Mark Schenker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: “Yeah that’s it.”

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

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

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

Dan: “Yep everybody does it.”

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

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

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

Bill: “Yep.”

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

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

Me: “Bill, you freaking ROOOL!”

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

Marshall JCM800 Pre amp Tubes:

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

The “magic” Settings:

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

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

Equalization:

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

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

Mic Placement:

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

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

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

Here’s the signal path for the tech heads:

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

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

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

I’ll be checking back soon – Mark

Rob and I decided to get together and work on guitar sounds to make sure we are getting what we want to get out of the equipment we all have. We planned to use a lot of guitar-amp-cabinet combinations to see what we would come up with. We don’t really have any preconceived notions, other than we know what we don’t like. We were originally going to do it once but it turns out we got together two nights and will also do a third as soon as we get a piece of gear we are waiting on. On one of the Saturdays we were off, we spent about 10 hours going through stuff and we learned a lot about some “problems” with existing gear that would not have shown up but for the microcosm of the recording environment. What follows is actually two sessions but the first session I don’t think we actually recorded anything, we just played and listened.

Obviously we have two guitar players and so Dean will be mixed on the left (like the last record) and Rob on the right, just as you see the band live. My original plan was to use a miked cabinet on one track, and a Palmer PDI-03 Speaker Simulator on the other from another amp head and mix the two. I had used the Palmer on some demo stuff and it sounded killer. The one I have is the original, the same model used on all the legendary Def Leppard albums and also used by Eddie Van Halen back in the day. These original ones are quite rare and extremely hard to find. I was lucky to get my hands on one because it sounds incredible. We recorded two tracks of the same performance, one with the Palmer and one of the cab. We had to decide what guitar to use and what amp settings to use, including which guitars were great or unusable and which guitar sounded better through the amp or the Palmer, so we planned on recording with every combination of every thing we had. We wanted to hear them in context with each other.

The first thing we did was put my old Marshall cabinet down the hallway. We used a vintage ’72 100 watt Marshall head on loan from Ronnie Younkins. It’s been modified by some amp guru in LA and has a couple of bells and whistles on it. Mostly mods of convenience rather than for a different sound or tone. Since I had been using my Marshall JCM800 Lead 50 with the Palmer and we loved the sound, we went with that amp on the Palmer – it was after all already plugged in and wired to it! We also have a ’67 Fender Bassman that was just worked over by a specialist and it sounds really warm and has a ton of character. Most people outside the biz might think we are using it for recording bass, not the case. It’s a fantastic guitar amp, but not a very good bass amp. In fact when Jim Marshall first started building amplifiers, his amps were all based on the early Fender Bassman circuitry. I also have a “guitar magic” kit from Torres Engineering installed in this amp so it’s definitely a guitar amp at this point, cleaner than a Marshall and silkier.

For guitars we had on hand Rob’s PRS, Lucky, Lucky II, my ’76 Les Paul Custom and a Fender ’72 Telecaster Deluxe re-issue I just got a hold of. We stood out in the hall with the amp cranked up pretty good and tried different settings and different guitars for a while. The PRS had to have the shittiest pickup in it, we found that guitar is unusable until we can install a real pickup, then we’ll try her again. In it’s defense, the model Rob has is the Santana which is their cheapest model (still not “cheap” but it’s the economy model on the PRS scale of things) so I would not expect it to have a great pickup in it. We found that Lucky II had way too much fret buzz and Rob planned on working on that later. Lucky was WAY too distorted, it has a very high gain Duncan in it and its just too much gain for rhythm and we’ll keep it in mind for lead tracks. The Les Paul sounded incredible, crunchy without sounding “metal” or thin. Rob doesn’t like playing that one too much, it has smaller frets than he is used to and he has to dig a little harder to squeeze some attitude out of it, it’s just a playing comfort thing. The Tele Deluxe really had our hearts this night. It had all the good things about a Les Paul and all the good things about a Fender rolled into one. The Deluxes were made with Strat head stocks and two humbuckers in the early-mid 70′s and this is a faithful Fender re-issue of the originals. It sounded great and Rob loved playing it.

We were having one problem though. No matter what head or guitar we used, we could not get the sound to clean up the way we wanted it to. Even with the pre-amps on say two, the Marshall was really pretty distorted, not in a bad way, it was breaking up all wrong and was just plain dirty. I had been having misgivings about my poor old Marshall cabinet even when we did the last record. We recorded most of the guitars on “Skin” through this cabinet. It was made sometime between 1970 and 1973 and when I got it in the mid-80′s it was in great shape. I used it for years playing in bands when I played guitar, I loaded that thing into my old Pinto wagon so many times. I left it in the heat in the car, in the cold in my various garages over the years, (I even lent it to Ronnie once in like ’86 and he left it under the stage at The Bayou for a week (but that’s a whole other story, shiot, now I’m in double parenthesis again, what’s the punctuation rule for getting out? This?)) My point is, that thing has got to be tired with all the abuse I have put it through. Since I was only just suspect at this point, I decided to see how much it would cost to replace the speakers in that cabinet. Brian Forsythe had been raving about a Marshall cabinet he recently purchased that had Celestion Vintage 30′s in it and he played me a Rhino Bucket recording they had done for a movie that sound really good. A lot like AC/DC guitars. I had Celestion 25 watt Greenbacks in mine. So I convinced myself the speakers were worn – had to be after 30 years right? Fucking-a right! I placed an order and after I put those new speakers in there and fired it up, I thought the world was going to end! That was exactly the problem, the sound was considerably tighter and more defined, we even had to turn the pre-amp up to get a little more edge out of it. That made such a huge difference I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.

Incidentally, back pedaling the timeline for a minute, I was in Victor Litz music during the interim while I was waiting for my speakers to arrive and I spied a dark green cabinet over in the corner, way out of the way. I asked Jeff Adams about it and we moved a bunch of other gear out of the way and it turns out it was a Trace Elliot 4×12 guitar cabinet! Wow. Rare find indeed. I knew from being such a gear head that these cabinets have a reputation for sounding great AND that they weighed in at roughly one metric ton. I bought the thing on the spot for dirt and it was in perfect condition. Not a scratch or tear on the thing. So I got it home, recruited my neighbor to help me hump it up the stairs, (most other cabs I can carry upstairs myself, not this boat anchor) take the back off the thing and guess what speakers are in it? Celestion Vintage 30′s! It also has much heavier wood and much different bracing inside compared to a Marshall. Cool so now we have two 4×12′s we can use. I hooked up the Trace right away to the ’72 Marshall and played the Les Paul through it – for a moment I was Angus incarnate, all I needed was shorts and some talent. THE tightest sound, just fabulous. I called Rob and got him all excited about the new cab. We planned to get together that Saturday after I had loaded the Vintage 30′s on order into the Marshall.

This time since we had made some decisions on what configurations we wanted to try, we were able to get right to recording some test tracks without too much fucking around. I put a Sennhieser 421 about eight inches away from one speaker and a SM57 on the other about the same distance. Ideally the diaphragms of the mics should be exactly the same distance away to avoid phase problems. I decided rather quickly I did not like the 421. 57′s have a lot of midrange frequencies and the 421′s tend to capture more highs and lows. I plan on mixing two different mic inputs to one track as we record. I’m going to try the 421 again later but I went with the Neumann instead this time. I learned a neat trick that I’ll share with you for using two mics on a guitar cabinet and recording them down to one track.

Start with the mics exactly the same distance away from the center of any two speakers, I use the top speakers usually on a 4×12 cab. (To avoid the proximity effect, use at least 8 inches) Run them both into your mic-pre and whatever outboard gear you want to use then into the recorder. Bring the fader up to zero on one mic. On the second mic, invert the phase. Bring the fader on the inverted phase mic up slowly, around -5 or -3dB you should start to hear the sound getting thinner and sounding terrible. Find the spot where the sound is weakest, thinnest and worst. Leave the fader there and flip the phase back on the second mic, what you hear should kick you in the head. What this accomplishes is finding the spot where the mics are most out of phase, which when they are flipped back, they are the most in phase. Of course there is no way to hear that while both mics are the same phase and this trick is a nice little shortcut.

We were able to record about 18 different tracks to one of the drum tracks from the first session that we were going to trash anyhow. Each time Rob played one “expression” rhythm track and one cleanish track. When I say cleanish, think Pete Townsend on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Cleanish is not a great description because what we’re looking for is anything but clean, it’s just not as dirty as the other track. With each pair of tracks we recorded, whatever we used to record one side, we’d use a completely different rig and guitar for the other side. We mostly used the Tele and Les Paul and used the Lucky’s here and there for comparison. We mixed the Palmer track and the miked cabinet track so each side really had two tracks simultaneously recorded. The Palmer really lived up to its reputation, it’s pretty amazing sound from that little box and you can run the amp on 10 without hearing a thing as the speaker output plugs right into it. We liked the sound of the Bassman for the cleanish stuff and the ’72 Marshall for the expression track. I wish I could get my hands on a Hiwatt amp and really go for that Townsend sound. The guy from Green Day records his cleanish sounds with a Hiwatt and uses an old Marshall like the one we have for his main sound. Rob and I both really like that sound a lot so if anybody out there has a Hiwatt head they wish to lend us for about six months, or sell at a reasonable price, let me know. We tried Rob’s JCM800 head and it is still just a little too dirty for what we are looking for.

We ran some CD’s through the analyzer to compare our frequency response to the big boys. We looked at the intro to “Highway to Hell” and other than plainly hearing the difference, we could see we had way to much middle in there compared to Angus’ guitar. It is a combination of having the mids on 10 where Rob likes his amps to be and using an SM57 (along with the Neumann) to mic the cab. I eq’d out what we didn’t need there and the sounds were really beginning to take shape. Next time I think maybe we’ll either use a different mic or get rid of the mids altogether and let the mic do the mid frequency work for us. If you leave a bunch of mids in the guitars, it will fill up the mix so fast that there will be no room in the frequency spectrum for vocals and bass, the mix will sound muddy. So we have to leave like 200Hz to about 800Hz just a bit subtracted, like maybe -3dB. When you look at guitar sounds you like through an analyzer, it really helps you to nail down frequencies to subtract from your guitar sound. You have to find a spot on the album you want to look at that has nothing but guitar and look at it that way through the analyzer. Sometimes if the spot I want to analyze is real short, I’ll use Soundforge (or Acid Pro or whatever is handy) to copy and paste like 10 copies of just that spot together in one big wav file and play that through the analyzer. I’ve found it quite helpful over the years. Of course guys who engineer and mix for a living can identify frequencies to subtract spot on every time, but I on the other hand need a little help. The spectrum analyzer is my crutch. Nothing much happens on a guitar sound above 7k so you might as well shelve that off. There’s not a whole lot needed in the lower mids either nor is there much but rumble below 180Hz. Take a look at your favorite guitar sounds through an analyzer, you will be quite surprised what you see versus what you think you hear.

We had not planned on using any of these tracks, this was just some equipment testing we wanted to feel out before we do it for real. We had a few other amps yet to try, the Soldano Hot Rod 50 XL which I have really high hopes for and the Mesa Boogie head. Did you know that the knobs on Soldano heads go up to 11? How great is that? I bet it brings a tear to Nigel Tufnel’s eye! We’ll try both of those through the Marshall and the Trace cabinets and see where we get with that. We’ll try one of Dean’s 2×12 Mesa Boogie cabinets too and see where that takes us. I’m not a big fan of Boogie cabinets but we’ll give it a listen and see what it sounds like.

I’ll be checking back soon – Mark

Now with all the work we had done to the listening environment, it was time to set out and actually record something. Jimmy and Rob and I set up another date to record drum tracks to five songs. All three of us had done some test sessions over the summer to see how some of the new equipment I bought sounded, mics, compressors and pre amps, and we were going for real this time. Jimmy and I planned on getting together on Sunday to get his drums setup and miked, and all three of us would come back on Monday to jam and get the stuff on tape.

Rob, Steve and I had been working on demos using our computers and a built-in drum machine since last April. Rob and I have had the same setup for a while. We use Sonar Producer’s Edition to make demos. It’s really a wonderful tool, you can cut, paste and change arrangements in a second, and lay down tracks in a tenth of the time it used to take using ADATs or a more sophisticated DAW. We hooked Steve up with his new computer so now all three of us have the same demo creation capability with Sonar, the DR-008 software drum machine and some snappy Joey Kramer drum samples. Rob and I have a PODxt and Steve has a Line6 combo with a direct out that he likes to use. But since we got the Tech21 endorsement, we just got the GT2 which I think sounds better than the POD and I think we’ll all be using that from now on. My point is that since we all have the same setup for demos, we can carry projects back and forth to each others house and work on the exact same demo, rather than everyone having their own versions of songs. It has made things a lot easier for us as far as collaboration goes. Since we do the actual recording of the CD at my house, I always drive to Rob or Steve’s (since he now has the same computer setup as Rob and I do), those guys will be doing their fair share of driving later on.

Once again this time, we’ll be using the trusty Roland VS-2480 that I recently installed a DVD burner into (voiding my warranty I might add), and I also have a DIF-AT24 that links the VS-2480 with my computer so I can very quickly bounce tracks back and forth between Sonar and the VS via the R-BUS. A little different than I had the last time. Before I could only bounce two tracks at once, now I can do eight. I’m all about convenience! For example I planned to record all the drums to the VS and the hi-hat and room mic to Sonar with an accompanying sync track. We use our original demos as a sync, muting the drums we programmed and creating a basic beat click track for Jimmy. It also makes it easy to reference the demo material if there is a question about how something goes.

With all that in place and ready to go, I was anxious to try out some new gear I had acquired over the last year. I had got some new mics – Sennheiser 421′s for the toms and possibly using one for second miking guitar, and a very nice Neumann TLM-103 off eBay that I had planned on using just for vocals but since it is such a kick ass mic I decided to use it as a room mic instead of the Audio Technica 4033 I had originally planned on using. I am going to use the 4033′s as drum overheads. It’s what I used last time and I love the way the cymbals came out on the last record so why mess with perfection. The thing I was most excited about other then the Neumann mic was the two Empirical Labs Distressors I bought – again one off eBay, one from a dealer. (It should be called eBay Studios here) These things are baby’s ass smooth. One for the kick drum and one for the snare drum. Then I’ll use them on just about everything else I record, especially vocals. On a side note, one of my Distressors started acting funny a while back and I contacted the factory about it and they had me send it in for repairs. I expected to pay a hefty sum for the repair but they actually REPLACED the unit – no questions asked. This thing was way out of warranty and wow, you just don’t get service like that anymore. They didn’t even ask when or where I bought it even though I did get it from a dealer.

Jimmy showed up at the appointed time, not often late is he, and we went about setting things up, he with the drums, me with all the recording gear. I had done some preparation with the sync tracks and with some settings on some of the gear but most of this stuff was new and I expected to mostly work on getting sounds rather than actually recording anything on this day. Boy was I ever right. We spent probably nine or ten hours just working with the gear and figuring it out as we went along. There always seems to be some adjustment to be made. Jimmy spent an awful lot of time just doing single hits on each drum that day! Finally I thought we had everything together and ready to roll and we decided to call it a day and reconvene Monday.

Once again Jimmy arrived on time. I was still a little burnt from the mental calisthenics of Sunday and as we got back into it, I knew there had to be something I missed with all the new gear and new signal paths we were using. But so far nothing was rearing its ugly head. When we were doing our test recordings to try out the new gear over the summer, I had noticed that we needed some noise gates on the toms and especially the kick. The kick mic was picking up the sound of the snare and it added this horrific tubular tone to each snare hit that I had to get rid of manually by editing out the snare hits on the kick track. It was really destroying the snare sound and this problem had to be addressed. I didn’t mind doing it for one test song but there’s no way I would do it for every song. I got hold of a Drawmer DS404 to use on the kick and the three toms. Cool thing about the Drawmer is that you can tune the gate to be sensitive to specific frequencies. Most gates will open whenever any sound is loud enough to break the threshold. In other words, I only want the kick gate to open when the kick drum is hit, even though the snare is just as loud and would also open the gate if it were just a normal noise gate. I took the frequency on the gate for the kick and set it so that nothing above 150hz (really low) would trigger or break the gate, thus only allowing the kick sound through that one mic triggered by the low frequency of the kick drum, not higher frequencies of the other drums. Likewise with the toms. I don’t want the snare drum leaking into the toms mics so I set those to be “tom frequency specific” for breaking the gate. I had hoped that we didn’t need to gate anything but I’m glad we did, it’s just too messy. Jimmy’s first comment was “You’re not going to gate the snare are you? They always did that in KIX and I hated that.” Nope no gate on either snare mic, just the kick and toms. So far it worked out well, the drums were nice and clear with each track being very quiet outside of what was supposed to be on it. The bottom snare mic was picking up a nice click from the kick drum due to its close proximity which was nice, sometimes you have to work to get that in there.

Rob showed up about 2:00 and we set about our goal of recording five drum tracks, even though we only finished four by the time we were done. Jimmy got most of the stuff in three or less takes. The ones he had more takes on were due to a problem with the computer playing synched audio and MIDI tracks with the VS properly and rather than figure it out and waste time, we just recorded a click track on the VS instead. We would play the Sonar demo project with the click track we made and the click would stay in time but the audio would lag behind. Very strange unless of course you RTFM which I didn’t do. It turns out that (according to the manual) Sonar does not support audio playback if it is not the master clock. It will only playback MIDI tracks in time if it is syncing to an external clock. That explains why the click track always stayed perfect and the audio was always lagging behind by the end of the song. What I thought was some weird problem turned out to be working as designed. Of course I figured all this out much later after we were done. I just flipped the master clock over to the computer and now it works fine. One of the songs called “No Regrets” we didn’t have a Sonar project for syncing to and so we made a new project with just a click track and Rob played along with Jimmy whilst I monitored gear for little red lights. (Red lights = signal clipping, very very bad) I ended up recording the hi hat and room mic on the VS instead of in Sonar because of this problem.

All in all we did quite well and we were all excited about the drum sounds. Mostly anyhow. I thought the snare sound was suspect and I wasn’t sure why it was bothering me. It sounded OK but it should sound great. We used Jimmy’s Zildjian snare which sounded killer during our test songs over the summer, and it wasn’t quite kicking my ass the way it was on the other songs. We stood around listening and talking about the sounds we got and then listened to some CD’s we liked in the monitoring room for comparisons. We are trying to get that drum “kit” sound not just capturing the sound of each drum, but to get the sound of the “kit” as one instrument. Jimmy likes the kit sound on the last Audioslave album, me I picked G&R Appetite, Aerosmith Done With Mirrors has a killer drum “kit” sound, Rob wanted to hear the Jet album and I just happened to have the new U2 album also which has some good drum room sounds on it. A reality check so to speak, we definitely agreed that we were in the neighborhood we wanted to be in.

Another thing we tried to help insure that we could get some good live room sounds was to record a MIDI drum track from the live drum mics and I could use that to trigger ambient drum sounds from the Drum kit From Hell 2 sample collection I have. That turned out to be more work than it was worth so we bagged it and we felt OK about it when we heard the sound of the room mic and how much liveliness it added when mixed in with the other drum tracks.
One important thing I did was create session sheets for each piece of gear recording all the settings for every single device in the line. Drawmer has some handy session sheets for their gear on their web site with little pictures you can fill in where you have the knobs and switches set. Nobody else had them for any of the other gear I have so I had to make them. Pain in the ass. I tried photographing the gear but you just couldn’t see it closely enough in the pics. Jimmy also brought his digital camera and took shots of all the mic placements on the drums so we could have them for next time.

Unfortunately, we are not going to use any of these sessions. I found two major mistakes I made that can’t be fixed in the mix much to my dismay. Remember the snare problem I thought I had? Well I was reading an article in a recording magazine and somebody was writing about recording drums and mentioned in passing something like, “put top and bottom mics on the snare and flip the phase on the bottom mic” so on and so forth like it is a given, which I knew it was. As a rule you always have to phase invert one of the mics on a top-bottom miked drum. As soon as I read this I ran right upstairs and fired up the VS to see if that was my problem and sure enough, I had forgotten to flip the phase switch on one of the mic pre amps, not did I switch it on one of the channels. When the snare is hit on a top-bottom miked snare, the top head moves towards the bottom mic at the same time it is moving away from the top mic (and vice versa) resulting in and electrical phase inversion on one of the mics at any given time, resulting in some frequency cancellation of a perfectly good snare sound. You have to compensate for this by inverting the phase on something in the signal path, I prefer to to use device closest to the mic in the signal chain which would be the mic pre. I know all this but simply forgot to do it. I knew something was wrong with the snare! The VS has phase inversion on the tracks but flipping the phase does not bring back the cancelled frequencies. I was hoping just simply reversing the phase switch on the track would help but it didn’t do much.

The other thing which made me decide to trash these tracks was the overhead tracks. I am trying to get a good drum KIT sound as I said earlier and part of that is getting a good stereo image from the overhead mics. I’m using a stereo mic bar with the diaphragms of the mics angled at 120 degrees or damn close to it – I measured it with my handily little compass. That includes all of the devices in line handling those two tracks as stereo tracks. I noticed I had forgot to channel link the input tracks on the VS for those two tracks, results being that each track had roughly the same thing on it. For a true stereo image, both tracks should have something slightly different, cymbals should be stronger on one side of the image or the other depending on where they are positioned on the drummer’s kit relative to center, the hi-hat should also be a little on one side and so on. I had captured none of this and I thought while we were recording this session that the overheads sounded great but it wasn’t “stereo” enough for me and I was silently reconsidering the stereo mic bar thinking that the mics were much too close, even though you see the same configuration in real studios all the time. I figured it just wasn’t working here and I would change it for the next sessions and it wouldn’t be all that noticeable. When we decided what songs to do for this session, I chose five songs that I thought would be the easiest to redo if we struck out with this session. Good thing cuz we’re doing them all over again.

So just incase this edition isn’t technical enough I’ll outline the drum recording signal path for all you gear heads:

Kick -> AKG D112 mic -> Drawmer DS404 gate -> Presonus MP20 mic pre -> Distressor on Opto mode about 3-5 dB gain reduction

Snare top -> Shure SM57 -> Presonus MP20 mic pre -> Distressor 3:1 with about 3 dB gain reductionSnare bottom > Shure SM57 -> Presonus M88 mic pre -> dbx 166 compressor 3:1 about 3-5 dB gain reduction

Toms -> all three Sennheiser 421′s -> Drawmer DS404 gate -> Presonus M88 mic pre -> no compression, will do that later, and 7k and 400hz were subtracted about 3 dB on the inputs of the VS. 7K to lose some attack and 400hz to lose some boxiness.

Overheads -> two AT 4033′s on a stereo mount -> dbx Stereo 31 band eq with a high pass filter at 120hz, then 200hz, 400hz and 800hz dipped about 5 dB (eliminates the clang in the cymbals which I find harsh) -> Presonus MP20 mic pre in Stereo mode -> Drawmer DL241 Auto Compressor in Stereo and Auto mode -> into the VS as a stereo linked pair of tracks

Hi Hat -> Shure Beta57 -> Presonus M88 mic pre, no compression

Room Mic -> Neumann TLM-103 -> Presonus M88 mic pre -> no compression -> plan to run this track back through one of the Distressors in Nuke mode and see what that sounds like. The Nuke mode is made especially for room miking, we shall see.

Talk at ya soon – Mark