Mark Schenker

Well, since it was much cooler today, 104 degrees on the official Myrtle Beach poolside thermometer rather than the 108 degrees of yesterday – what a relief, I thought I’d work on my notes some more and try to get something else posted. I found out the heat index yesterday here was 121 degrees! Everybody is swimming and enjoying the sun – I don’t get it, how come nobody else has their laptop with them on the beach? How strange . . . must be the heat getting to them!

I decided to do something different for the backup vocals this time around. On “Skin” Steve did most of the backups with a couple of overdubbed vocals by Dean and I, and even some by Rob before he joined the band. I would liked to have done what I’m doing this time but there wasn’t really the luxury of time while recording “Skin.”

I want the backups to sound big and endless on this record without relying on reverb and delay so I’m going for the Mutt Lange/Mike Shipley method of recording and mixing vocals. More or less. For those of you who don’t know Mike Shipley, well, I don’t know him either. I know that he is Mutt’s right hand man and has worked on all of Mutt’s big records – AC/DC, Def Leppard, Bryan Adams and even worked on Shania Twain’s recordings a bit. He’s one of the best engineers in the world – you’d have to be to work for a perfectionist like Mutt. Their method, as described by “Ship” is to record twenty or so takes of the same part, scoop the mids out a little, boost the highs, and squash the shit out of them with a nice compressor. The resulting vocal sound really speaks for itself. The only problem I have with that is that if you have a vocal part with three harmony parts, that adds up to sixty takes of the same line. There is no chance I could have talked Steve, Jimmy and Rob into that. (Dean’s playing schedule prevents him from being available for backups – but I think those three can cover for him!)

So here’s what I did instead. I recorded each part three times with Steve, Jimmy and Rob around the mic. For the first take, Jimmy in the middle, for the second Steve in the middle and the third take has Rob in the middle. This way no one voice will be dominant in the mix and I get nine voices for each part and since most parts have three part harmonies, that gives me twenty seven voices all together. (Whoa, check out the big brain on Brett – you one smart motherfucker!) Not precisely the Mutt/Shipley sound but close enough for me. Effort per gain factor you know.

I recorded all the backup vocal tracks in Sonar synchronized up to the VS-2480. I could have done them all on the VS and bounced them down, but the machine tends to slow very slightly when a project gets loaded up with v-tracks and I needed to do a little editing of the backup tracks before I flew them into the VS. One of the things that happens when you record that many voices on that many tracks is the voices flam a little at the very beginning of the phrase. I just used the regular editing tools in Sonar to chop off the very first several milliseconds of each phrase so it doesn’t sound loose whenever a backup vocal starts. It’s easier to edit the tracks in Sonar than to edit that many tracks in the VS environment. Also, anytime you get three guys in a room doing backups under the pretense of some discipline, there tends to be some clowning around for relief that inevitably gets on some tracks, so I had to go in and edit all that shit out.

There was one song that had a shit load of gang vocals that got really fucked up when I tried to move a track and didn’t do it right. Suddenly the song on the VS was way out of sync with the backing vocals in Sonar. I tried to backtrack (undo my way out of it) and then Sonar started playing back the vocals at a different sample rate for some reason. Rob suggested exiting Sonar and rebooting so that’s what I did. Magically Sonar was back in sync with the VS and playing tracks at the right sample rate so we moved along. There were several anxious moments had by all when it seemed like we may have lost all our work on that song. That sidetracked us for about twenty minutes. This song was also one where the backup vocals were so high and such a long duration for each part that we only did two choruses of the first harmony and one of all the others. I copied those phrases to the other choruses in the song instead of having them do each chorus – we cheated a little. Those guys were absolutely worn out and their heads were going to explode!

I mentioned earlier the idea of scooping the mids out of the backup tracks. I didn’t do this in Sonar before running them over to the VS. I mixed all the parts after I edited them (where needed) down to a single track for each harmony part on every song. Then using the track dynamics and EQ’s on the VS I made my adjustments there. I shelved off the backups at about 250 and made a nice smile EQ curve between 250 and 10k then boosted about 3dB around 10-15k for some air. I did it this way incase I inadvertently did something horrible to the backup tracks. I could just re-mix them down from Sonar if I need to.

The result is nothing short of phenomenal in my opinion. If you like the backups on Journey and Def Leppard albums, then you are in for a treat with this record. I gave Jimmy a couple of mixes with all the backup vocals mixed in and he’s been calling me “Mutt” Schenker over email. Funny guy that Jimmy! I think that means he thinks it sounds phenomenal too . . .

One of the things that I had a lot of fun doing was a backup vocal effect on a song called “A Thousand Thank You’s.” The idea I had was to use a technique that the Beatles had used on some backup parts on Sgt. Pepper, “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” I think it was. They sang some of the backups through cardboard tubes to get that telephone-ish effect. You know, the kind you hate to see as the Christmas wrapping paper runs out when it won’t completely cover the gift you are wrapping. Sounds silly to do and I’m sure those who did the singing felt really silly singing through cardboard tubes. I can sympathize. Luckily for Steve, Rob and Jimmy, I neglected to procure said cardboard tubes before this backup session began. Oh well – not sure I could have talked them into doing it that way anyhow – even citing the Beatles as an irrefutable example! I knew I had some tools I could use instead to get the same effect.

What I did was copy the backup part to a stereo set of tracks – the part only happens twice in the song. I ran one side through an AM Radio simulator and the other side through a Bullhorn simulator then recorded only the effect return so there was none of the original signal in there. The Bullhorn simulator added a raunchy really bad honky distortion to the track – just like what you’d imagine a bullhorn sounds like. The AM Radio sim was also very accurate, it sounds like some shitty transistor mono tiny speaker radio with a little bit of that classic AM interference. Since they are on stereo paired tracks, you get a different effect on each side. I also took the right side and panned it into the middle as the part fades out so it seems like the part sweeps and changes as it is sung. Actually much cooler than just singing through cardboard tubes! It turned out great – Steve was really bowled over by it. Rob said I may have put a little too much reverb on it and he’s probably right – I can fix that later no problem.

Next, Jimmy and I recorded the drum tracks for the final eight songs completely all in one day, check back soon! And stay in the shade!

Mark

I promised to get this one up a little sooner but things have been progressing so quickly that it just didn’t happen until now. I’m currently in Myrtle Beach and editing what I wrote a few months ago as I sweat my ass off in 115 degree heat – it IS July in the South after all! Luckily my studio is 350 miles away or I’d be in there working on stuff rather than editing this!
Boy what can I say about Steve that has not already been said? I’m not sure where to start but here goes. I thought we might get three songs done but we got all six of them done! Steve is a fucking professional animal. I know I said this on the last album sessions, but he’s always prepared, and it seems like he doesn’t even have to try hard.

Most of the time, Steve will double his lead track with another track sung the same but slightly laid back. That of course will be mixed alot lower than the first. We did this on “Skin” and Steve says he has always doubled his vocal tracks since Midnite Dynamite. Before that he would only double some tracks. I think we decided to start with an easy song so he doesn’t have to push so hard right out of the chute so we chose “Fool’s Confession” to start with. It had been so long since we recorded vocals together, just he and I, that I had forgotten how truly great he is. When you’re in a studio recording a project, the microscopic environment and the scrutiny of the details will bring to light all of your weaknesses. It will also highlight all the things you are really good at. And Steve is phenomenal in the studio!

We tracked all the songs, saving one of the screamers for last. As we did the doubled tracks we sometimes had to go back and redo some of the trailing vocal lines to match the first one, but 99% of the time, Steve remembered exactly how he had just sang the first track and matched it almost precisely almost every time.

Steve then told me a story (from the room we are using as a “vocal booth”) about a conversation he had about double tracking vocals with famed producer Tom Werman, who produced “Blow My Fuse” as well as a Crue album or two as well as producing the likes of Dokken, Cheap Trick, Nugent, Poison, Twisted Sister, and L.A. Guns just for starters. Werman told Steve that the only people he had ever worked with that could properly double track vocals were Steve and Robin Zander. Steve says he thanked him but reminded him he had worked with the likes of Bret Michaels and Vince Neil and that he wasn’t sure if Werman was really complimenting him at all really! Robin Zander is damn good company to be mentioned in the same sentence with for sure.
Now for the technical part. I had used an Audio Technica for lead vox on the last record. As you already know I have upgraded some of my studio equipment and one of my better investments so far has been a Neumann TLM103 large diaphragm condenser mic that I have so far been using for a room mic on drums and guitars. The only time I used it on vocals previously was when Rob and I were recording some demos for songs we wrote and a couple of scratch vocal tracks Rob did here and there. It’s a great great mic with a capsule derived from the ultra high-end U87 and a nice response curve that is dead flat until it starts to rise at about 4k and drops off around 18k with what looks like about a 3-4dB boost in that range. Perfect for a rock vocal mic.

I also used the old standby Presonus mic-pre and a Distressor for light compression on the way in, 3:1 with about 2-3dB of gain reduction. I also used the HP response curve button on the Distressor which does something really cool. I’m not sure how many other compressors do this but the Distressor does it quite well. Enabling the HP circuitry does this – paraphrased from the manual: p’s” and “b’s” can hit the mic with an air blast that shows up as a high amplitude, low frequency signal, causing the compressor to “kick in”. The result may be a brief, unnatural drop in the apparent vocal level. This high-pass, or low cut, will not allow low, low frequencies to trigger compression, and in this case, prevent the unnatural drop in vocal level from a “p” or “b” blasting the mic with wind, while still letting the low frequencies to go through to tape. (or disc in this case)

Now just to reiterate, none of this stuff I write about, with recording vocals, drums or whatever, are not things I thought of, they’re not new nor are they innovative even though sometimes it might come across as though I’m having many eureka moments every time I touch a piece of gear. All these techniques are things any decent engineer would know, I’m just trying to give the reader a little insight into what goes on in the recording process and in my mind. So if you’re thinking, “wow he combined two bass signals to get his tone, or he pushed the HP button on the compressor – absolutely fucking brilliant!” I’m just another recycling donkey, just using shit me and every other professional and home recordist engineer knows as best I can to get the job done.

As I was saying, the Neumann is a great mic and since hearing how Rob’s voice sounded with it, I was pretty excited to get Steve’s voice with it. Steve told me the other day that he thinks that mic is the best sounding mic he’s ever sang into. Well that may be, but I have an EQ setting I use on his voice and that coupled with the musical sound of the Distressor compression, might just have a little more to do with it. Although I’m sure using a Neumann on vocals is a good idea. Probably 90% of every record you’ve ever heard has been sung through a Neumann U87. The problem I had with the U87 is that it costs $3000! Not exactly ny idea of a bargain and since the TLM103 is made from the U87 capsule, and this album not being a major label release, well I think the TLM103 is more than enough!

Steve told me the other day he has a few words he wants to change here and there and wanted to know if it would be a big deal to just punch him in for a word here and there – no problem we’ll do that next time he comes over.

Backup vocals are done and if it’s like a blast furnace here in Myrtle like it was today, I’ll have plenty of time between relaxing and sleeping to edit and post my notes.

Mark

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