Mark Schenker

Ahh a weekend off! Few and far between! While indulging in the Monty Python “Python-o-thon” on BBC America this evening, I’ll shall update you on what Rob and I have been doing in the aforementioned “Ring of Deaf” in my basement. Crunchy Frog anybody?

“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!!

As I mentioned in my previous post, Jimmy and I had gotten together to finish up the drum tracks on the remaining nine songs. As usual everything went pretty well except for on a few songs, “By The Balls” I think it was (which most of you know as our current opening live song) there was a problem with the original Sonar project and it was a few beats per measure fast – it started to sound like a heavy metal song. Luckily I had an old version of the project that was the right speed. Don’t know how it got messed up, it must have gotten mixed up on Rob’s hard drive with the one that was the correct speed.

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!

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