I hadn’t brought this Go-Betweens song to a Uke West jam, so I had an opportunity to rework it. I used the mosey strum this time with the high-g Kanilea instead of the 8-string Klos.
My original cover from last year sounded, to my 2026 ears, a bit muddled (do an A/B!). The Instrumental could not be readily heard. It sounds like my vocals were overdriving the mic a little. I don’t think it’s plosives, since the filter is in place and I am not singing directly into the mic. I think the overdrive issue is at the Scarlett interface, so I upgraded to the 4th-generation model, which includes a safe mode to prevent clipping. It also has an auto mode that determines the optimal level, which is actually better for what I do, so I’ll give that a try next time. Safe mode seems to have helped. I have learned not to get excited and upload to YouTube once I get a good take. I wait at least a day, listen to it again, making sure it sounds the way I want.
I used a little bit of reverb (room setting) on the mixer’s mic channel, so my voice gets some of it as well, providing more presence. So I have the ukulele pickup channel off. I ported the bass and instrumental GarageBand tracks into Logic Pro. I then “panned” the instrumentals to the right channel, and the bass and percussion to the left. When the backing track is played from the iPhone, I use a splitter cable to drive separate preamps into separate mixer channels, providing greater control over gain and relative volume.
I used Logic Pro to provide compression, limiting, and reverb at the master track. I added an instrumental from the original song, left out of my original cover, using the Blackbird Farallon. I did not get the volume level of the additional instrumental notes to my liking. So to avoid another adjustment take, I copied the track from the backing track and added it as a post-recording processing track, resulting in just enough volume boost. I used quantization to help with alignment, which makes for an echoey effect. Good enough.
Shawn's Ukulele Stuff 