desired.

And this is a Meinl Bass Box!  It comes with an L-shaped beater, which you can attach to any standard bass drum pedal.  Once you set it up, you’ve got yourself a nice, compact bass drum.  And since it’s operated with a pedal, it frees up both of my hands to play the snare drum.  One of the limitations of the cajon was that I had to use my hands to play both the bass and snare sounds, which made it difficult to play certain patterns.  And like the Remo Rhythm Pal, this thing is pretty easy to take apart and store away on my shelf when I’m not using it.

Flower Garden Preview (Unmixed Audio)

Here’s an audio preview of Flower Garden!

https://soundcloud.com/user-789983357/fg-premix/s-L73Pq 

Originally I was just going to use my regular melodica for the lead, but at some point I realized that my Piano Horn had all of the notes that I needed.  I really like the tone that the Piano Horn produces, so I decided to try using that instead of my melodica, and I’m very pleased with the results.

Also, I decided to sneak into yet another university to record the vibraphone that you hear in this track (like I did with the harpsichord in Hot Head Bop).

Good times.

Well that’s all for now!  Once again, thank you so much for making it possible for me to take on all of these cool projects that I’ve been putting off for so long!  Y’all are the best.