Mark Schenker

I initially planned to use my red Warwick Streamer LX for most of this record but despite my best efforts, I think I’ll be using my ‘74 Rickenbacker 4001 for some tracks. It sounds great but I’ve always had to work a little to get some decent low end out of it. That’s always been the complain with Ricky’s from most people. The Warwick’s are just the opposite, I can let me amp give me the highs and the bass naturally has a nice tight low end growl that I like live.

While doing demos and writing songs at Rob’s and Steve’s I always seemed to bring my Ricky along for the ride and used it on most of the demos we did. I got used to the sound but I decided it was too thin and because of that I was going to use my red Streamer. In the mean time I had taken the bridge pickup out of it and sent it to Lindy Fralin Pickups in Richmond to get re-wound hotter which would give it more low end and re-magnetized. Yes thirty year old pickups will lose a bit of their magnetism, who knew such a thing? Anyhow it was really cheap and I had my pickup back in about two weeks. I installed it and it made a really big difference. It sounded much fuller without losing that Rick top end that I love. I was still resolved to use my nice Warwick though. So much so, I took both of my old Rick’s, but them in their cases and into the back of a closet in another room. Just so I wouldn’t be tempted to grab one in a moment of frustration.

However! I tried and tried using the Streamer. It’s what I play the most, it’s what I play live and my live rig is tailored to bring out the best in those basses, and the way the necks are on all my Streamers has a big influence on the way I play – hard to explain, it’s just REAL comfortable. While it sounded good and I love to play it, I just could not get it to sound right so that it would sit in the mix the way I wanted to. I could EQ it to death and get it close but I know from experience that drastic EQ usually is the road to ruin. Get it right at the amp, then capture it. I like to wait until I at least have some guitar scratch tracks down before working on bass tracks. Two reasons, one for the mix to make sure my sound is working, the second is so I can work around the guitars to establish bass melody. I need to know where I need to hold down the root and where I can go out on a limb and trying to use my imagination for the guitars and chord progressions just doesn’t work for me.

I duplicated my live rig in the studio, luckily I have a spare Trace Elliot AH1000-12 for this, and no matter what I did, it sounded great but not what I wanted. I ran through the usual bass recording scenarios, miking my cab and running direct through the Avalon, different mics, I tried both the Palmer and Marshall speaker simulators and various combinations of everything. Everything was an “almost” but nothing hit me right. Finally I decided to start working my way through my bass collection. I tried my Fender Jazz, my Fender Power Jazz, all my Warwick’s including the Buzzard, I even pulled out my two ancient neck-through Spector’s (those both sounded pretty good I might tune the action up a bit and use them on something) and still, great stuff but to THE one. I went so far as to put passive Duncan pickups in one of my less loved Streamers just to see if that made a difference. (All my Streamers have EMG active pickups in them)

So while I’m doing all this I had been looking around learning as much as I can about Hiwatt amps and I sent an email to a guy who runs a Hiwatt web site and asked him a bunch of questions about the Hiwatt amp I have. He wrote me back and had looked at our web site, turns out he’s from eastern PA and had played The Old Mill and The Mountain View in Hagerstown back the day. He asked why I was giving up my Trace Elliot heads. He assumed since I’m the bass player, I was going to use my Hiwatt live for bass. I hadn’t thought of using the Hiwatt for bass! Can you guess where I’m going with this? In the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii DVD, Waters was using Hiwatt’s for his bass amps. Not a bad idea. Why not give it a shot?

I tried it out through my Trace Elliot 4×10 cab and it did sound pretty good with just a mic on it, both a D-112 and a SM57 sounded great. It was missing that some of that tight low end I get from the Trace amps though. So I was struck with another idea? Why not combine the two somehow? My Trace amps have two effects sends, on full-range and the other high-pass. I decided to send my highs to the Hiwatt and send that signal through the Palmer speaker simulator and mic the Trace cab from the Trace amp. I do a similar thing live but I use a Tech21 RBL for the highs instead. That way I can get a little distortion on my top end and my lows stay tight and focused. I turned the Hiwatt up until I just started to get the same smooth distortion on the highs I get from the RBL. I also ran my signal direct from the bass into the Avalon U5. Believe it or not it was pretty damn good but . . . just to make sure, I HAD to go get one of the Ricky’s out of the closet! I plugged in the Ricky and hallelujah! THAT is what I had in mind. I did have to boost some lows just a bit though, nothing drastic. I actually used a lot less of the miked cab than I thought I would, so it’s a mix of the three, Hiwatt on the highs through the speaker simulator, direct in through the Avalon and a little bit of the D-112 on my cab from my Trace Elliot head.

During all this I had three big problems that were solved by three nifty little pieces of equipment. The first problem was, for some reason, since I was feeding the Hiwatt from the high-pass effects send of the Trace head, I was getting an ungodly hum on the Hiwatt through the speaker simulator. I just happened to have a single EB Tech Hum-X hum eliminator plug. (pic up on the left) As you may know we have a Morley endorsement and Morley is a subsidiary of EB Tech so we get a few goodies from them as well. I powered down the Hiwatt, plugged it into the Hum-X and I could not hear even a small amount of hiss or any noise whatsoever from the Hiwatt. I figure it must have something to do with it just being an old amp and the Trace being newer. Sometimes you connect a bunch of electrical devices together and you get hum, it’s a fact of life. They were both made in England so it couldn’t be a wierd internal power handling mismatch issue. That was one problem solved my a cool gadget.

My second problem was I couldn’t tap a signal from anywhere to get me a non-amp affected signal for the direct signal into the Avalon. I have a splitter but it wasn’t working right. Morley to the rescue again. I have a little gadget called a George Lynch Tripler (the orange box in the picture strip to the left) that has one input and three outputs including a gain knob incase splitting the signal reduces the level too much for you. Splitting something once usually has minimal effect on level but splitting it three ways can drop the level noticeably, so Morley built a little active gain circuit into this thing. (I didn’t have to use it but it is there if I need it) I was really happy to have this neat little device!

The third problem I had was that since my Streamers are active EMG pickups, the output is so high that the signal coming out of the Avalon was always greater than +2dbu as shown by the steady (irritating) blue signal light on the front. Not a bad thing but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t getting some kind of terrible harmonic distortion that I would hear later which would wrench my guts out. There is nothing worse than doing a ton of work and realizing much later that you made a mistake on a technical issue like this. I hate to sound like a damn Morley commercial but they have some really useful devices to solve real problems. I used an EB Tech box called a Line Level Shifter. (middle box next to the orange Tripler in the pic) It converts -10dbV to +4dbu and vice versa just by plugging in. It’s auto sensing so you just have to run the signal through the right jacks which are clearly labeled depending on which way you want to go, up or down in level. So I was able to go from the bass to the Tripler, to the Trace (effects send to the Hiwatt) and to the Line Level Shifter to the Avalon all at the same time without losing any levels anywhere in the signal chain – and with no hum whatsoever. I am also using the Behringer EQ’s on my bass tracks in line. They are very transparent, a little difficult to use and the manuals really blow but I got them figured out after a while. I use them before the compressors so the frequencies I’m reducing won’t have an influence on the way the compressor works. I want the compressor to react to the EQ’d sound, not the raw amp/direct signal.

Earlier I mentioned how much I like playing the Streamers but I think the Ricky is going to work for what I need to do. What I’ve been doing before I lay down a track is get my parts together using one of my Streamers, jamming with the song for a while to see if any new melodies hit me or if I’m inspired I reach out and grab some cool bass riff while I’m playing, then I’ll switch basses and play once or twice on the Rick, then I’ll record.

Since I’m doing bass parts by myself, I have to punch myself in and out a lot to make sure I don’t suck and whatnot. The VS-2480 has a really neat auto punch in/out function that I use for myself when I record alone. All DAW’s have them nowadays so it’s nothing unusual. I have a remote pedal to use for punching in but sometimes you can hear the punch-in point even if you hit it spot on with the pedal. So what I do is use the internal auto-punch feature, line up the punch-in spot a couple of frames before one of Jimmy’s kick drums, usually on the “one” of the measure I want to punch-in to, hit record/play and start playingand when the auto punch-in point comes along, the machine punches me in flawlessly every time. It makes me sound like I can actually play my instrument and that I actually know these songs.

Here’s the signal path for the tech heads:

• Bass -> Petersen Strobostomp tuner -> Morley George Lynch Tripler (3 outputs) ->
  Channel 1 to Trace Elliot AH-1000 amp -> Speaker out to cab -> AKG D-112 mic -> Presonus MP-20 Mic pre -> Behringer DEQ2496 Ultra-Curve Pro eq dual mono mode -> Empirical Labs Distressor, 6:1, Distortion 3 mode, Attack on 2.5 Release on 2, 5-8 db of gain reduction -> VS-2480
• The high-pass effects send of the Trace Elliot -> Hiwatt bright channel, bass knob on 0 -> Palmer PDI-03 Speaker Simulator -> Presonus MP-20 Mic pre -> Behringer DEQ2496 Ultra-Curve Pro eq -> Empirical Labs Distressor, 10:1 opto mode, Attack on 3, Release on 5, gain reduction of 8-10db. (I’m slamming it a little, it sound much smoother crushing just the high end) -> VS-2480
• Channel 2 to Avalon U5 Direct box -> Presonus MP-20 Mic pre -> Behringer DEQ2496 Ultra-Curve Pro eq -> Empirical Labs Distressor, 6:1, Distortion 3 mode, Attack on 2.5 Release on 2, 5-8 db of gain reduction -> VS-2480

I then mix the highs in with the miked signal down to one track and keep the Avalon track separate, I’ll combine them later when I get closer to a done mix.

We’ve actually done lead vocals and backup vocals on all these six songs, I’ll post my notes later this week I hope. I did some very different things this time with my recording methods for the backup vocals so stay tuned I’ve got some great stuff to share.

Mark

Right, so despite all of our experiments and what I wrote in the last installment, we’ve changed a few things for recording guitar.

I decided that even though the guitar sounds we were getting were really great, I just wasn’t nailing it. It was dam close to what I heard in my head but not quite there. I tried some different mic combinations and the one I liked the best for Rob’s guitar, after all the experimentation was the SM57 in close with the Neumann TLM103 about 15 feet away at ear level. I’ll probably use a different mic in close for Dean just to make sure the two guitars are colored by different microphones in close.

Most of you know by now I’m a shameless gear head and will buy and try anything that piques my interest in my eternal quest for the ultimate sounds for bass, drums and guitar. (Hi, my name is Mark, I’m an equipment junkie. It has been 18 days since my last gear purchase . . . ) Through some selling and buying on eBay I managed to acquire two unbelievable pieces of gear. I found a ‘76 Hiwatt 100 watt DR103 amp wired by Harry Joyce himself. I was inspired by a number of things to find one. I saw a Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii DVD, which was filmed in ‘75 or something, and they had stacks and stacks of Hiwatt’s. Even the keyboard player had them piled up for his stuff. Gilmour’s guitar sounded incredible. Clean yes, but just amazing tone and sustain. I’m a fan but truthfully I bought the DVD because I had read that there are some studio shots of them recording “Dark Side of the Moon” and I wanted to eyeball the now vintage gear they used. Supposedly they had spent $500,000 building a brand new up to the minute recording studio to record that album. A ridiculous sum back then. I had also been listening to the new Green Day album and read where they used a Hiwatt mixed in with a Marshall for some of the guitar sounds. Even though that guitar sound is way over the top for me, I liked alot of elements of it and I was sure I could hear some of that Hiwatt sound in there. The thing that made me absolutely have to get one for us to use on this new album was listening to an album I had bought more than a year ago but never listened to once until I recently loaded it into my iPod. The Who re-released “Live at Leeds” in it’s entirety as the “Deluxe Edition.” They remixed AND re-mastered it as well – like The Who need to be louder right? The original “Live at Leeds” had just six songs on it, this Deluxe Edition has thirty-three and includes the entire performance of “Tommy” from that night at Leeds University in 1970. Anyhow, the guitar sound on that record is mind boggling and that’s what made me seek out an original Hiwatt.

The second thing I managed to acquire through unloading a few more pieces of scorned gear is a Marshall model 1959 100 watt Super Lead Plexi re-issue. Another fine example of classic rock guitar tone dreamland. Now some of you may turn your nose up at the re-issue and for the purists, understandably so. Some say they don’t sound much like the originals. Of course they don’t but they don’t cost as much either. HOWEVER, I found there are some things you can do to get these re-issues to sound indistinguishable from the originals. First and foremost, the output transformer should be replaced with what is known as a “Tone Clone” made specifically for these amps. These are EXACT replicas of the original transformers made for Plexi’s in 1968-69. In any tube amp, this is the most important part of the amp and has the greatest influence on your sound. It’s that last component that your guitar goes through before it leaves the amp and heads to the speakers. A cheap output transformer will make a great guitar and guitar player sound horrible. The second thing is to replace the printed circuit board and it’s components with a hand wired point-to-point board. I won’t bore you with the details as it was alot of fun to do, (see pic to the right) but the end result is an amazing “historically accurate” sounding Marshall Plexi. It sounds good even through a shitty 1×12 cabinet! This amp sounded really great before I modded it, Rob and I did a few scratch tracks with it to see how it would work in the mix and it was great even before I updated it with all the replica innards. One of the things that forced me to retrograde these components was that while changing the tubes, I noticed that one of the wires on the output transformer was worn through and could ground out on the chassis at any time. It had been replaced with a non-Marshall stock transformer and to repair it . . . well, it was just as easy to replace it. And since I had to take the board out to do that, for $80 more I could have a complete point-to-point board. So I went for it headlong. Now it’s as if Angus himself played on our album! Rob liked it so much that decided to unload his ‘82 Marshall JCM800 that he bought brand new in 1982 (now considered “vintage” – imagine that!) and get himself an all original ‘74 Marshall 100 watt Super Lead. He’s using it live and absolutely loves it. Dean is actually getting close to getting a Super Lead as well – that’s how great these things sound! It inspires people to go spend $1200 on a vintage amp just to have great guitar tone! You say you never heard one before? Yes you have! Listen to AC/DC Highway to Hell, listen to any Zeppelin song, Van Halen I & II, just about any great rock guitar sound was recorded with a Super Lead. It’s just hard to go wrong! Leave the master volume amps for the Fizz Donkeys of the world!

So back to what we recorded. Rob used the Marshall Plexi with my old Les Paul on a few songs that are flat out rockers for his sounds and we recorded scratch tracks of Dean’s parts using the Hiwatt to see how they would sound together. They mix together really well and sound fucking fantastic. For the Marshall I mostly used the SM57 mic in close on an old Marshall cab with the Neumann room mic, and for the Hiwatt I used the Trace Elliot guitar cab with an RE-20 close with the Neumann room mic and mixed to taste. For the Marshall I also mixed in a very small amount of the Palmer PDI-03 speaker simulator and used a Marshall SE-100 speaker simulator on the Hiwatt. The speaker simulators have a very distinct sound to them and I am using a different one for each guitar player so the nuances of the respective guitar sounds will stay unique and not be colored by a piece of gear that was used on the opposite guitar. The speaker simulator adds a bit of “in your face” sound that the various microphones don’t offer. It’s a nice touch and helps to keep the guitar sound from getting too dark without adding fizzy brightness to the top end.

Here is a list of the six songs we did guitars for and we did slightly different things depending on what the song called for. We have so many songs that there’s no way all of them will end up on the CD but here ya go anyhow! We just did scratches for Dean’s side but we’ll use the same setup for Dean when he comes in to do his tracks.

1. Hot on Your Heels – a mid tempo rock song with a very catchy melody. Starts with a guitar riff and we used the Marshall Plexi with the Marshal cab and my old Les Paul on Rob’s side and a ‘72 Telecaster Deluxe with the Hiwatt through Dean’s 4×12 Mesa-Boogie cab on the other.

2. Fool’s Confession – Not a slow song but close. We used a stock Stratocaster through the Hiwatt with the Trace cab for Rob’s side and the Tele through the Marshall Plexi with the Boogie cab on Dean’s scratch track. We also used an acoustic for one track that Rob played. I miked it with the Neumann at about the 12th fret and sent the direct signal through the Avalon U5 direct box. It takes some of that nasty “electric Ovation” sound away that I absolutely loathe. I mixed the mic way louder than the direct signal to give it as much openness as I could.

3. Don’t Know About Women – This is a hard heavy one so for this song on the Marshall we dimed every knob on the front and let her rip! It’s really overdriven and sounds great! Rob used the Les Paul on both his side with the Marshall Plexi/Marshall cab and also through the Hiwatt/Trace on Dean’s scratch track.

4. Big Bang Boom – Starts with a real wide sounding picking chord pattern guitar. Rob used the Tele through the Marshall Plexi/Trace cab for his sound and we used the Les Paul with the Hiwatt/Boogie cab for the other. The Trace cab is much tighter than the Marshall cab and depending on what the song calls for I’ll switch up the amp/cab combination for what I think would work in the mix for the particular song.

5. No Regrets – Nice simple song with not even a guitar solo. Starts with a guitar riff. Stratocaster through the Marshall Plexi/Marshall for this one on Rob’s side. Les Paul through the Hiwatt/Trace on the other.

6. A Thousand Thank You’s – Or for those of you from Pennsylvania, it’s “A Thousand Thank Yooze.” Just acoustic guitar, so far, I think we’ll do one electric track but it won’t be very loud in the mix. We did this one the same way as the other acoustic track. We had to do it the same as we had to return the very expensive Ovation to it’s owner as it was a loaned to me just to do these two songs.

On the Plexi we jumped the channels as is standard to do with these things. The settings on the amp are, leave Presence on 0, the bass on about 2 (except the one song where we dimed everything!), Mids on about 8, Treble on 8, Normal channel on 6, Treble channel on 7.

The Hiwatt stays fairly clean unless you really push the output section of the amp. Hiwatts have a reputation for being the loudest amps ever made. No wonder Townshend lost his hearing a bit. Luckily the cabs are fairly isolated from where we sit and record, because I have to run the volume on about 8 to get the really cranked sound I want. On 8, you cannot stand in the same room as the amp, it rips your head right off! Even thirty feet away is painful. The Normal and Bright channel are jumped like the Plexi with each channel on about 7 and the presence, mid and tone on 6 and the bass on 5. It’s really quite difficult to make a Hiwatt sound thin or like shit. Just crank up the mains and start playing “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or “Who Are You” it sounds “just like the record!”

Here’s the signal path for the tech heads:

Guitar -> Amp -> Speaker out to Palmer PDI-03 -> Speaker through to cabinet -> SM57 (or RE-20) close mic, Neumann TLM103 room mic -> both mics to separate Presonus MP-20 Mic pre’s -> Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro eq dual mono mode -> 2 Empirical Labs Distressors, 10:1 Opto mode Attack on 3 Release on 5 -> two inputs mixed to one track on VS-2480.

Palmer PDI-03 XLR out -> Presonus MP-20 mic pre -> Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro -> Drawmer compressor, 4:1 attack on 15 ms release on 500 ms -> one track on the VS-2480.
Since I know how I want these to sound and have gotten quite in touch with how everything is being mixed down, I’ve been mixing the mics down to one track on the fly and using the other track for the speaker simulator. I’ve spent a lot of time on guitar sounds I know, but we don’t care – if it ain’t worth doing right, then why bother?

I’ll be checking back soon – Mark

Trying to capture the energy, power and color of a flesh-and-blood, fire-breathing Marshall, is like trying to put a 747 in your living room.

You can stand in front of the amp and the raw power will make your hair stand up. But point a microphone at it and you will be surprised at how little of its character actually makes the trip to your recording.

Our plan is to figure out what amps, cabinet, mic combination sounds the best and once we get that nailed down, we will lay down guitar tracks like mad in assembly line fashion. We want to make sure that each time we record guitar we do the exact same thing, mic placement, eq, compression, mixing the room and close mics and so on. Once we get a method that works in the mix, we can more or less cookie cutter everything and change guitars and amps to get different tones while still using the techniques we hammered out to capture the sound of the amp properly. In our previous guitar experiments, we tried all our collective amps in our growing amp farm, a ‘67 Fender Bassman, two Marshall JCM800 Lead 50’s – one sounds drastically different from the other, a Soldano Hot Rod 50 XL, a ‘72 Marshall Super Lead 100 and a Mesa-Boogie Mark IIB. It seemed no matter what amp we used, with the exception of the Boogie which sounded great, there was WAY too much distortion, and bad distortion. Even with the pre amp knobs on like one or two it was out of control. (Pre amps turned way down sound bad anyhow, they really choke the amp quite a bit.) Not quite Twisted Sister distortion but bad, tone-masking distortion. We noticed that in particular the Fender Bassman, while fairly clean, had a not so flattering distortion to it. This Bassman does not have a pre amp knob so the only way to adjust the gain is to mess with the master volume knob. The more you turn up the amp, the more unflattering the distortion became. OK fine, off to do some research, gotta be a way to fix that.

I (or Rob) found a web site for an amp mod kit company called Torres Engineering. They have a kit called “Bassman Magic” for $18 I believe it was. The description sounded good so I ordered it. What could it hurt right? Rob and I proceeded to put the kit in the amp, which was fairly easy once we identified the pre amp circuit in the amp from the schematic. He read the schematic and identified the resistor values in the kit while I endangered my life by soldering and clipping away unneeded caps and resistors. This amp was getting a haircut! As soon as we plugged the thing back in and gingerly flicked it on, the first thing we noticed is that neither Rob nor I got a jolt of electricity. Very good! We at least had not killed ourselves or I would not be writing this all too well. The second thing is, as soon as Rob hit a chord the amp screamed like a banshee. A high pitched moan that would not stop until we turned the amp off. That’s bad. I thought “oh well, way to ruin a perfectly good Bassman. Good thing we have other amps.” I called Torres the next day and amazingly I spoke to the legendary Dan Torres himself. I barely got the whole problem description out and he interrupted me.

Dan: “You have one of the rarest of the rare’s, a Bassman that is wired phase-reversed.” (I suspected this all along you know . . .) “Take the green and black wires going to the output jack and reverse them, should be fine.”

Your favorite skeptic: “Really? That’s it? Are you sure?”

Dan: “Yeah that’s it.”

I thanked him and hung up, absolutely positive I would be shipping that amp to him for extensive repairs, it could not possibly be that damn simple. Of course it was. All the while I’m soldering and putting the chassis back in, I’m thinking about if I have a box big enough and if I have enough bubble wrap for this amp to ship it to my new buddy Dan for repairs. But fear not! As soon as I switched the wires, re-soldered it, and tried it out, I proudly called Rob and told him the Bassman we “borrowed” from his friend was fixed! I got this amp mod shit down pat! It sounded great on the top end, a major improvement. But the lows were still fuzzy and loose. I hate fuzzy and loose. I don’t like amps like that either. I figured I’d call my new buddy Dan back and ask him about it. He had me get out the schematic from his kit and pointed out one capacitor to change to a different lesser value, assuring me the low end distortion would tighten up dramatically. I am now of course enamored with modding every single amp within reach. Even on Dan’s web site, he says that all the great guitars you hear and love on records are never stock amps, if it’s a Marshall or a Fender it is most likely heavily modded. Page, Townsend, Stevie Ray, Angus & Malcolm, Slash, Brian May, even KIX – all heavily modded amps. While I had Dan on the phone, I asked him if he had a kit to fix the way too distorted Marshalls we have. (The ‘72 was OK, just a fix for the JCM800’s)

Dan: “You don’t need a kit, just swap out the pre amp tubes with lesser gain tubes.”

Your favorite skeptic with my well rehearsed line: “Really? That’s it? Are you sure?”

Dan: “Yep everybody does it.”

He directed me to a nice little chart on his web site that explains the whole thing. Very good, I’ve now been educated. I started thinking and while I was on a roll, I decided to call Soldano Tech Support and ask them about the Hot Rod 50, I had a question previously about a knob on the back of the amp that replaced one of the speaker outs, looked like a mod kit of some kind. (They had no idea, not a factory mod. I had to take a pic of the inside chassis and email it to them which I just did tonight) I asked a very nice helpful fellow named Bill if he had any suggestions on how to tame the wild ass distortion on the Soldano. (If you want to hear a killer Soldano, listen to the intro of “Lay it Down” by Ratt, MONSTER friggin’ guitar sound, a modded Soldano SLO 100) Nice distortion, very sweet and clear, but just way too much for what we want even on the lowest pre amp settings.

Bill: “Well, most people just swap out the pre amp tubes.”

Me now the world’s expert on this line: “Really? That’s it? Are you sure?”

Bill: “Yep.”

Me thinking I’m on Punked or something: “Do you know a guy named Dan? (just kidding on that one)

Bill: “Try a 12AT7, a 12AY7 then if it’s still too much try a 12AU7. Also, try replacing just the first stage pre amp tube, then replace the second stage with a 12AX7 back in the first position, then try replacing both tubes with the same lesser gain tube. See which one you like, try any combination of swapping out the two pre amp stages with different tubes and go with what sounds good.”

Me: “Bill, you freaking ROOOL!”

I ordered two of each tube (matched and balanced triodes) from thetubestore.com in the Great White North, told the guy on the phone to “take off, ay” and had the tubes the very next day. I spent about three hours by myself figuring out which tube combination worked the best in the Marshalls and the Soldano. Words of wisdom, let the tubes cool off a bit before touching them. In my infinite patience, I learned the same lesson over and over again! I just couldn’t wait to try the next thing looking for the perfect sound, singed fingertips and all! I ended up with a 12AY7 in the first stage of the Marshall and a 12AU7 in the first stage of the Soldano. Replacing both first and second stage pre amp tubes seemed to take the life out of the amp, it was a little too clean. “Bereft of life” as they say in the Parrot Sketch. So after all that, in our quest to shove the 747 through the front door and get “that sound” on our songs – last night we discovered the following in summary:

Marshall JCM800 Pre amp Tubes:

The stock 12AX7 is too mushy and dense for the kind of powerful rhythm sound we want. A Marshall JCM800 with a 12AY7 in the first stage pre amp section will reel in some of the unnecessary saturation and provide some head room. The 12AY7 hardens up the sound and adds the necessary dynamics to create the aggressive banging (READ: Townshend-like fury) that we want to hear in an FM recording.

The “magic” Settings:

A technique we have found that really goes a long way toward achieving the sound we want is – Turn the Master volume up to at least 8. If your neighbors are not as far away as mine, get a Marshall Power Brake. Turn the pre amp up to about 6. Now turn the guitar DOWN to anywhere between 6 and 8. CHA-FREAKIN’-CHING. SOme pickups sound fine wide open, but not what we have on these guitars. It is the only way to get a powerful, clean, and lively sound. It defies logic. Turning the guitar down just seems like the worst thing you could do but the combination of cranking the amp way up and turning the guitar down a little is the key. You have all this uncontrollable, awful sounding distortion at your fingertips but don’t go there keep around 7 or so, (to taste of course) and BANG away. It is good. If you’re thinking of trying this in the privacy of your own living room, keep in mind it does not work unless you jack the Master volume up to 8 or more. Don’t worry a JCM800 reaches full volume at about 2 – from there it just gets better, not louder. Also, a warning to you – if you’ve never had a 747 in your living room, don’t forget to secure all breakable items with duct tape before you fire the thing up. Luckily I have nothing in my basement. The pics you see at the left were from an earlier session when we were working on eq’s. The basement sounds way better than the family room. And my dogs are not scared with the amps in the basement.

We tried the Soldano briefly and while it sounded great, but alas, nothing sounds like a Marshall, so we easily talked ourselves into that.

Equalization:

One of the things we had done before on a previous test session was to try to get the EQ right on the way in. Most people will say don’t eq too much on the way in, you’ll not be able to undo anything later. I agree on drums but I disagree on guitar and bass, you can easily re-record the takes if you ruin them with eq. I feel this way especially since the VS-2480 eq’s are not very versatile. That is probably the only two complaints I have about that machine, the eq’s kind of suck and it’s difficult to patch in outboard gear, no channel inserts. The 2480 has a built in analyzer so I figured I’d use that to compare how the sounds we were getting from the mics and the Palmer Speaker Simulator was compared to a commercial recording. So what did we choose? I took the intro to “Highway to Hell” made a long repeating 15 second .wav file out of it and played it looped through the analyzer to “see” what it sounded like. Rob and I spent a few hours a couple of weeks ago creating eq curves on some outboard digital eq’s I have (Behringer DSP-2496 Ultra-Curve Pro’s – GREAT eq’s for the money, very quiet and you can stack a 10-band parametric on top of the 31-band graphic eq digitally with the units internal routing) and fortunately remembered to actually save the settings. What we did was play the “Highway” loop, use the analyzer’s peak stop function to give us a target line and then Rob would play the same riff and we’d see where our sound was compared to “Highway”, making eq adjustments until our peak stop curve was really close to the “Highway” guitar sound.

It seems if you DON’T do this, the raw guitar sound you get through the mics is such a wide spectrum sound that you’ll cancel out the low mids in the bass and some of the snare frequencies. That’s going to be a muddy mix I can assure you.

Mic Placement:

Since we were confident with our eq settings from previous test sessions, we started working on mic placement. You always hear about engineers jamming the old reliable SM57 into the grill cloth, usually at an angle and then setting up a room mic. We were using a Marshall cabinet with Celestion Vintage 30’s in it and we wanted to find the sweet spot mic placement for the Marshall. I stayed upstairs in the control room while Rob took some headphones down to the basement and plugged into the snake. We have the amp farm in the control room so we can tweak the knobs easily and have a 100 foot speaker cable run down to the basement connected to the cabinet. The plan was for me to play while Rob moved the mic around the speaker cabinet until we found “the spot.” We setup an SM57, a Sennheiser MD421 and an AT-4040 large diaphragm condenser mic. We found a good spot on the cab after about 20 minutes of messing around with the SM57, it ended up being about an inch from the grill cloth at about a 45 degree angle pointed halfway between the dust cap and the outside edge of the cone. (Sounds vaguely familiar – only the same exact position in every single thing you read about guitar mic placement! Fucking duh!) Then we worked on the room mics. Rob walked around while I played and found two spots that sounded good to his ear. The Sennheiser was about 20 feet away but slightly off to the left of the direction the cabinet was pointed. Out of the direct line of fire, it seems to give the sound a chance to bloom a little before picking it up. He said it sounded hard and sandy when you stood directly in front of the cabinet. He put the mic at ear level. Same thing for the AT-4040 but we didn’t end up using that mic at all the other two sounded so perfect.

The idea was to mix those two mics down to one track and on the other track for that guitar, we used the Palmer PDI-03 Speaker Simulator and mixed the summed mic track and the Palmer track to taste. We used the JCM800 as described above and my old ‘78 Les Paul. We really believe after all this prep work, we’ve nailed a killer guitar sound. Rob played on two songs and we made some CD’s and we were done. He called me on his way home and raved about how much he thought finally the sound we have sounds like what he thinks HIS guitar sounds like. We were both quite happy with it still today, the next day is always the litmus test.

Now that we have a method down for a clean guitar with the Boogie and/or Bassman amp and a dirty guitar with the Marshalls and Soldano, and we have our eq and mic placement down, we’ll start burning through the six songs that Jimmy laid the drums down for over the weekend and next week. We’re thrilled that since we have everything set, no matter who plays what track, Dean or Rob, clean or dirty, we already spent hours and hours getting sounds, we just adjust everything to what we wrote down and go.

Here’s the signal path for the tech heads:

Rob’s brain -> Rob’s hands -> Les Paul with 10’s on it -> Marshall JCM800 -> Speaker out to Palmer PDI-03 -> Speaker through to cabinet -> SM57 close mic, MD-421 room mic -> both mics to separate Presonus MP-20 Mic pre’s -> Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro eq dual mono mode -> 2 Empirical Labs Distressors, 10:1 Opto mode Attack on 3 Release on 5 -> two inputs mixed to one track on VS-2480

Palmer PDI-03 XLR out -> Presonus MP-20 mic pre -> Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro -> Drawmer compressor, 4:1 attack on 15 ms release on 500 ms -> one track on the VS-2480.

BTW – a couple of paragraphs in this edition are from an email Rob sent me the day after our outstanding success, gotta give credit where credit is due. I don’t make up all the funny shitchya-no.

I’ll be checking back soon – Mark