n-Track Studio's Featured Artist of the Month

OCTOBER 2001


The Five W
Featured Artist's Web Page: http://www.mp3.com/kellymoore


Where: Ephrata - WA USA

Who: Kelly Moore - Keyboards, and all of the vocal and Instrumental parts with the exception of a few high vocal speaking parts and the guitar tracks in "Inertia"
When: 2001

Why: [..] "I try to live life fullest treating every day."

What: [..] "Just about anything!".


In Short:

 Influences are STYX, Chicago, Billy Joel, James Taylor.

What's in the car CD Player?: Nsync, Back Street Boys, Will Smith, Aaron Carter (I have three daughters remember!), Diana Krall (to keep the adults sane).

Gear: If I have the opportunity, I play my mother's Yamaha Baby Grand but my songs were done from an electronic keyboard. I have a 73
key Fender Rhodes Suitcase Electric Piano I bought as a Junior in high
school I like to break out and play once in awhile.

Thanks: The staff at n-Track has been a great help with this process. When I have a question, I email them and by the next morning, the
answer is waiting for me already. Thanks to Harold Geesey for the great
guitar tracks in "Inertia". Thank you Sarah for the part about the cat in "Life's Work", and to Laura and Holly for the "Pledge of Allegiance" in "Inertia". I would also like to thank my beautiful wife Janice for the help with the high vocal parts (she sings better than I do), and the inspirations
to make all this possible. Sorry I kept you all up late at night with my silly back up vocal part recordings that didn't sound good unless you were the one with the headphones on.



CD - "Life's work" (2001) WIP
Kelly Moore
by Alessandro De Murtas
Featured Songs: 

 Inertia
Be With You
We'll Be In Love
Life's Work

[..] "I was born in 1964 in a small town in central Washington. I started taking piano lessons when I was five years old. By high school, I was able to play by ear and sing as well so I became
very popular at wedding ceremonies. They would give me a cassette tape and tell me to play song #3 so I would listen to it a few times and then perform it in the ceremony. They got off cheap too because they not only didn't have to buy the sheet music, they could get away with paying one guy to do both the piano playing and the singing. I think I charged about $25.00 for my services.
In collage, I was accepted as a freshman to join the "Crimson Company", a show choir designated as the good will ambassadors for
Washington State University.
It was a great honor to be involved in the small group as a freshman but I soon realized that I wanted a career outside of music so I chose to go back into the family furniture business after I received my degree. I now have a beautiful wife (Janice) of 15 years, three daughters (Laura, Holly, Sarah) and a successful furniture store (Moore Furniture Inc.) with my brother and business partner. I also enjoy life on the wild side so I am a Freestyle Jet Ski Pilot as well finishing 10th in the world last year but that's a whole nother web site.

After realizing that Jet Skiing and music composition don't mix well, I decided to try to get my songs on a CD before I bounce my head off of a Jet Ski one more time. I started out with the sound recorder that comes with Windows and about 30 seconds later, I was on the Internet looking for a real program.
That's when I found n-Track Studio Software. Thanks to their free demo-program, I was making music by the end of the night. I never imagined I would be able to create sound like this without paying thousands of dollars to a studio. What started out as an idea to preserve my music, turned out to be the dream I had always hoped for with my music... my own CD!

I try to live life too its fullest treating every day as if it's my last but at the same time, I try to work hard to secure a future for my family. I think that is why people have enjoyed my music. I have 37 years worth of life's experiences to share."

Tips and Tricks from Kelly Moore using n-Track Studio.


Computer Equipment: AMD 700, 256 meg RAM, Sound Blaster Live Card, 19" monitor (a big monitor is helpful with song editing).

Recording Equipment: Tapco 6 channel mixer board, Zoom RT-123 Rhythm machine, 2 keyboard, 1 microphone......that's about it.

[..] "I started out with my first song, playing the piano part and singing the vocal parts all the way through from beginning to end. I guess that's part of learning the program because now I only do things once and then cut and paste.
What started out as 80% musical talent and 20% computer skills has turned around and now I spend way more time on a song at the computer instead of the keyboard. I've found that when I record a song for the first time, I get the first verse and chorus done and then I take a break from it and listen to it a bunch of times.

Then I can figure out what I like, what I don't like and what the song is missing. The problem is, by the time I get done with the song, I have recorded the vocal parts over a series of nights so the sound settings get changed (I have a four year old remember). One time I even heard a train in the background of one of my vocal parts. Therefore, after I get the song about where I want it, I spend one night re-cutting all the vocal tracks so that I have consistency between them. In my title song "Life's Work" I cloned the lead vocal track and then panned one to the left and one to the right. I then offset them by 1/100th of a second so it sounds like the sound is traveling around you.

n-Track Studio probably has something that does the exact same thing built into the program already but I like the way this changed the sound. I use the volume lines a lot to get levels exactly where I want them. It's easier than re-recording things if you don't like the settings you have your mixer at. The hard part to remember is that if you cut and paste, the lines stay the same. If you add on to the ending of a song but you already faded the song out, you have to go change those volume lines or you can't hear the new stuff. In the song "A Hero" you will see that I used various sound clips embedded in the song.I downloaded them off the Internet and used Cool Edit to get them all to the proper format that would work with n-Track Studio. I used the volume lines a lot to get each clip to fade in and out exactly as I wanted.

I would also bring up the clip's "properties" and adjust their offset by 1/100th of a second to get them to fall on the beat. It was quite time consuming but it makes the song."

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What's Being Cooked Up?
Featured Artist of the Month - Comments and suggestions are welcome.

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I've got 8 songs recorded so far including one re-make with my wife. I would like to finish this CD over the next few months and then share it with Jay Leno. I would also like to Jet Ski a lot more but I have to squeeze 6 days of work into every week, so who knows what the future holds.