Music Recording.

8.20.07 - drum miking

2007-08-20T14:23:00.000-04:00

I should like to add that in the last couple of sessions I have worked on with TJ, we have used more microphones on the drums than I have ever used in any other session. They also end up sounding totally awesome. An audix D6 and shure KSM 32 on the resonant side of the kick, behringer B1 on the beater side, shure SM7 on top of snare, 57 underneath, tom mics (i forget), KM84's on cymbals, and SM69 on overhead room. whoa. 14-16 tracks of drums. And it sounded GREAT. weird.

wanli/this car up, 8/07

2007-08-19T14:28:00.000-04:00

I've been busy lately.

I've finished some work with a band called Wanli that I tracked a couple of weeks ago. They took the basic tracks home with them to do overdubs, and came back to mix with me at silver sonya. Two days for five songs. I think they came out really well. The guitars ended up being really dark and had all been recorded with a close mic as well as a room mic, so there was a lot of decision making when it came to mix time about what would stay and what would go. I ended up using almost exclusively the close-mic'd tracks. Some eq with those neve and ssl plugins at silver sonya managed to breathe some life into them. The bass, which had to be re-tracked by them (there was a problem where the clocking signal from the computer bled into the bias frequency of the tape machine, the same thing happened with aloha), sounded awesome. I'm not sure when it will be out but i know they want to have it to sell at shows when they start playing out again in winter time. So that was the wednesday and thursday before last weekend. Then my band played a show at a school in Arlington with our friends Slumber and the Epochs. that kicked ass. Then sunday i started a tracking session for an indie pop band from boston called This Car Up. We spent sunday through wednesday in the big room, then got everything transferred and worked in silver sonya and its inspiration chamber (isolation booth) from that point on. It's the first time i've kind of bonded with clients, and it made the job even more enjoyable for me. They're nice dudes and things were sounding great when i was finished with my part of the job. I think i might go down to check stuff out because their friends from boston were coming down to record horns today. Next weekend i am recording drums, again through silver sonya. Then, i might be tracking for the next Death By Sexy record.

8.2.07 - aloha

2007-08-02T17:01:00.000-04:00

This was a pretty monumental experience for me. It was the first project I've ever worked on that label money paid for. The band had two days scheduled to track at inner ear before they had to catch a plane to Singapore this afternoon. They are working on an EP to be released on polyvinyl sometime in November. We tracked five songs to the 2 inch and i transferred them to DP at the end of our time last night. I'd say over all things went extraordinarily smoothly, especially given that the band lives in all different states and can only get together to tour and record, which means most of these songs had never been played by the band as a unit. Tony brought in a cd of demos he had made at his place in rochester and everyone would kind of sit down and work away at it until there was a song there, and then i would record. I think if it were any other band or a group of less talented musicians, this formula would never work, but success in their work process has been proven by their last two records, and i can't wait to hear what overdubs and mixing will do with this already awesome music.

7.20.07

2007-07-20T12:13:00.000-04:00

going over to alex's today to work on the new zulu pearls stuff. the further along we get, the crazier the music gets to me. It's like space music to me. I love it.

7.19.07

2007-07-19T19:09:00.000-04:00

it's been like 8 months. whatev.

home recording.

what i think is that people get hung up on the fact that they're at home and don't think it's a legit way to make a record. I think it's usually because they're using the mic pre's in their 002 and some crappy ass mic to make the whole record. Naturally, it won't end up sounding like your favorite record, even after some amount of mixing triage (if you decide to take it to a studio to mix). I kind of believe that someone can get really good at recording with crappy equipment on their own time, but i don't believe a person can make amazing records that way. There was a time when home recording equipment had character because it was actually shitty. Or actually strangely made or had restricted bandwidth or whatever. Now, most home recording equipment is computer-based or one of those standalone hard disk recorders, which all sound pretty good. They're supposed to use modern technology to reproduce sounds with somewhat realistic fidelity. But they aren't quite there in terms of ACTUALLY sounding good, or sounding anywhere close (with a few exceptions) to what the higher-quality stuff does. For me, i'd rather hear old "shitty" home recordings than new more modern "good-sounding" home recordings. Because in my mind there are kind of three categories of quality, in terms of fidelity from objectively "worst" to objectively "best" (my own personal order is a little different). Well, four. There is total garbage. Then, there's the old GBV-esque character that is indicative of 4 or 8-track cassette and 1/4" reel to reel recorders. Then, there's what you hear on like every modern local band's demo, which is contemporary low-cost home recording gear. Then there's "studio quality", whatever that means.

Now, what i'm trying to get to is if people invested in similar quality but more minimalist examples from what is found in studios, not only would their records SOUND better (because most nice pieces of gear are about eliminating problems more than holding some sort of magic or "vibe"), but they'd be able to build their chops a lot more.

There's been too much going on since i last posted to go through all of that now. Contact me if you actually want to know.

11.23.06

2006-11-23T19:28:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile. I've been doing a lot of school stuff and have only had a couple of days recording. One of them was this past saturday, with john of Slumber. We started in on a new tune of his, and after moving the condensers around for a bit, i decided instead to mic his voice and guitar (played live) with dynamics; an EV 635A on his voice and a 57 on his guitar. No compression, 2108 to tape. It worked really well and captured a somewhat sullen song with a bit of rolled off eq. I think it helped to capture the song well. after that alex played some rhodes (we finally moved it to a place in the room that is easy to get to) and i did some guitar though our leslie. i look forward to finishing the tune.

10.23.06

2006-10-23T17:05:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-11T16:12:00.000-04:00

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

2006-10-01T12:16:00.000-04:00

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.

9.29.06

2006-09-29T20:47:00.000-04:00

spent some time at silver sonya today. hung out. waited for chad. he was late. i decided to leave early and take care of things at home instead of sticking around. Don picked up a UA LA-610, which is awesome, because we're going in to track stuff next week. i look forward to using it. Martin let me see a floor plan of their new space in alexandria; it's going to be really awesome. live room bigger than the A room at inner ear, with a top level where a second control room will be housed. i'm hoping we can really break it in with the all-live session for alex's record in about 3-6 months.

all for now.

9.27.06

2006-09-28T01:28:00.000-04:00

i'm spending an extraordinarily long time trying to get the text to look right even though it doesn't matter for a second because no one is going to read this anyway and it's for me. right? should i be putting on some sort of a persona? i feel like i should. I feel like i'm kind of in high school. this is my first weblog, in which i hope to talk mostly about making records and making pictures. probably less about pictures. so here goes.

next week we're going in to work on pet heart. we were working on it at alex's house but then i kind of dropped his external hard drive onto the screen of my Tibook and snapped the whole assembly kind of off. it's still hanging out but certainly doesn't stay up on its own anymore. So, we go back to inner ear for another day. We've been in and out for almost 2 years, trying to do this record. everyone wants to know when we'll put it out, and no one really cares about the fact that we want it to be good. or at least we want it to be what we want, instead of not what we want. The problem is, what we want changes every day. trying to keep this project under control has been really difficult for me, because i get so tired after having to play and record all day. David and alex could go forever, because they're simply creating. Me, i have to do both things. they tend to not really get it when i'm beat and want to sleep or play final fantasy; i think in the past they maybe thought it was a lack of passion. No. it's just that i'm tired.

friday chad is mixing georgie james at silver sonya. i'd like to hang out and see what he does with that. i love them. saturday martin and i are going to master a record. sunday i have my last day at murky. monday pagoda is mixing. i love them, too.

what else.

nothing.

this is so weird.

goodbye, self.