n-Track Studio's Featured Artist of the Month

APRIL, 2001


The Five W

 . Featured Artist's Web Page: http://www.mp3.com/DavidAddis


Where: Coventry, England

Who: Guitar, Vocals, Keyboards, Bass, MIDI Drums by David Addis

 When: David Addis has played with a number of bands since the age of 15 when he started learning the bass guitar. A year later he picked up his first 6-string and formed his own band, playing a mixture of covers and original songs. Now David is at university, and plays with 20" Ride, a rock and blues band in Coventry

Why: He likes it.

What: Instrumental Guitar Rock.

In Short:

 Influences are Extreme, Van Halen, Satch, Neil Zaza, SRV and Steve Vai.

Albums -
Guitar 2 Drum, 2000

David Addis
 by Alessandro De Murtas
Featured Songs: 
Bass Control
Uplift
Turtle Moon

(..) My name is David Addis and I live in Coventry, England. I'm 19 and I've been playing with quite a few bands over the last 5 years. I started learning the bass guitar and ended up in all my friend's bands, but rarely liked the style of music we played. Later I formed my own band, but still found it hard to reproduce what I heard in my head. Still, we kept practicing and by the time it was my last gig with my band at secondary school (before we left for university) we'd actually got pretty good, and were paid for some gigs in pubs. After a year at uni I discovered n-Track recorder, and found I could make some high-quality home recordings. Last summer I recorded an album with a friend of mine, Michael Whiteman, who used to play drums for my old band. We became MaD (if you know what I mean) and hosted 'Consequences' on mp3.com. Since we both go to different universities, I can't do any work with him during term-time and I'm playing around with some solo work. It's exactly the sort of music I want to make, and I get to do everything my way. That must sound a bit egotistical, but I'm sure Mr. Steve Vai would agree it's the way to go.
Tips and Tricks from David Addis using n-Track Studio.
(..) At home I record on my PIII 850 using n-Track Studio (16-bit) and just record through a SB card line input, with no multitrack recording. I record mostly guitar tracks, which come from a Line 6 POD, which is very versatile (with all manner of inputs and outputs) and has an enormous library of guitar sounds. I can also hook this up to my PC to fiddle with my sound, and I've made quite a few I'm happy with, like a deep metal guitar (possibly my favourite), a high-gain brit rocker, a tough SRV sound and some nice clean sounds as well. I record bass guitar through the POD as well - it's not really meant for it, but one of the amp models includes a bass amp people started to use for guitar, and it works quite well considering how much I can tweak it. When I record vocals, I occassionally use the POD but found it's actually best to just put it through some sort of pre-amp (like a small 'notebook' Mike had). Drums (on my solo project) are all done by writing them out on Piano roll in n-Track Studio. I think Flavio has done a really good job incorporating midi instruments into n-Track and I've become pretty quick at getting the drum beat in my head onto the computer. My sound card (just about) does the drums justice, even if it's not quite as fluent as a real drummer (hey, at least it doesn't make mistakes).

I use FASoft Compressor quite a lot, perhaps too much actually, but I do find it makes mixing instruments a hell of a lot easier, and it means vocals can actually be recorded completely dry if necessary. Often, after I have mixed down a song I actually reimport it to n-Track and give it a bit more compression for luck, it's quite easy to let some of your songs fall below a few db for a whole verse of chorus unless you painstakingly play with the mix and program the levels - although this feature can come in handy at times if you want to emphasize a particular instrument. Programming the pan can also create some nice effects.

A serious tip to programming drums is to write out a sample verse or chorus on the piano roll, then go back to normal track view. Slap on the grid and copy and paste until the song is filled out. Some people might just leave it, but I would definitely recommend diving in and changing a fill here, a cymbal crash here, and so on - it really does make a difference.

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