It was some time ago, when I got my first proper melodica – a vintage Hohner Professional, and a beautiful instrument.
Back when I got it, I decided I needed to test it quickly. So what musical style works well with melodica? Reggae, and anything related to it – which also would include Ska, Dub, Jungle and DnB.
I stepped over to my MC-505 drum machine, and browsed through the presets. Something not too fast, I though. After some browsing, I stuck with “Drum’n'Bass 6″, albeit brought down in tempo considerably. This preset, meant to be used at 160bpm, develops into a nice grooving Reggae track, if you limit it just to the simple bass line and the Amen-Break-inspired drum groove. So I synced the MC-505 to the Repeater, recorded a simple melodica melody, added a guitar chord track, and then sent the Melodica through the Eclipse’s “Heaven” patch. This short sketch had been my main mobile phone ringtone ever since.
For a proper recording of the track, I first copied the MIDI tracks from the MC-505 into Cubase (at that time refamiliarizing myself with the complex sync concepts in Cubase). For the drums, I used the additional Battery I Studio Drums Big Stereo Kit (with additional splash cymbals from the Battery I Drum’n'Bass kit). The bass was performed with a software rendition of a Juno-60 organ synth bass patch. I decided not to care about the guitar part, at least not for now.
For the melodica, I used an ORTF stereo pair of Beyer M201 closeup (about 4cm behind the melodica), and added an AKG SolidTube about 80cm away. The Beyers went through the Quadmic again, while I chose to use the SPL GoldMike for the AKG. After recording the track, I decided to give it another go using my new Hohner “Fire” melodica and recorded the part with that as well.
Mixing the track proved rather easy: putting the individual drum parts through gentle processing for BD and SD allowed me to have a punchy, yet dynamic and natural feel to the drums. The bass synth worked right out of the box, and finally, I included the Eclipse again (integrated as an external effect in Cubase). Choosing among the two melodica parts I found that it worked well to use both of them: only the Hohner Professional got sent through the Eclipse, and the Fire model received a gentle lo/hicut. Finally, I made some subtle use of the stereo miking.
And with that, here’s my rerecorded ringtone (“Klingelton” is German for ringtone) for years to come!