10.23.06

People keep telling me that i need to add pictures to my blog. For any of you interested, i'm working on it. It's not easy when you don't even have a digital camera. In the meantime, you'll have to forgive me.

Friday night alex zach and i got together to re-record guitar tracks for what is currently being called "party girl", zach's side project from widows that we've been working on for about 8 months. It is a project that thus far has been completely contained on our tascam 38 1/2" 8-track. Not so long ago, he decided he'd like to keep the original drum tracks and completely re-write the guitar parts from the ground up, creating totally different songs. Friday night was occupied with doing just this. He just got his amp back from being repaired (66-67 fender bassman, rips) so we got a chance to record with that for i believe the first time at chez nixon. It sounded dope. I used an sm-57 pointed at the speaker and ran it through my UA 2108 aand straight to tape. But that wasn't really the important thing i gleaned from a night of recording with zach. what i realized is that everyone truly has different ways of working, and the sooner you can figure out what kind of method works best for the artist, the sooner sessions start consistently going really well.

Sunday i spent at Silver Sonya with alex, working on a song for his record. Things went really well; we knocked out a bunch of guitars, the bass, and lots and lots of little color-adding elements. The song is really starting to glue together. We used my SG junior for all of the electric guitar tracking, through the same fender super champ i mentioned in my last post. I brought my rack down thinking we'd need the 2108s for guitars, but the pres in the manley console are really really nice and i didn't really worry about it. Plus my rack is like 35-40 pounds (i bought the cheap wooden rack enclosure that weighs a ton instead of the more portable skb plastic case), so i was more than happy to not lift it up onto the top of the racks in the control room. Bass was recorded direct into the little labs DI/reamp box they have there, followed by the fearn compressor (not reducing very much, maybe like 1-3 dB). Later on we tracked some of that beautiful bosendorfer grand they have in the live room using the korby red mic. The result was very natural, and the korby has an interesting way of bringing in the room to any application...it seems like it has a really wide cardioid response pattern. We used the same microphone to record some melodica and cymbal. very cool. things came a long way.

next week i have my first real mastering session at silver sonya. we'll see how it goes.

10.11.06

hey.

i feel like a slacker. i should've done this post a week ago.

we went into inner ear last week. last wednesday. instead of playing tuesday night we spent the time planning out the session in the form of a to-do list and loose schedule, and then we drank beers and drew pictures. I think it was our best studio day in at least a year. We started by tracking acoustic guitar. For david's acoustic double guitar in blood infection the signal chain went neumann M149-UA LA610 in limit mode-tape. GP9 at +6/250, 15 ips. all of our tapes are set up like that. I then went in to do acoustic guitar tracks for Pet Heart, removing the limiter from the signal chain. This whole setup worked extraordinarily well for the strummy stuff being recorded. We had not much trouble with the guitar being too dark (we had just restrung it) and with a tiny boost of like 1/2 DB at 7K, it sounded about as realistic as i wanted it to.

We then recorded some auxilliary percussion through the milab VIP-50 (in omni)into the UA LA-610. i like that mic because it tends to take some of the annoying body out of percussion stuff that you really just want to be a gesture anyway, and the UA box kept things pretty natural. Tambourine (doubled zach and david simultaneously) and maracas (alex david and zach all together) for pet heart, and i did sleigh bells on blood infection.

i then did some electric guitar on blood infection, this line that i've wanted to put down for months but didn't take the opportunity until then. my 69 SG junior into this weird little fender "super champ" i think it was, to SM 57, into the vintech 1272, to tape. yum. i doubled my part.

By that point dexter had arrived with his drums to play in the chorus bits of blood infection. so we set up his drums in the live area of the room. I used a beyer M88 dynamic mic low over the kit, kind of at ear level over the snare and kind of pointed at the kick. That went into the 1272, and then into the manley vari-mu in limit mode. Totally amazing. After a couple of takes i realized that the milab was still plugged in and in omni in the parlor area, so i patched that into the adjacent track (LA-610 in limit mode, getting kind of killed) and it really aided in opening up the room a bit. The delay between the two mics was so noticeably long that i wasn't concerned at all about phase issues. Dex totally killed the part after he settled in.

then bass! it was awesome to have alex just stand and play in the control room and listen really loud through the big monitors. we used this mysterious black p-bass from the guitar closet and ran him into the 610 with some low end boost eq and the comp/limit section was in compress, maybe reducing like 4-6 db. my mind wasn't totally blown on the sound but it sounded like a bass and the performance was totally dope so i'm sure it will be fine come mix time. He tracked his stuff for the two songs in a matter of 20 minutes. awesome.

the last thing of the night we decided to wait on so i could get real crazy and not have to worry about anything but playing. i borrowed chad's tone king and used my zvex SHO as well as my ibanez AD9 and did this freakout thing for the big part in blood infection. i was happy with my 4th or 5th take and we kept it and cleaned up.

hell of a day.

10.1.06

it's weird how there's been this huge outcry against brickwall limiting and how we should make full dynamic range records and blah blah blah but people, like really professional people that mix records for a living, are still making it impossible for the people who have to master them. i should say, it seems to me like the pressure that used to be on the mastering people to turn the wave forms into blocks of blown-out information is now resting on the mixing people. Maybe they think that the artist is expecting it to sound finished when the mixing is finished. I know that dave fridmann (sp?) 'masters' everything that is done at tarbox road just by mixing straight into an L2 or whatever. The record martin and I received yesterday was a record like that. What we were given was 13 blocks of waveforms. There was no way for us to add any information to the mixes because the compression on the mix bus (and probably some brick wall limiting) was so extreme and LOUD that boosting 11k by like 1/2 dB above unity would send the output into overs. Not to mention the fearn was getting totally killed on its input, simply because the output from digital performer (i.e. the raw files with a mellow amount of the waves multiband compressor) was so intense.

stop mixing records like this! get rid of your bus compressors and use them for other things! the mixing engineer has completely monopolized on what the record will sound like in the end, and leaves nothing up to the people who have to master the record. I don't understand.

I drove down to the new space with martin after chad showed up. it's going to be really incredible. seems a little bit slimmer in width than inner ear but there are two levels and the B control room will be upstairs and they're about the same in length. there is going to be a hangout balcony. Someone told me at the tapeopcon in new orleans two years ago that whenever parliament would go into record back in the day in detroit, there'd be a ton of people just like hanging out on top of the isolation booths smoking weed and having a good time. sounds awesome.

pagoda mixing tomorrow. hope i can make it.