Jimmy used Scott’s kit and brought his snare and cymbals. Scott got everything mic’d up with some nice super-high room mics to get all those pretty reflections of those drums bouncing off the wooden walls. We did some test drum tracks with Jimmy using his Zildjian snare, the one made from cymbal brass that he got from them back when he had an endorsement. It’s possibly THE loudest snare ever made. It sounded really good with some ringy overtones, and we weren’t sure if that whas what we were looking for. Scott suggested we try his Ludwig Black Beauty just for fun. Jimmy played for a few minutes and we recorded it and took a break to listen back. Jimmy decided he liked his Zildjian better. It did sound great, so did the Black Beauty but they were too different to compare really.

With the drum sound set, Scott took off for a few to get his dogs from his house and bring them over for company. Jimmy Rob and I decided to run through the arrangements of the three songs and we did quite well! Originally Rob and I had the idea of recording my bass and his guitar at the same time to capture the live vibe as best we could but we spent alot of time working on drums and we figured we’d probably want to redo some parts later anyhow. We decided we’d just sit in the room and Jam with Jimmy as he tracked his drums.

There is a famous story about Keith Moon’s antics in the studio during the recording of Who’s Next. He and producer Glyn Johns along with the first engineer had spent about three hours working on drum sounds, moving mics, changing drums, tuning drums, etc. When they finally “got it” Moonie asked the guys in the control room if everything was just how they wanted. They answered “yeah man we really got it” and Moonie asked “are you sure” they replied, ”oh yeah perfect Kieth, just perfect.” Then Moonie promptly stood up, and walked right through the front of the kit, brandishing that wide evil grin of his. Great story.

The point of that story as it applies here is this. The room we recorded drums in was very live and hyperactive. I was sitting about three feet from Jimmy and his pounding the kit was so boneshakingly loud that I had to look up from what I was doing because it sounded like he was walking through the kit continuously! At which point I would be in rather serious danger of big heavy things falling on me. I play with Jimmy alot and I’m pretty used to being in close proximity of his powerful drumming, but when he has something he does not normally have - a gargantuan reflective room as an amplifier - it’s downright scary shit!

Here’s a video of some of what we did. It’s long and mostly pretty boring, it’s kind of like watching a video of somebody at work, nothing exciting about a bunch of people taking their job seriously. Even in a cool studio making music. But that is how it is in the studio and so here you go!

Jimmy at Dragonfly Studios 8/15

I’ll give y’all a demo version of one of the songs we are tracking for you to hear how a track evolves from the demo stage to the version we feel is good enough to release. This is an older song that was written by Rob and Craig Stegall ages ago, one that Rob and I felt strongly enough about the music and feel to try and pull it from the vault to revive it as a Funny Money song.

This song was in dire need of new lyrics so I went about re-writing the lyrics using some ideas Rob and I wanted to explore using only the original title. I think Craig came up with the original title, which was “When Love Seems Dead.” For the rewrite of this song, Rob had the idea of using the simile of how at any given point in a relationship, ”love” with someone can be like a dog playing dead. So we expanded on the idea walking ourselves through similar scenarios we’ve both been in. How sometimes when you reach a point in a tulmultuous relationship when you are not sure if the love is actually gone or if the love is just playing dead. Like when you have problems with someone you are supposedly in a serious relationship with, you talk about things, try to resolve them and nothing happens, there is no forward motion. Sometimes you just get sick of it and it seems like they do nothing to help the situation and it’s all one-way. Where the rubber meets the road, it’s all you and no them. You’re just like “yeah this thing is almost over now” and you feel that emotional door closing a little, that slightly uneasy sinking feeling of going down the far side of a long swale in a speeding car. Then suddenly the other person does something cool or unexpected, maybe start acting like they are more into the little thing you have built together than last week, or do something huge they said they would do for you on an emotional level. Something out of the ordinary arc of the relationship that gets your attention in a positive way. And you think, “Hey this might be alright! Maybe things will work out…” and you get all excited again about this person and your relationship, so you “throw it a bone again” and keep trying until the next time love plays dead. But once you start feeling that way, how do you really know which it is? Is love dead or is it just playing dead like a little dog trick?

I tried to put that whole space that we are all familiar with, that ebb and flow of the shaky love-not-love thing into these lyrics and I hope it makes a connection with listeners. It’s definitely something we can all relate to. So this song is about those feelings and the uncertainty of what it feels like “When Love Plays Dead.”

Remember this is NOT what we recorded, this is a demo, with crappy plug-in guitars and a Jimmy-approved BFD drum track. Oh and Steve didn’t get around to singing on the demo, so this is Rob belting it out. Enjoy!

One of the biggest problems we had with doing these multi-band festival shows, is that we are very used to our stereo in-ear monitor system we built for ourselves to use with Funny Money and we didn’t want to go back to the old “way of the wedge” for any reason. Not to mention the fact that any large venue multi-band show anywhere is usually a cluster fuck during changeovers. Steve, Jimmy and I all have Ultimate Ears in-ear speakers. Steve and I have the Shure PSM-400, Jimmy plugs straight into the mixing board back by his drums with a stereo cable. Rob plays commando with no ear plugs or in-ears, he tried them but didn’t like them. He’s a brave man. We have fine tuned our mixes over the last few years and it works great for all of us. (Ronnie has Ultimate Ears and a Shure unit but he doesn’t use in-ears with KIX)

So when this came up, and Funny Money was off that weekend anyhow, we decided to do it if Jimmy and I could figure out a way to get our in-ear rig down to Oklahoma without spending a thousand or more dollars on air cargo. We decided to drive. We figured eighteen hours, good company, a couple of iPods and Jimmy’s van, we’d have a great time. We’ve all made the drive to Florida numerous times and this was just a little farther so what’s the big deal? When we did get to the venue, we saw a bunch of Rockit Cargo pallets backstage that were from Queensryche. That must have cost them an arm and a leg and we were glad we didn’t further line the pockets of Rockit Cargo with our hard earned cash…

I had asked Scott Spelbring to go with us to run FOH since our regular sound man Joe Corcoran couldn’t make it that weekend. Scott offered to ride with Jimmy and I and we’re glad he did, we had a blast on the drive and Scott just added to the fun. With my new hard disk video camera in tow, off we went. I had an old digital tape camera and decided to update my gear for the trip. This one even has the Super NightShot Infrared system for that fuzzy green-and-white-tinged-hotel-heiress-sex-tape effect.

Here’s some video I took on the way down edited down for, um, you know . . . dramatic effect.

One time in particular I recall having saved up $10 from allowance and since the bus was free, I had enough to buy one record and a soda. My friend and I decided to make a special trip to The Top Pop Shop one Saturday to buy a record, which is something we often did only when we had more money so we could buy more than one record. Trips out there off base were slightly frowned upon by our parents, but they always let us go anyhow.

I knew what I wanted, it was the latest Rush album called Hemispheres - one record, a 45 min bus trip and a two mile walk - $5.99. I remember walking back to the shuttle bus stop with this weird blue and pink album with a naked man on the cover in the magenta plastic bag with The Top Pop Shop logo on one side. I remember thinking about how great it was going to be when I got home and my friend and I could spend the rest of the day filling our young minds with brand new music buy guys who were so cool they had white shag carpet on their stage! We knew that because we had studied and dissected every picture in the folds of ‘All The Worlds A Stage’ and their rare appearances in Creem Magazine. Sure we liked Zeppelin, Boston and AC/DC like all the other kids over there, but if you knew about Rush, oh man you were SO in on the real deal! Rush was our band!

I been looking forward to this show for quite sometime since I missed Snakes and Arrows the first time around. Rush always seems to play in our area on a Saturday and we play every Saturday so I had been SOL on the R30 tour and the first round of S&A. This was my first experience using StubHub and it was a positive one. I used to use a ticket broker to get something in first couple of rows, but my former contact is shall we say, involuntarily “out of the business” at the moment. I bought sixth row on Geddy’s side and received my tickets promptly about three weeks before the show. Nice. I’ll be using StubHub again just for the low hassle factor alone. I had two tix, Lisa couldn’t go and isn’t a fan, Rob couldn’t go, Jimmy couldn’t go (he has yet to see Neil play live), Dean already had tickets. I decided to invite my good friend Kelly. She was a casual Rush fan who had never seen them before. She was about to be welcomed into a really special and exclusive club like no other.

We hooked up with Dean before the show, and we talked Rush talk for a while. It’s funny how real Rush fans always refer to the band members by their first names, as if we know them - nothing could be further from the truth but it’s always first names only during Rush discussions with other known Rush fans - as Kelly noted for future reference! Dean checked out all the merch I bought giving it the stamp of approval. I think he went and got a shirt later. They had some really cool stuff, dog tags, temporary tattoos, tie dye shirts, USB drives with the Rush logo, and everything was priced very reasonable. $30 for a shirt - a cool shirt with cool artwork on both sides - $5 for temp tattoos, $10 for dog tags or a baseball hat. You got a sense that the band was really trying to make the merch affordable for all the fans. Everything seemed well worth the price, not the normal rape and pillage pricing at most concerts. And there was cool stuff for women. Even though Rush concerts are mostly a sausage fest, at least the women who do show up get nice choices for merch!

I’ve seen Rush about seventeen times, sometimes twice on the same tour. I try to never miss a tour. My first Rush concert was the Moving Pictures tour in 1981-82. I still have my concert shirt! This latest album Snakes and Arrows is the best Rush album in forever. It hearkens back to the classic Rush era, the era that made me LOVE this band. For the first time since probably the Counterparts tour, I was looking forward to hearing the new material live, there are so many good songs on the S&A. Not to say that all the in between albums weren’t good, for example, I didn’t even buy Test for Echo, which I love, until after I saw the show on the ‘97 tour, but this new album is OLD good. One song in particular really had my head moving sideways. A song called ‘Workin’ Them Angels’ is a good song already, but whoever is the creative mind behind the Rush visuals hit one out of the park with the imagery on the big screen for that song.

[Show as slideshow]

At Rush concerts, everybody cheers when certain things are shown on the big screen, it’s a given. Everybody always goes nuts over the same images for the same songs, for the love of the familiar and the nostalgic. The Starman is always a guaranteed roar, and we as fans just can’t get enough of that one. But there might be a new classic in the works here. ‘Workin’ Them Angels’ seems to be about how people can do things on the edge over and over without killing themselves and how those people tend to work their ‘guardian angels’ overtime. Like guardian angels have to work harder for some people than they do for others who don’t take as many risks in life. During the song, the big screen cycled through false color images of people doing dangerous jobs with long flowing sepia-toned angel wings on their backs. Then an image of two soldiers in full desert battle gear popped up, one crouching with an M-16 and the other standing beside him - both had angel wings. The crowd roared so loud it drowned out the band. It sent chills up and down my spine - the emotion was just overwhelming. THIS is why we go see Rush!! THIS is why our religion is better than yours! Most times you just expect to go to any concert and hear the songs you know and love so well, but the imagery for this song was so powerful and so moving, it far eclipsed any of my old favorites (Well, maybe not ‘The Trees’) and made me love that song so much more.  Talk about going the extra mile, this was absolutely out of this world for me. It was that moment when your brain is so overloaded with positive aural and visual stimulation that your cortex just gives up and collapses in a gelatinous mass of euphoria. I love being caught off guard like that. It does not get any better than that for me.

Since Vapor Trails tour, Rush has done a three hour show with a half hour intermission. Dean and I called each other during intermission to share our thoughts and impressions at the midway point. We agreed we were both right in the middle of being blown away! We spotted each others seats and waved like a couple of 12 year olds! Kelly was impressed at her first Rush concert and eager to be in the club from now on. A week later she had learned for herself all the band member’s real names and some of the story behind 2112 - off to a good start!

The seating up front was pretty informal, the security would let people walk up into the middle to take pics - nice touch. I got some pretty good pics of Geddy. One time he came right up to the edge where I was standing and I hurriedly got off a few shots. I had to admit to Kelly after I took a couple of strides back to my seat that my heart was beating like a little fanboy standing five feet from one of my heroes. One drawback to our seats, the keyboard rig blocked Neil. I could see his feet pretty good, but was resigned to seeing him up on the big screen when his turn came. The sound was fantastic as usual. Clear as a bell top to bottom.

Kelly made a few more observations on the religious aspect of being a Rush fan at a Rush concert. Things that we have taken for granted for a very long time. One thing that struck her the most I think, Rush has THE most air drummers per capita than any other band. When you turn around and look at the crowd, it’s quite a sight to see, everybody nailing every crash and every fill in almost perfect unison. Another, everybody sings the wailing part in 2112: Overture. Together. Loud. It’s just what you do! No need to be embarrassed to do it because everybody else is doing it too! It’s like there is a script for fan participation that we all just know, it ain’t written down anywhere, you just have to go to enough shows to know what to do. It’s kind of like going to church, where you know the Order of Mass, when to say ‘amen’ and ‘also with you’ - you learn by going and participating repeatedly!

I cannot wait for the next tour. I cannot wait for the DVD from this tour, and I can’t wait to ’see’ those songs again. Maybe next year they will do ‘The Camera Eye’.

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!!

I got a new toy last week for my bass rig and I spent so much time in the Ring of Deaf in my basement working with it, comparing my sound to bass sounds I love, that it really got me thinking hard about my sound and what I’ve learned over the years about bass.

So being the thoughtful dope that I am, I decided to share it with you! I can hear you now . . . oooh how interesting! Thanks so much Mark! You’re oh so generous!

In a previous blog, I mentioned that I took sound clips from a bunch of songs with sounds I really love (guitar, bass and drums, but I’ll only talk about bass here) analyzed them with a harmonic analyzer so I can “see” a graphical representation of a sound I like. It helps me learn what frequencies or lack of certain frequencies AND the magnitude of same, that makes something sound the way it sounds. So focusing on bass guitar, some of my favorite sounds are Geddy Lee, John Entwistle and Duff McKagan’s sound on the first GnR album. In fact, I saw some GnR video from the first album back when that shit was happening on MTV, that had Trace Elliot bass amps in the background. I immediately sold all my Hartke cabinets and bought a new Trace Elliot rig, which I still have. It’s not the same one I use live but I still have the amps and cabs. He’s a GK endorser now but Trace Elliot or GK, Duff’s sound on that first album is absolutely killer and one of my all time favs.

One of the things I confirmed with my software analyzer tool was what frequencies that I have learned by trial and error to pull out of my sound. It’s better to EQ by cutting bad sounding frequencies than boosting good ones. I see a lot of bass players in bands that warm up for FM, most all are decent players but I see some really goofy EQ settings which result in some plain old “just OK” bass sounds. A lot of players think they need all this high treble in their sound as I see in the way they have their EQ set on their amp and what I hear in their sound. A lot of guys think that’s where Geddy Lee gets all his treble from, like in the 4-6k range and sometimes even higher! Well unfortunately, that range is where a critical range of guitar frequencies will cancel out those frequencies on bass in a mix. So you can boost there all you want, nobody will hear that part of your sound unless there is no guitar! Invariably, when talking about bass sounds with other players, I say they don’t need that 5k boosted and they always say something like, “but I like that Geddy sound man, I need that 5k . . .” Not really, and let me show you.

Listen to the following clip of Geddy Lee’s bass sound on the intro to Cygnus X-1 on Rush - Different Stages Live.

It definitely sounds like he has a ton of treble right? Well he does but just not where most players think it is in the EQ spectrum. Here’s an analyzer display of a clip I made using JUST the first note of the clip you just heard pasted together over and over to create about a 10 second clip. I had to do that because the bell in the background was adding a lot of 300Hz that is not part of his sound so I did the best I could to eliminate that 300Hz drone from the bell by creating a repeating loop of just the first E note. I didn’t want to get too much of a false peak in the bass reading by letting the bell drone on, so I figured making a loop of the E would help a little. There’s still a bit of a rise in the graph around 300Hz, so take that with a grain of salt.

 

I’ll take you through the readout. It’s the classic Rickenbacker through a 70’s Ampeg SVT tube amp sound that we all love. The key is to pay attention to the dominant peaks and the obvious valleys, those are most likely deliberate boosts and cuts in those areas. The other smaller humps and troughs are likely 2nd, 3rd (and so on) harmonics of fundamentals lower in the spectrum. There’s some low rumble around 40Hz as you can see by the small peak there. Then there is a nice peak at 80Hz, that’s where alot of the very low presence is. The only other thing in a mix down in that area is the kick drum. It’s a good thing to have some stuff around 80Hz in your sound and since it’s the octave of 40Hz, that frequency will naturally come up just a bit as shown by the graph. Then we see a bit of a hole until about 130Hz, which seems to be a key frequency in his sound, it’s quite dominant here. We see another boost at about 170-180Hz, (also an approximate 2nd harmonic of the earlier dominant 80Hz) that’s a good one to really give your bass some low presence in a mix. It doesn’t conflict with guitars there and that’s one of my favorite low punch frequencies. Another peak at just over 210Hz, then our bell drone peak at 300Hz, ignore that! Adding that to your sound will make your bass sound muddy in the mix. There is another secondary peak at just over 400Hz, I’d say that’s a close second harmonic of the 210Hz peak. Then there is not a whole lot until about 750-800Hz. I always duck the 250-750Hz range on my amp a few dB with a nice smiley curve. That whole range sounds very boxy on bass. 750-800 or so will make the bass stand right up in the mix, you can see where Geddy’s is just a bit lower than 750. Then we have two key frequencies for his killer treble sound. 1.2K and 2.4k with 2.4 being the octave of 1.2k. I usually dip 1-1.2k a couple of decibels in the guitar tracks to allow this part of the bass sound to stand out. This is a critical area to NOT have any cancellation going on with the guitars. Then we see a small hump at 4k then a drastic drop. The 4k peak is most likely coming from the way he is slapping his E string for this particular song, it’s likely attack. After 4k? Drastic drop off to almost nothing - relative to the other peak frequencies anyhow. Notice the difference in decibels between the dominant frequencies and the drop off at 4k. It’s huge!

Let’s look at another great bass sound that makes me practically unable to speak when I hear it. It’s John Entwistle on Won’t Get Fooled Again around 1978-79 or so. I lifted it from The Who’s The Kids Are Alright Deluxe Edition DVD. On the bonus disk there are two special videos that have only John’s bass and what they call Ox Cam. You can just watch John and listen to only his bass. It’s absolutely amazing. A must see for any bass player. First time I saw it I was speechless for about two hours!

Here’s the same clip with the rest of the band mixed way back.

He’s using his Alembic Exploiter, nice fat soaring treble huh? It’s hard to say what his amps were at this time. In the video you can see a Marshall 4×12 guitar cabinet mic’d and angled up toward him - you gotta look hard but it’s there. You can see a ton of Sunn cabinets and I know at times he used Alembic preamps into Crown power amps too. He was the first bass player to split his signal high and low, and only apply distortion to his treble, amplifying the highs and lows very differently whilst leaving the lows tight and deep. Here’s an analyzer capture of the bass only clip.

Are you surprised to see some of the same peaks as in Geddy’s sound? Pretty cool huh? Check out 1.2k and 2.4k, almost the same as Geddy’s. Remarkably similar in the 100-250 range too. Apparently those two guys talked! Again, almost nothing above 3k - relative to the other dominant peaks. Entwistle has a little more magnitude in the muddy range between 300 and 750, that seems to be the only notable difference. I’ve read where Geddy was heavily influenced early on by Entwistle and Chris Squire from Yes, so it’s no surprise that two of the greatest bass players that ever lived seem to know what frequencies work and don’t work for a kickass bass sound. Even with both players using completely different equipment, there are some surprising similarities.

Just a note on how I used these analyzer graphs to play with my sound. If you take a graphic EQ and make it look like the picture above, your sound will not be very good. The idea is to look at the peaks and valleys, what frequencies are dominant, what ones are not there hardly at all, and try those same frequencies in your amp or EQ, pulling them up and down to see how it works for YOUR sound. It’s just something to try, it’s not a rule I use. My idea was to find out what’s there and not there by analyzing sounds I’m totally in love with, add and subtract frequencies then listen to it for myself and see how I like it for MY sound. I’m not trying to cop Geddy’s or Entwistle’s sound, I’m just seeing what their sound is made of and seeing if there’s anything there for my own taste. Get my drift??

I mentioned distortion when talking about Entwistle’s sound. Most musicians don’t realize what an important component of a great rock bass sound distortion is. So I want to talk about it and give you some examples of what I think is really good bass distortion. I had not been totally happy with my live bass sound for a little while, actually I take that back, my bass sound is kickass but I was not happy with some elements of it, most noteably the amount and type of distortion I use in my sound. For those who don’t know, and I know there are a lot of people who read this blog that might not know what that means, it would be the same type of distortion you hear in any rock guitar sound, just on bass guitar.

I had been lookin for a new distortion device for a long time, rather than playing through a fragile and very heavy tube bass amp, I would rather use some sort of tube emulator device either rack mount or stomp box to add a small amount of distortion to my sound. Anyway while I was playing with my new toy (A Gallien-Kreuger Diesel Dawg stomp box) trying to get a sound, I kept listening to my iPod one minute to the bass in parts of songs I’m shooting for, and my amp the next, comparing the two to see if I was getting close to what I want.

I’ll start with some early examples and take you right up to the modern day. Here’s a clip from My Generation going way back to The Who’s Live at Leeds Deluxe Edition (1970?), when Entwistle was using Hiwatt amps, great distorted bass sound. Although a little loose in the low end, it’s probably loose because of the limitations of the speakers of the time. He wasn’t splitting his signal and treating highs and lows differently just yet.

Here’s one of my favorite distorted bass sounds. We’ve all heard this one a zillion times as it was a big hit. Red Barchetta from Rush Moving Pictures c. 1980. This was the only track on the record where he used his Rickenbacker 4001, all other tracks he did with his ‘72 Fender Jazz. The passage I picked really shows the nice smooth distortion he uses, especially when he hits the double note pattern in the middle.

Now a clip from the flip side of that album, track one side two for those of you who have it on vinyl. The Camera Eye he used his Fender Jazz on and it has a slightly different tone than the previous clip, and may even have just a tad more distortion on it. Unlike Entwistle, Geddy at this time distorted his entire range of sound, highs and lows. He still has that beautifully distorted treble and when he goes down low, it’s rock solid. It’s key not to use so much distortion that your low end turns to shit. Another thing you don’t want to hear is the “fizz” of the distortion as a contant along side of the bass sound. It should change dynamically like a tube amp would with the way you play. It’s a fine balance.

Let’s move to the real recent to a great bass player and a guy who spends a ton of time and energy thinking about his sound, experimenting and refining his tone. He’s a huge Rush fanatic too so he definitly has some elements in his sound that could be comapred to Geddy Lee’s tone. Tim Commerford from Audioslave. This is a passage from Drown Me Slowly off of their latest album Out of Exile. Tim also uses a Fender Jazz and a (very heavy) Ampeg SVT head/cabinets. You might not be able to hear the subtle details of Tim’s finely tuned tone behind Morello’s solo if you don’t crank it up - if not, get the CD, it’s worth the $10 on iTunes!

Killer sound huh? Again nice smooth distortion, not buzzy at all, great lows, great treble. One of the few modern rock bass players that truly has his own unique sound.

I used the Diesel Dawg last week live and it’s one of those devices that is very touchy and can go from just a nice dancing on the top smooth distortion to total fizz donkey buzz saw. It sounded great last week, but this is one of those subtle effects and changes that I sometimes make to my sound that takes me a while to make a decision on. I have to listen to it for a few weeks and get inside of it to really understand what it does to my sound and THEN I’ll get a feel for if I like it or if it goes on eBay.

I was worried when I first tried it that the amount of distortion was not going to be able to go down far enough for me but it works great. I’m just looking for subtlety in my distortion. My Trace Elliot amps also have a valve drive knob in the preamp circuit to I get a nice distortion on my full-range sound as well. My amps also have a high pass effects send which is where I tap my signal to apply the Deisel Dawg distortion to my high end only - a la Entwistle. I add just a touch of chorus to my highs as well, you can hardly hear it but when the chorus is bypassed, it’s like “what happened?” I’m looking forward to recording some tracks using my new setup and see how it sits in the mix.

In closing this edition, I hope those who stayed with me all the way to the bottom of the page and if any of you are players, maybe you can use a tip or two of mine to discover something about your own bass sound.

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!