Description
My Sister's Guitar is my first tape. It's got six songs: five older ones, and one brand-new one. If you like pop or folk or anti-folk, you might like it. But don't take my word for it. You can hear almost all the songs in RealAudio format below.

It feels good to finally have it released. Already, it has helped me get gigs.

Tape Update

July 14, 1999

Finally, I've got casettes I'm happy with. The first casettes had some scratchy, ticky sounds and at first, it looked like Accudub, my duplicator, was going to blame it on the master and give up. Then Freddy took charge and went the extra mile to make it right. I suspect their CD player didn't like my CD-R master the first time, so I brought in a DAT. This time, they got it right.

Left to right: Mike, Aaron and Tony each contributed

Songs

• Play Me a Song
• The Fishmonger Song
• Lonely streets
• The Alligator Song
• In the Sighs
• Overtired

Recording Notes
(click for song-by-song recording notes)

My Sister's Guitar was mainly recorded using my home computer.

Specs:

• Sure 058 Microphone
• Sanyo Microphone
• Altech Lansing ACS48 speakers
• Gravis Ultrasond PnP
• SparQ Drive (for offline song storage)
• homebrew Pentium 100/Celeron 450 (overclocked)

The magic of multitrack mixing enables me to play tracks on top of each other.

Instruments played by me:

• Flute: Armstrong
• Sister's guitar: Anjo
• New guitar: Ovation CS148
• Ukulele: Ventura
• Piano: Heintzman & Co. 1929 O (It's a good piano, but its claims that it's a "grand piano in upright form" are marketing-speak.)
• Keyboard: Concertmate 500 (aka Casio SK-1)
• Pennywhistle: Generation
• Maracas

Fake bass was achieved by sampling the A string of a guitar, using the SK-1. Then I mauled it with an equalizer, and compressed the hell out of it.

Piano was tricky, because in order to record it, I had to move my computer upstairs.

Instruments played by others:

• Viola played by my mother, Kay Heuer
• Fake French Horn by Tony Hightower

Tony performed the french horn the same way everyone does fake brass: He buzzed his lips into the microphone. Then I used an equalizer to change the sound and added a bit of distortion. I'm not sure what it sounds like now, but I think it sounds more like brass than lips, and I like it.

Mike Audet mastered the songs. He adjusted the frequencies, compressed the volume levels, and made DAT and CD-R master copies.

Questions, comments or suggestions about this web site? Email me at aaron.bentley@utoronto.ca