Going back a few months for a little background, I had recorded most of the tracks on a Roland VS-2480, with the exception of a few backup vocals, all the sample loops, orchestra and some sound effects, which I recorded in Sonar. I had planned to mix using Sonar on my computer after transferring all the raw tracks from the 2480 since bouncing tracks down on the 2480 degraded the sound noticeably and it’s only 24 track mixing. Sonar has like a 256 track limit or something rediculous like that so that would have suited me just fine. However I quickly quickly realized when running a 52 track mix with a number of plugins and effects that my computer was slightly underpowered for handling the load of the massive amount of music we had tracked. The track count added up quickly from all the backup vocal tracks we did and three mics for each primary guitar rhythm track and whatnot. Although Sonar worked fairly well and I could have gotten the job done, something fortunate happened to us that made me switch over to Pro Tools HD.

As I said in my last blog, a guy named Scott Spelbring happened to see my Backing Vocals II blog entry and dropped me a note on MySpace saying he liked my tracking writeups and offered to help with anything if we needed any. Scott runs a big studio not far from my house called Dragonfly Studios and he extended an invitation to have us bring a song or two down and mix it there. I’m sure you’ve heard Scott’s work before – Dave Matthews, SR-71, Bowling for Soup, Nikki Barr and of course he engineered and produced Plunge’s Hometown Hero – a great sounding record through and through. Jimmy and I decided we’d go down there together and bring two songs to mix, “Crush” and “Hot on Your Heels” and if we liked what we heard, we’d hire Scott to mix it for us which Scott was totally in to. Rob couldn’t make it that particular Sunday and the only way to get Steve to a mix session is to shoot him, throw him in the back of the truck, take him down there and prop him in a chair – Weekend at Bernie’s style! I exported all the tracks to broadcast wav files, burned them to a data disc and Jimmy and I drove down to Dragonfly one Sunday about 30 mins south of my house to a real, kickass professional recording studio.

Scott gave us a nice tour of the facility – top notch in every respect. Lot’s of great outboard gear, a Digidesign Pro Control fully automated desk and a killer live room. We spent all day there, most of the time was spent importing tracks into Pro Tools, explaining to Scott my mad methods on what was what, and setting up the mix, way more time than actual mixing. Regardless, at the end of the day we did get a mix and we really liked what we heard, Scott did an outstanding job on “Heels.” Scott is a freaking Jedi Master with Pro Tools and being in the software/computer business, I’ve been around computers long enough to have a keen sense of when somebody really knows what they are doing on a piece of software. Scott knows how to leverage all the nuances of Pro Tools, he moved about with ease and knew exactly what he was doing at all times. His wizardry was most impressive! Not only that, he has to be the world’s nicest most genuine guy too and he loves to talk tech so all three of us really hit it off. And above all else – he’s a dog person! Anyhow, when I compared Scott’s mix to my roughs from Sonar, levels, effects and EQ aside, there was something that was just better about the general sound and basic quality of Scott’s mix. It was difficult to explain. We didn’t do a whole lot of EQ at Scott’s – it just plain sounded better coming off Scott’s gear. I did a little research and found some white papers on Digidesign’s web site about the Pro Tools 48-bit mix bus and that helped explain why the Pro Tools mix was elementally much fatter and pro-sounding that the Sonar mixes. Sonar does not use a 48 bit mix bus and the difference was audible to me.

Jimmy and I decided we’d talk to the other guys and see what they thought about Scott mixing our record. We still had some tracking to do and Scott was going away for a month in May to do a USO tour running front of house for Plunge. So we agreed to talk when Scott got back and made a plan to have everything done ready to bring to Scott to mix by June 1st. I had a ton of work to do to export all our tracks and get them ready to be mixed in Pro Tools. I was ecstatic at the prospect of having Scott mix our record and so were the other guys.

In the mean time, as most everybody knows, Dean had put in his notice that he was leaving the band. He still had some rhythm tracks to do and all of his solos. Steve, Jimmy, Rob and I, while we regret Deans decision to leave, decided we would not release a new CD with guitar tracks played by a person who was no longer in the band. So all Dean’s tracks were scrapped. Luckily though, when Rob and I recorded all his rhythm tracks, we had to sort out all our guitar parts from the demos and right after Rob would finish his tracks for any song we were working on, we immediately recorded Dean’s parts as guide track so Dean could learn all the guitar parts he was supposed to play. Then we would run mixes of Rob playing the parts intended for Dean without Rob’s main tracks so Dean could come in prepared and there would be no question about what parts he was supposed to play. It worked out great for two reasons, Dean always came in prepared, and when he decided to leave, much by accident we already had good, well-engineered, produced guitar guide tracks that Rob had tracked for Dean. So I just flipped the virtual tracks labeled ‘Dean’ over to the ones labeled ‘Rob’ and we were done! Almost. Rob had to redo a few tracks as we did some of them slopplily because we thought Dean would be playing them anyhow so there was not much point in punching in and tightening things up here and there. So we left some stuff a little sloppy, one pass tracking style, thinking the only purpose they would serve was for Dean to learn his parts. Those rhythm tracks were retracked.

Turns out we needed those guide tracks after all and we only had to redo like three rhythm ‘Dean guide tracks’ of Rob’s, and Rob had to do all the solos that were earmarked for Dean. We knocked that stuff out in about two weeks of hard work and we were very happy with the result.

I also decided that since we spent the bulk of our time at Scott’s importing raw tracks and organizing data, and since I had witnessed the brilliance and amazing workflow of Pro Tools first hand, that I would get the software and get the projects ready in Pro Tools so all Scott would have to do was EQ and mix rather than organize my mess! It’s really tough to explain the difference a well engineered workflow makes in a software program – when you see it, it seems like everything just makes sense and everything is done so easily and intuitively. (The MIDI implmentation in Pro Tools has a long way to go but that’s a whole other story) So since I was way overdue for a new PC anyhow, I went and built myself a dual core Athlon 64 for about $1000 (tax deductable of course!) and got my new Pro Tools HD up and running in no time. I was importing raw wav files from Sonar and the VS-2480 like a mad scientist, finishing up bass parts here and there, reading the 750 page Pro Tools manual front to back and generally working like Edward Scissorhands trimming the hedges, every single night, every free moment – except for during Soprano’s and 24! I really wanted to be ready for when Scott came back to go right in and mix.

Then something quite remarkable and unexpected happened out of the blue one day – Beau Hill called!

We had to get some backups on “Crush” for a good reason. We had an opportunity to go to a big studio to mix a couple of songs and I wanted “Crush” to be one of the ones we took down so it had to get done pronto.

A guy called Scott Spelbring dropped me an email one day via MySpace and we got to talking and he offered to help out if we needed it. Scott has worked with a number of national artists and big producers, Dave Matthews, Drew Mazurak (Linkin Park, Nothingface), SR-71, Jim Ebert (Butch Walker), Jason Mraz and Plunge just to name a few. Scott has a very impressive list of clients and an even more impressive state-of-the-art Pro Tools-based studio. And his studio is only about 25 minutes from my house, it could not have been a more ideal situation for us. After thinking about it for roughly two seconds , I took him up on his offer to mix a couple of songs for us. Check him out at Dragonfly Recording Studios. Jimmy and I went down to Dragonfly to let Scott put the magic touch on our songs this past Sunday – we were very excited with the results, more on that in the next edition . . .

I had everything setup ahead of time to maximize the time available before everybody got burned out from singing. They all three rode together and got down my way about 5:30. Steve did his usual warmups and we got down to tracking. I think we had five songs to complete, the biggest one requiring the most work was “Crush.” For those who have seen us perform this song live you’ll understand this part. We did about 10 tracks of all three guys yelling “Crush” (you know that part right? Each track with a different guy standing in the middle of the three so no one particular voice becomes dominant in the mix. I really think we nailed the arena gang vocal feel. The desired effect of course is the gigantic crowd of people yelling (or singing) “Crush.” With that many voices, it can’t possibly go wrong and it sounds nice and huge just like the idea Steve originally came up with.

A couple of times Steve had to man the cell phone as he was trying to work out with the club owner of Memories (our Saturday show venue) if we all collectively thought we should cancel the show or not due to the snow. In typical fashion here around D.C., the weathermen can never say if something is going to be real bad or just OK, so we were keeping an eye on the TV and trying to determine if we were going to get dumped on or not. Obviously we ended up playing the show on Saturday and everybody eventually made it home OK.

We burned through five songs in about four hours and at the end, there were a couple of lines for Steve to redo in some other songs that for one reason or another were not quite right. One of them was a line in “Hot On Your Heels” which is the other song I wanted to take down to Dragonfly to mix. Steve still had some juice left in the old voice box and so we went in and fixed a couple of lines here and there on a few songs.

In the previous weeks and weeks since my last installment here, we have been working on guitar and bass tracks whenever schedules and time permits. Rob has started his final phases by doing solos, Dean has a couple of his rhythm tracks to fix up, mostly because I had him play the wrong part on a couple of songs and about four more basic rhythm tracks to do. He also has to do almost all of his solos. I’ve got four more songs to lay bass tracks on and there are three more songs to do lead and backup vocals on.

Hopefully, we can proceed with mixing songs at Dragonfly with Scott Spelbring as we finish up tracking the rest of the album, so we’ll sort of have two things going at once and we won’t have to wait for all the tracks to be done before mixing starts. Damn good idea!

I see Dean mentioned the intro to Crush in his Glog that I made so I guess I’ll elaborate. As you live show attendees know, Dean does a little talkbox guitar intro and we start the song when it’s apparent he’s done talkboxing. Our original idea, can’t remember if it was Rob’s idea or mine, was to have a thirty second intro with a real orchestra sitting around tuning up with some talking and whatnot. Having a Crush on someone is sort of like an orchestra playing a deep classical movement. There are rushes of intensity, dense feelings, expectation, elation and of course dissapointment. Since the analogy of a Crush being like an orchestra with so many facets that can “play” anything, as anything can happen in a Crush with so many facets, that we thought it would be neat to hear the “orchestra of the Crush” warming up to get into Crush – get it?

Rob had worked with a guy previously that actually had a digital two track recording of a real orchestra warming up which he had emailed me like two years ago and neither one of us could find it. I looked on old PC’s, searched entire servers where I may have saved the file for “safe keeping” and I even searched backup tape archives – no luck. So I was faced with either buying an orchestra sample CD, none of which are reasonably priced, at least for what little I wanted to do, or finding royalty free samples and build my orchestra intro. I could see buying a sample library if I used orchestral sounds all the time but I couldn’t justify it just for this. I also have Tascam Giga3 and I used a couple of virtual instruments from there but the learning curve was pretty high and I was impatient, I get that way when I want an idea to flow. I hate it when a technical glitch gets in the way of creativity, it’s such a downer. I’ll read the very thick Giga manual for later because it looks very powerful.

After I started, I actually found myself working backwards from the first note of the song. I knew how I wanted to transition into the song, I could hear that in my head and I heard a few other things I wanted to use but it was easy to work backwards. I found some royalty free samples of oboes, violins, cellos, flutes, french horns and whatnot that sounded really good. The problem was, most of the stuff was single notes or two note trills. I had to tune each sample and create a melody from my tunings and and paste them together for each instrument to create a part that sounds like it was actually played by a musician, and then load the wav file I constructed for each instrument into a track. (which I could have done easily with Giga I’m sure if I had the patience to learn that first – which I didn’t because this idea was burning a hole in my pocket. I did use a couple of simple defaults though) I also got two royalty free samples of a real orchestras warming up like I wanted (thanks SuperGirl!) but they were sparse and had a lot of talking. Not really what I envisioned when I heard the samples by themselves. I took the talking peaks in the wav files and “de-normalized” them so the peaks were below the rest of the sample but I really had to beef them up with individual instrument parts to make them work for what I heard in my head.

I also wanted to take the listener on a musical journey through a few well-known emotions that you feel when you have a serious Crush on someone. I thought a lot about how I feel when I have had Crushes. The ones that are really up and down are the ones that you remember, if you have a Crush on someone, and they dig you, then it’s all happy. The fun starts when they are not sure they like you for whatever reason, maybe you’ve got Stinkfoot darlin’, or you’re moving to Montana soon to be a dental floss tycoon. Or maybe you listen to way too much Frank Zappa. Whatever – you know those kinds of crushes well right? There’s some happy stuff, cuz having a crush is cool at first and really happy when it works out (but that’s a different song – when it works out then it’s some love schmuv song) There’s anxiety if she’s not showing the same level of interest that you have in her, then there might even be some bludgeon you feel when you know she don’t like your python boot wearin’ ass. My idea was to use some subtle chord voicings against other chords to recreate tension and anxious feelings with the music. I tried to wrap all the wierd and wonderful range of emotions all up into about thirty five seconds and then ROCK right into Crush. It turned out really great, when I listen to it, it takes me through a snapshot of one little crush I had a while ago that didn’t work out in my favor. It’s cool to listen and feel like I expressed those feelings well because when I hear it, the familiarity of those feelings is right there, the music pulls those feelings right up. I’m very pleased with it. I let the boys listen to it and everybody was bowled over. Jimmy and Rob had a few suggestions they sent me over email. I printed those out so I won’t lose those too! When I marry that project over to the beginning of the real song, I’ll make those little changes. (Screenshot of the intro in Sonar 5)

For Dean’s parts, we used my Les Paul and the Marshall Plexi for the first track. I want the guitar on his side to be dark, heavy and thick without sounding like some dumb metal song. We started with his Explorer, but it’s a little brighter than the Les Paul and I didn’t want that to be the main sound on his side, so we did about twenty seconds and I decided to use record the Les Paul first and use the Explorer as a doubled track mixed in behind the Les Paul on his side of the mix. Usually we don’t double rhythm tracks, I think it takes away some of the overall timbre of the instrument and masks some of the individuality and articulation of the player. Now I think if you’re not such a good rhythm player, or your tone sucks, doubling can save your ass and make you sound like a rock god. Normally no need for doubling around here but since Rob’s sound on this song is going to be something along the lines of “The Rover” or “Royal Orleans” (Zeppelin) I needed to make sure Dean’s side is extra thick to allow that space for Rob while still keeping the song heavy. So we did one track with the Les Paul with three mics, one track with the Explorer with different mics through the same amp, then we set all the gain aside for the clean parts by using the trusty Hiwatt. There are some jangly guitars throughout the song so we got out the Strat and cranked up the Hiwatt – the Strat sounds absolutely dreamy through that amp. Of course I had to pull the inputs way back to clean it up. It reminded me of “Run to the Hills” Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pretty cool stuff. There were about three different parts repeating through the song that Dean did with the Strat, I love the sound of that guitar!

We then moved on to the talkbox. Dean has a Rocktron Banshee that, while is not the Heil talkbox made famous by Peter Frampton, Joe Perry and others, it sounds damn good and won’t blow your amp if the driver fails. The corksniffers would look down their nose at anything that is not a Heil but I challenge them to a taste test! No chance anyone can tell, the Banshee sounds that good. It does not even need an amp, it has it’s own mini amp built in. It has a little gain knob and we cut that back quite a bit from his live setting to make sure we get some nice tone showing through and we ran through the song punching him in where his talkbox parts are. I also had him do some chord layering in a couple of spots and double a couple of the single string runs here and there. We put a lot of talkbox in spots where it’s the main part and some layering where it will be mixed in the background for texture – love the way it came out. My plan was to have him double those parts too but the talkbox is such a spur of the moment feel thing, I quickly realized that there was no way to have him double the parts without him wanting to kill me for making him do stuff over and over until it matches good enough, there was just no way, the parts have too much individuality and expression – that’s the whole idea behind the talkbox and luckily my good sense overtook me and we didn’t double the talkbox parts – saved by my inner voice of reason for once. I can’t wait for you to hear it!

“Well don’t you even take the bones out?”

“If we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy would it?”

Right. And now for something completely different. I should tell of the infamous Ring of Deaf first. As you know, when Rob and I first started searching for guitar sounds to use, we weren’t sure if we wanted to use attenuators, go full blast or what. We figured running a 100 watt tube amp with everything “dimed” would not work because of the sheer volume. He and Dean would not be able to hear the backing tracks in the headphones over the amps. That turned out to be a farce. The tracks could be easily heard even standing right next to the amps as long as the headphones were tight! We decided to setup all the amps and cabs in the basement in a semi-circle and run the microphone snake upstairs to the second floor control room. The amps would be far enough away from where I sit so I could really hear what’s going on without hearing the ambient sounds from the amp and we could run everything as loud as we want all hours without disturbing the neighbors. You can still hear it loud outside but the neighbors can’t hear it. (or we can’t hear the doorbell over the amps when they come over to complain!!)

We’re running everything dimed, as loud as the amps will go, with the spot for Rob and Dean well behind the blast of the amps. When we are adjusting the amps and listening for a good sound, Rob or I run in front of the amps, adjust a knob, then run far away across the room to give a listen. It’s like lighting off firecrackers when you’re a kid, you light one and run like hell so you don’t injure yourself! And equally as fun I might add. Even then it’s still so fucking loud it hurts. It’s just funny to run over to the amps, adjust, run away, listen at painful volume repeat numerous times and somehow arrive at the conclusion that it sounds good! The only way to tell for sure is when I go upstairs and listen through the speakers. I’ve gotten used to making subtle changes that you don’t hear that well because of the volume, and really make a big difference upstairs on the track at mix volume. I guess it takes a decent imagination to think about how different things translate from the amp room to the track. I’m sure there is a little luck involved too!

“Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink – Say no MORE!”

Below is Rob photographed at the international headquarters of “The Royal Society of Putting Things On Top of Other Things.”

To your left just out of the shot we have a ’67 Fender Bassman that’s been modded for killer guitar tone, and a bass Isocab. I use the Isocab late at night when I want to record bass. Guitars we can do late at night, bass goes right through walls and would cause major problems in the neighborhood for sure at the volumes I need so I just use the Isocab. Slightly behind our guitar hero is one of my Trace Elliot bass cabs with my old Marshall JCM800 on top. Then we have a very exciting and amazing amplifier, a ’76 Hiwatt DR103 Custom 100. Loudest amp ever made. Just deafening but it sounds incredible. Below that we have a vintage Hiwatt SE4123 speaker cab loaded with Fanes. Oh the tone!! I think I’m becoming sexually aroused! Next to that we have a Marshall Superlead 100 Plexi reissue that has been gutted and rebuilt to real ’68 specs. Also a great sounding amp. Below that we have a ’74 Marshall cab loaded with original Celestion greenbacks. It’s a little loose from being 30 years old and well used, so I stuffed acoustic foam in the handles to keep them from vibrating at 150 decibels. It’s sitting on an Auralex GRAMMA. There used to be casters on that cab, but they were sheared off long ago. They are probably still in the back of my ’79 Pinto wagon in the pile of beercans I left in the backseat when I junked it. Next to that we have a Soldano Hot Rod 50 that I stuffed some vintage-like components in to make it drip with tone. Under that we have Rob’s ’74 Marshall Superlead 100 that he customized with a point to point board, some tricky wiring and very liberal component substitution. Not exactly stock you know! Under that we have a Trace Elliot guitar cabinet with Celestion Vintage 30′s in it, basically a Marshall cab, but this one is glued together a little better. On the floor we have the red mic spot finder gadget – a giant MagLite so we can see into the speaker grilles to get the mic placements exactly where I want on the speaker cone. You see a couple of mics in the pic, off to the right just in the pic near the mic finder gadget is a Sennheiser e906, then in the foreground is a Neumann TLM103 we use for a room mic – at ear level of course. On the Marshall cab we have a large diaphragm Shure KSM32 and a good old SM57.

I’ve been making sure whatever mic combination I use for Rob, I change for Dean. Same for the amps, if Rob plays his track with the Telecaster Deluxe through one of the Marshalls mic’d with the SM57, the KSM32 and Neumann room mic, then Dean plays through the Hiwatt with a Les Paul, subsituting the e906 for the SM57 and vice versa. That strategy has helped keep the two tones from blending in the mix even though they are panned. If you use the same mics and guitars all the time, even with different amps, there are going to be some annoying similarities in the tone. For me it keeps the listening experience much more interesting. Rob and I have played around with stuff so much we figured out that certain guitars sound too similar to use on both sides. For example, his Woody guitar has some tonal characteristics that are very much like the Tele Deluxe. So we keep those two guitars out of the same song. We also keep the Gibsons out of both sides. If Rob used the Les Paul on his side, then I usually put Dean on anything but his Explorer or PRS. All the time we spent working this out, I have occaisionally made a mistake and let Dean use the wrong guitar, we just re-do it. Redoing guitar tracks is infinitely easier than redoing drum tracks.

These songs sound really great with a Marshall on one side and a Hiwatt on the other. Two phenomenal but distinctly different tones that have their individuality in the mix. Rob came over today and did a track in exactly 2.5 hours. It took us a while to get a sound that was needed for the song. The riff needed a lot of juice to make it happen with some attack and squeal, so we had to make some adjustments to our normal Plexi settings to get the sound a little hotter. We tried the Soldano which was great but we needed a little more body so we went back to the Plexi. The Soldano is going to kill when we get to recording solos. Dean took the week off, he was playing on a couple of weeknights. Steve came down last night and did lead vocals on five songs – that leaves three more to go for lead vocals. More on that next blog.

For guitars we have Rob almost done. He has to do one more song and he’ll start doing solos. Dean has about six songs left to do rhythms on and he’ll start on solos after that. As soon as we get more music finished and I bounce some tracks down, we’ll get the Angels together for some backing vocals. I’m keeping sort of a running mix. I have eq’s and effects pretty much set as I go along. On the last record I really didn’t keep up all that great and basically started from scratch mixing, I wanted to avoid that this time and mix as we move through the songs. Anyhow, we’re making a lot of progress recording two or three sessions of guitar a week, usually getting two tracks done – some songs have more than two guitar parts so we don’t aways finish a whole song in each session. I was going to do a post on what Dean and I have done, but he blog-blocked me a little and put some stuff in his blog. So I’ll wait until we get some more tracks down for Dean.

Some songs have acoustic on them and I borrowed a guitar from my freind Kent. He has a bunch of really nice acoustics and I wanted to make sure we have a good sounding acoustic to use on this record. If we start with a good sounding acoustic and it sounds bad, then I can only blame myself. I know some of you are thinking about Steve’s acoustic he uses live. While it’s a fine guitar, it does actually have a crack in it on the top of the soundboard which is probably not the best scenario for good acoustic tone. OK for live work, but not a chance in the studio.

Kent let me borrow a 2005 Ovation Collector’s Edition that he got last year. Rob and I used it on four songs. Two songs where it’s one of the main guitar tracks and the other two where the acoustic is a backing track to the electrics. We were getting sounds last week on “1000 Thank Yoos” and the guitar would work for about two minutes and just stop. I was wanting to record it direct and mic’d then mix the two sounds and the direct signal kept going dead. After replacing cables, the battery and trying a different preamp, I called Kent to ask him if there was any sort of secret Ovation ritual I needed to know to get it to work. He said that he has never used the direct output, he always just mic’d it and he wondered aloud why I would ever want to use the direct signal when I have a Neumann TLM103 to mic it with? My answer was “Uh yeah well I was just trying it to see, I wasn’t really going to use the direct . . .” He is going to have it repaired under warranty, probably the electronics module is bad, and I of course just used the mic as I’d planned all along! Right!

I ran the mic for the acoustic through a Universal Audio 2-610 tube mic pre with a dash of compression and that Ovation sounded classic. Warm like a . . . well, you know, warm! I never thought I’d say that about an Ovation. I’d always disliked the way they sounded. I guess when you grow up listening to acoustic guitar sounds on Zeppelin and Who records, anything that’s not in the same neighborhhood is garbage! I think we did well on the acoustic. I was a little nervous about it because I don’t have much experience recording acoustics, never really had to, but so far I think we did alright.

Speaking of Zeppelin we did something interesting on “Crush.” Most of you know that song from our live show. Rob wanted to do something different with his tone on that song to make it a little more unique. I suggested we use the Les Paul with the pickup selector in the middle to get that Jimmy Page tone like on “The Rover” or “Royal Orleans.” (Man, that one’s digging DEEP!) We both thought it would be a good idea and we’d try it to see what happens. Listening to it by itself with the drums and bass and without Dean’s track, it’s really hard to tell if it’s going to work. It sounds neat but I can’t tell if it’s adding or taking away from the song just yet. Not sure if both guitars should be heavy or just Dean’s. We are going to wait and decide if it works after Dean tracks his part. It might add a nice texture and space to the song, or it might be total shit!

We’ll see. Come back soon!

(Walks down the hall. Opens door.)

Mr Barnard: WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Man: Well, I was told outside that…

Mr Barnard: Don’t give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!

Man: What?

Mr Barnard: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous pervert!!!

Man: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I’m not going to just stand . . .

Mr Barnard: OH, oh I’m sorry, but this is Abuse.

Man: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.

Mr Barnard: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.

Man: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.

Mr Barnard: Not at all.

Man: Thank You. (Under his breath) Stupid git!!

Something else was going wrong for us; some of the projects would simply not play the audio in time with the MIDI tracks which made it hard for Jimmy to play with the click track which was in Sonar and being played to the 2480 recorder while he plays to it. What we do is take our demo projects, mute everything but say one guitar and the lead vocal, then create a click track in the project for Jimmy to play with. He likes the lead vocal and guitar turned down to where he can just barely hear it underneath the click and his playing. The recorded audio would drift out of sync with the click track by the end of the song. Not a big deal but annoying as hell for Jimmy – but he’s a pro, he played right through it.

After those sessions we were all proud that we had finished everything and could move on to finishing up the guitars on the first six songs. I also had figured out the sync problem in the mean time. It was something as simple as switching the master clock to the computer and slaving the 2480 to the computer rather than the other way around. In Sonar’s docs, it had some blurb about not playing audio in sync with MIDI tracks when Sonar is not the sync master. I got that problem remedied pretty quick.

Then the bad news. I’m not sure what made me go back and listen to those tracks because we were still pretty heavily involved in the first six tracks we recorded, getting guitars and overdubs done, but I went back and listened to either “By The Balls” or “Slow to Blow.” Just for fun because I recalled Jimmy’s groove was pretty happening on both songs. While I was listening, I was sitting there thinking things sounded really good and punchy. Then I noticed something was funny about the cymbals. When he hit the cymbals, there was no separation in the stereo field. On my Presonus Central Station, there is a mono button on the remote controller and I use that of make sure nothing is out of phase. Usually when you hit the mono button, everything sounds drastically different. When I hit it this time, nothing changed. That’s bad, real real bad. I figured it might be just a mic phasing thing, easily fixed. But it was much worse than that. After listening and trying different things, I realized in horror that I had recorded the overheads in mono. I had not felt my heart sink like that in a while. I looked at the inputs I used for the overheads and through the signal path I had made the tracks stereo paired – except in one spot. At that point forward, both mics are combined into two of the same sound. Completely useless. I can describe it like this. When you listen to a record, the drummer hits a crash cymbal and you hear it on one side or the other depending on which cymbal he hits. On these tracks, all cymbal hits were right up the middle, neither right nor left. How awful!

Hoping that maybe I had just fucked up one song, I opened all nine projects and they were all mono overheads. Crap. No luck whatsoever. Then in a very paranoid move, I opened up the other six projects we already did and checked those, they were fine.

Can anybody say do-over?

That’s all we could do, chalk it up to experience. I missed one. Jimmy took the news well, even though it was a stupid mistake on my part. I try not to miss details like that, I guess nobody’s perfect, even when you try really hard and there’s a lot of work on the line.

When Jimmy came back to re-do the tracks, I had acquired a couple of new toys that I really didn’t think much of and thought we’d try just for fun. I bought a Crown PZM 30D mic on a whim because I heard one on some drum tracks I was listening to. It was an example track on an equipment example CD I got somewhere. PZM stands for pressure zone microphone. It’s a very different kind of mic, you don’t actually “mic” an instrument with it. You put it on the floor, a table, tape it to a wall – any flat surface will do. It’s supposed to pick up sound reflections from hard flat surfaces. I figured I’d try it and if it sucked I’d put it on eBay and lose a few bucks. I’d consider that rental fees to try it out.

I had never used one of these mics before and so I thought the best thing to do would be to put it on the hardwood floor adjacent to my family room which is where we setup and record Jimmy’s drums. I had written down all the settings from our last drum sessions. All the compressors, all the mic pre knob positions, all the fader and level positions were recorded. Some stuff I took digital pics of because it was too tedious to type it up. My motivation was just in case we had to redo something which is exactly what we were doing right now; all the new sessions would sound the same as the previously recorded six songs.

While checking the sounds on each drum, I noticed the kit was really popping and sounding nice and big. I hate to compare but it reminded be of Bonham’s sound on “In Through the Out Door.” Just a big tight and roomy sound. I thought I was hearing too much overhead and room so I kept turning those mics down so I could focus on the close mic’d sounds. I kept turning them down lower and lower and it still sounded huge. I realized the PZM was what was giving me all the incredible room sound I was hearing! Jimmy and were both pretty impressed with that little thing. When mixed in with the room mics and overheads, it is really something. I don’t know exactly how it works or why it sounds so good, but it’s really worth the money.

Of course it sounded so good on drums, I’ve since tried it on every other instrument. It was just OK on guitars and didn’t really add a whole lot to anything else I tried. But from now on it’s must have on drums!

We did two or three takes of each song and other than the addition of the PZM, we thought these sessions sounded markedly better than the last six songs we did. So what did we do right when we thought we were finished? We decided to REDO the first six songs!! Even though they have bass, guitar and vocals and were practically done, we just said fuck it, this new sound works so well, we have to go through the extra effort. We scheduled another session two weeks later in which time I touched NOTHING in my studio so all the settings were exactly the same. We were going to take pics of mic placement but we mic everything the exact same way every time so that wasn’t an issue. Between Jimmy and me, we have really good recall on details so we didn’t bother. We do have one pic of how high we keep the overheads over the kit, that was from our very first session and we do look at that when we setup. Needless to say “PZM” was the buzzword in the dressing room for the next two weeks and over email.

The next sessions went great. We kept referring back to the first tracks to make sure Jimmy matched his original performances which he liked very much. There were a couple of things that had to be redone on bass and guitar. A drummer who has a monster groove like Jimmy, well you can’t expect him to play with the exact same feel for every performance. So since his feel was slightly different on some things, I went back in and re-did a few bass tracks to tighten it up. A few guitar parts were redone too. More on guitars later.

In summary, we had a good time redoing those bad recordings and honestly, the second trip through the songs was much better, sounded better, played better – everything. I’m pretty stoked about it. All the drum tracks are officially done. Hooray!!

I posted a song on our MySpace site – not new, I just stuck “Just One Dance” up there from Skin to Skin and Rob and I were talking about how much we can’t wait to get this thing done and out there for everybody to hear, we’re so in love with what we are doing we can barely stand the wait!

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

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

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

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

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