I thought I was stuck with this POS Audio-Technica PRO24 mic which is seemingly for live sound or usable for possible room or overhead use... but I've been toying around with this beast and if you've got an extra $200 in your prod. account, I wouldn't be opposed to actually recommending two of these guys. They are definitely good overhead mics, but they don't put out much bass. The bass wears thin unfortunately, and the weak excuse for a "stereo" mic kind of makes it cheap-ish, but two of these for simple drum mic'ing is AWESOME for small studios. Pair this with a good kick drum mic, like a Shure Beta 52A or something of that sort, and you got an awesome and cheap drum mic kit. However, if you're opting out for something more... controlled... opt out for the Shure PG56's and pair that with something like a 52A. As always, Shure SM57's... king of the mics... use that thing for the snare. Or if you're awesome, double mic your drums and sum an 11 track drum mix. That's most likely what I'd do, but I also don't have a steady job.
Long story short:
Decent and cheap drum mic set up: AT PRO24 paired with a 52A
Not so cheap: 52A, or whatever you want for your bass mic (I love that 52A deep tone), and a slew of PG56's for your rack, keep those PRO24s as overheads, and drop something like a SM57 on your snare
Not cheap at all: double up on your PG56s and screw those cheap PRO24's and use something like C1000's for overheads. Or SM57s. I'd go with the 57s.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
Live production
Live production is something I'd like to start expanding on in my arsenal of production. I'm not talking about like light techs and fog machines and shit but I'm talking about solid pre's for your shit. You're playing in a practice space foamed with high quality sound foam and 4 or 10 sound blankets to boot as well as a room only big enough to fit 10 comfortably or 20 snug. It's going to sound a lot different when you're on a stage projecting out against who knows what the hell... half pipes because the venue is an indoor skate park... non-proofed glass because the place is usually a cafe in the afternoons... high ceilings, cement floors, room made mostly of porcelain, who knows. Live production sound determines who will buy you're CD.
I personally try to stay away from things that add major watts to my set up. No tube pre's, no "sound maximizers", nothing like that at all. That just drives a muddled sound of shit out of your usually nice sounding cabs or speakers. I try to deter myself from heavy beepboopboop shit... no Nord electro pre's or Line 6 rack pods. That stuff also drives your tone to an empty puddle of crap anyway.
I'm almost a "purest" in a sense where going through a gate/comp and an EQ is all you technically need... there are a few other things you might really want but in my opinion,
This dbx 166XL is a beast on stage. This compressor will filter you to a really rich clean if you use it right. My rig, I only have one channel on my amp, so this works perfectly... you can rig an A/B or A/B/Y box to these guys and mod your boxes a little so your channel switches to the right 166XL if you are eccentric... but if you're using a one channel amp (especially these old Fender's) this is essential for live sound as well as:
dbx 231 might be overkill for some people, but the advantage to a 31-band EQ... you have 31 bands of EQ and not 15. I have to admit, I am pretty set on using my Alesis DEQ-230, but again... 31 band EQ is not essential. ESPECIALLY a dual channel 30-band EQ like I have... but it can be practical and very useful if you're limited to a minimal amp (like me :D). EQ's are necessary.
There are only a few other things I'd venture out to try. Although I said I don't really enjoy "sound maximizers", there are a few that filter you through a super light chorus or phaser so your notes have a very very distinct clean pinch to them that you can only get when you're back in your own proverbial "shed". I can't think of one off the top of my head... but you can kind of get the same effect by stacking enough comp/gates and limiters on each other if you're lucky. Or we can all cash out on a UA 1176 and take that on the road with us......... cough cough.
I personally try to stay away from things that add major watts to my set up. No tube pre's, no "sound maximizers", nothing like that at all. That just drives a muddled sound of shit out of your usually nice sounding cabs or speakers. I try to deter myself from heavy beepboopboop shit... no Nord electro pre's or Line 6 rack pods. That stuff also drives your tone to an empty puddle of crap anyway.
I'm almost a "purest" in a sense where going through a gate/comp and an EQ is all you technically need... there are a few other things you might really want but in my opinion,
This dbx 166XL is a beast on stage. This compressor will filter you to a really rich clean if you use it right. My rig, I only have one channel on my amp, so this works perfectly... you can rig an A/B or A/B/Y box to these guys and mod your boxes a little so your channel switches to the right 166XL if you are eccentric... but if you're using a one channel amp (especially these old Fender's) this is essential for live sound as well as:dbx 231 might be overkill for some people, but the advantage to a 31-band EQ... you have 31 bands of EQ and not 15. I have to admit, I am pretty set on using my Alesis DEQ-230, but again... 31 band EQ is not essential. ESPECIALLY a dual channel 30-band EQ like I have... but it can be practical and very useful if you're limited to a minimal amp (like me :D). EQ's are necessary.There are only a few other things I'd venture out to try. Although I said I don't really enjoy "sound maximizers", there are a few that filter you through a super light chorus or phaser so your notes have a very very distinct clean pinch to them that you can only get when you're back in your own proverbial "shed". I can't think of one off the top of my head... but you can kind of get the same effect by stacking enough comp/gates and limiters on each other if you're lucky. Or we can all cash out on a UA 1176 and take that on the road with us......... cough cough.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Erik Schau and his slew of songs
I don't know exactly when Schau started recording his demos at Shedaluma, sometime between the time he got back from his semester abroad and his next quarter at UCSB, but he brought Tambo and myself, the 402 Production team, a slew of songs that weren't exactly finished by our standards. His myspace account, www.myspace.com/erikschau, depicts a few songs as to which he has recorded and some songs we have recorded with him.
Tambo has this organic rhythm appeal towards most songs. Kind of funny coming from a beatmaker and mash up artist like himself, but it almost makes complete sense seeing as he is techincally making beats and adding more beats on top of beats for songs. We usually take a driving percussion stance on acoustic tracks to fill out the outside emptiness solo acoustic tracks sometimes bring.
On Schau's latest track, 'Julia', we opted out for a few things we haven't set forth on Schau's songs before. On his first two demo'd tracks he brought us, 'Dreams of Driftwood' and 'Most of All', we took a very simple straight forward approach to those songs and tried to maximize on backing vocals and guitars and lingered on percussion and bass. The option to leave 'Julia' bassless was actually almost a mistake since that didn't cross my mind til... now. However, we maxed out all the tracks as usual so I guess it wasn't extremely necessary to include a low tone track like that... however, testing as many waters as possible is what makes for the best sound.
For 'Julia', Schau was using his Taylor for the guitar track recording through a Shure SM57 I believe and singing through that AKG C2000 (I think it was a C2000...). For the second acoustic guitar, we opted for a baby Taylor through that same C2000 with the mic closer to the bridge than the sound hole for that deep raking acoustic sound you hear. During this recording session, my band Bare Knuckle Boxing was actually recording at the same time, so a third electric guitar was used for the solo portion of the song. That was my Ernie Ball Music Man Silhouette Special going through my original Fender Deluxe mic'd with an SM57. The delayed swell-y sounding tremlolead effect was a simple custom delay programed through my first edition Digitech RP200.
Tambo quickly learned how to play the accordion, I believe it's a toy accordion... could just be some toy version of some variant of an accordion, and tracked that going through an AKG C 414. All extra percussions were done going through the C2000 (I'm now thinking that AKG mic could very well be the larger diaphram version of the C 414... I really need to get down there and check it out).
Backing vocals went through both the C2000 and C414. I don't know if it was the mic output from the C414 or Schau's voice, but his "presence", so to say, was greater than that of Tambo's when recording these tracks. That wasn't a bad thing at all, but at the mix down it was hard to work around since cutting the level in half loses intensity of the vocals, so Tambo (he was SE for this one actually) decided to cut the losses and opted for the same intensity at the cost of weird leveling.
Tambo did leveling and pseudomastering through the board (nonautonomous...). That Mackie is the worst leveling board in the world, I've decided. It doesn't kick as much as some boards I've been behind, which makes it kind of not the most awesome workstation already. It's got a few faulty faders that make it almost impossible to do on-the-fly pans or eq's. The non-autonomous thing makes it twice as hard, if not more, to do quick leveling. We started just summing and exporting all the tracks on their own and loading them into a DAW and finishing it off there. I'm not really a fan of DAW stuff... the ability to actually touch the track is an art lost to binary code. Some things, like tape and reels, can be traded for hard drives and digital storage now... that's not a problem... but when you're recording mostly analog, there is a culture of art that seems to be mistaken for work nowadays. Thank god for companies like iZ corp.
Tambo has this organic rhythm appeal towards most songs. Kind of funny coming from a beatmaker and mash up artist like himself, but it almost makes complete sense seeing as he is techincally making beats and adding more beats on top of beats for songs. We usually take a driving percussion stance on acoustic tracks to fill out the outside emptiness solo acoustic tracks sometimes bring.
On Schau's latest track, 'Julia', we opted out for a few things we haven't set forth on Schau's songs before. On his first two demo'd tracks he brought us, 'Dreams of Driftwood' and 'Most of All', we took a very simple straight forward approach to those songs and tried to maximize on backing vocals and guitars and lingered on percussion and bass. The option to leave 'Julia' bassless was actually almost a mistake since that didn't cross my mind til... now. However, we maxed out all the tracks as usual so I guess it wasn't extremely necessary to include a low tone track like that... however, testing as many waters as possible is what makes for the best sound.
For 'Julia', Schau was using his Taylor for the guitar track recording through a Shure SM57 I believe and singing through that AKG C2000 (I think it was a C2000...). For the second acoustic guitar, we opted for a baby Taylor through that same C2000 with the mic closer to the bridge than the sound hole for that deep raking acoustic sound you hear. During this recording session, my band Bare Knuckle Boxing was actually recording at the same time, so a third electric guitar was used for the solo portion of the song. That was my Ernie Ball Music Man Silhouette Special going through my original Fender Deluxe mic'd with an SM57. The delayed swell-y sounding tremlolead effect was a simple custom delay programed through my first edition Digitech RP200.
Tambo quickly learned how to play the accordion, I believe it's a toy accordion... could just be some toy version of some variant of an accordion, and tracked that going through an AKG C 414. All extra percussions were done going through the C2000 (I'm now thinking that AKG mic could very well be the larger diaphram version of the C 414... I really need to get down there and check it out).
Backing vocals went through both the C2000 and C414. I don't know if it was the mic output from the C414 or Schau's voice, but his "presence", so to say, was greater than that of Tambo's when recording these tracks. That wasn't a bad thing at all, but at the mix down it was hard to work around since cutting the level in half loses intensity of the vocals, so Tambo (he was SE for this one actually) decided to cut the losses and opted for the same intensity at the cost of weird leveling.
Tambo did leveling and pseudomastering through the board (nonautonomous...). That Mackie is the worst leveling board in the world, I've decided. It doesn't kick as much as some boards I've been behind, which makes it kind of not the most awesome workstation already. It's got a few faulty faders that make it almost impossible to do on-the-fly pans or eq's. The non-autonomous thing makes it twice as hard, if not more, to do quick leveling. We started just summing and exporting all the tracks on their own and loading them into a DAW and finishing it off there. I'm not really a fan of DAW stuff... the ability to actually touch the track is an art lost to binary code. Some things, like tape and reels, can be traded for hard drives and digital storage now... that's not a problem... but when you're recording mostly analog, there is a culture of art that seems to be mistaken for work nowadays. Thank god for companies like iZ corp.
Monday, April 14, 2008
The Shed, pictures and all
How Weezer of me:
For a very long time, since I started producing, I've always had this place on the side of my house everyone calls "The Shed". Historically, it was an actual tool shed which we tore down and rebuilt to accommodate a room of studio equipment as well as some other things my parents didn't want to have cluttered around their home. My dad realized he actually might need an actual tool shed to store even more stuff, so he built another shed adjunct to my 'shed'. Due to it's shed-like area, the name stuck. Some call it 'The Shack', which to me, sounds way 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or creepy snuff/9mm-esque. Anyway, it's a snug hideaway here in Sonoma County. Many have come through to demo or practice and it seems perfect for just that.
Inside the shed there isn't much room for control type stuff... much less, within the home itself (I'll get to that later), but there is one spot that conveniently fits a 12 track board and two 4 racks, along with a top shelf for as many as six 4-racks. Currently, I have a weird old school eq that was laying around as well as a receiver for multipurpose usage. I've hosted a crap load of Korg and M-Audio material for small 4 and 8-track type stuff, as well as a lot of DAW stuff through Logic Pro, Acid, Cubase, and Cakewalk. The con to this is that the "control closet" is located behind the drumset, which is obviously a pain to control unless your engineer or tech is also the drummer. We'll get to physical workarounds to this problem later.
The Shed, like most spaces and studios, has it's rest and relaxation area and cutesy things. A lot of it is just based around me. We used to have an SNES in there, but many days, unpaid and bored, would end with us trying to beat DK Country or having a Street Fighter tournament. We definitely got rid of that beast. There use to be guitar schematics for custom bodies from my old friends' company 'Coranado' (fronted by Jarrett Kemmerly and Mike Stender). Unfortunately, those were stored since they were fading and deteriorating. Some things that have been put up and never taken down is the Nick Wan Wall.
Not many people draw for my wall anymore, but some fun classic people have been Anthony Gilardi (son of a local mayor), Kelly McClellan (awesome artist from what I recall), and Brad Hieser to name a few.
The outdoor area is simple. Trees cast over you and if that's not enough, there's an umbrella and patio deck furniture. There's also a BBQ if you're down for some grill action. And a lawnmower in the actual shed if you're down for some grass action.
Some people who live here aren't in the know of a messy space...
Aside from The Shed, the control room itself is almost just as hilarious.
The control room is hugged with less than mediocre stuff. Unfortunately not pictured is a Korg 4 track portable board which is used for some simple summing. The laptop in the shed sends the files over to this HP desktop which tracks it all out onto Cubase or Acid, depending on how intense of a project it is.
Sometimes it's just easier to do guitar tracks in the control room since the shed has a lot of clutter and stuff that doesn't necessarily make the acoustics the best. Hardwood floor, short ceiling, a bed and a computer for interference... that's about all in this room.
Going through a Fender Champ 45 here. Also, I like shoes sometimes... those are Nike Court Forces. Not pictures are some Bape Roadstas. Sony HDV-HC1 is the cam we use for vids and such. An iced tea courtesy of Della Fattoria. Sky Dancers: The Sky's the Limit courtesy Lauren and Remy.
This is also my bedroom. I wake up, I do a little mastering and editing... then I think about taking a shower or something like that. Sometimes my dog taps on the door and steps all over my keyboard and ruins some hours of stuff I've been processing. In any case, that is the tour of The Shed. Sometime soon, Shedaluma. Til then.
For a very long time, since I started producing, I've always had this place on the side of my house everyone calls "The Shed". Historically, it was an actual tool shed which we tore down and rebuilt to accommodate a room of studio equipment as well as some other things my parents didn't want to have cluttered around their home. My dad realized he actually might need an actual tool shed to store even more stuff, so he built another shed adjunct to my 'shed'. Due to it's shed-like area, the name stuck. Some call it 'The Shack', which to me, sounds way 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or creepy snuff/9mm-esque. Anyway, it's a snug hideaway here in Sonoma County. Many have come through to demo or practice and it seems perfect for just that.
Inside the shed there isn't much room for control type stuff... much less, within the home itself (I'll get to that later), but there is one spot that conveniently fits a 12 track board and two 4 racks, along with a top shelf for as many as six 4-racks. Currently, I have a weird old school eq that was laying around as well as a receiver for multipurpose usage. I've hosted a crap load of Korg and M-Audio material for small 4 and 8-track type stuff, as well as a lot of DAW stuff through Logic Pro, Acid, Cubase, and Cakewalk. The con to this is that the "control closet" is located behind the drumset, which is obviously a pain to control unless your engineer or tech is also the drummer. We'll get to physical workarounds to this problem later.
The Shed, like most spaces and studios, has it's rest and relaxation area and cutesy things. A lot of it is just based around me. We used to have an SNES in there, but many days, unpaid and bored, would end with us trying to beat DK Country or having a Street Fighter tournament. We definitely got rid of that beast. There use to be guitar schematics for custom bodies from my old friends' company 'Coranado' (fronted by Jarrett Kemmerly and Mike Stender). Unfortunately, those were stored since they were fading and deteriorating. Some things that have been put up and never taken down is the Nick Wan Wall.
Not many people draw for my wall anymore, but some fun classic people have been Anthony Gilardi (son of a local mayor), Kelly McClellan (awesome artist from what I recall), and Brad Hieser to name a few.
The outdoor area is simple. Trees cast over you and if that's not enough, there's an umbrella and patio deck furniture. There's also a BBQ if you're down for some grill action. And a lawnmower in the actual shed if you're down for some grass action.
Some people who live here aren't in the know of a messy space...
Aside from The Shed, the control room itself is almost just as hilarious.
The control room is hugged with less than mediocre stuff. Unfortunately not pictured is a Korg 4 track portable board which is used for some simple summing. The laptop in the shed sends the files over to this HP desktop which tracks it all out onto Cubase or Acid, depending on how intense of a project it is.
Sometimes it's just easier to do guitar tracks in the control room since the shed has a lot of clutter and stuff that doesn't necessarily make the acoustics the best. Hardwood floor, short ceiling, a bed and a computer for interference... that's about all in this room.
Going through a Fender Champ 45 here. Also, I like shoes sometimes... those are Nike Court Forces. Not pictures are some Bape Roadstas. Sony HDV-HC1 is the cam we use for vids and such. An iced tea courtesy of Della Fattoria. Sky Dancers: The Sky's the Limit courtesy Lauren and Remy.
This is also my bedroom. I wake up, I do a little mastering and editing... then I think about taking a shower or something like that. Sometimes my dog taps on the door and steps all over my keyboard and ruins some hours of stuff I've been processing. In any case, that is the tour of The Shed. Sometime soon, Shedaluma. Til then.
Graham Patzner steps into Shedaluma
Graham Patzner, a common friend now between Ryan Tamborski and myself, decided to cut a track at the less-than-infamous Shedaluma. Next time I'm throwing down in that area I'll grab some official pics and specs of this stuff but from what I can remember...
a Mackie 8 going through an Alesis WS, summed into a Tascam CD-RW402. I can't remember pre's, but I think there is one eq pre and one gate/comp... maybe not though. Tambo and I really stick it strong with the fact that we don't filter much out of our tracks because we're more grime and grit and such but that doesn't mean we can't have a little g/c helping us out.
As for mic's, we were using only two... sm58 and some AKG mic (possibly a C 2000... not extremely sure).
Since we haven't had the chance to expand into a larger track'd board (or even an a/d/a converter to either my Cubase PC or Tambo's Mac [I don't know what Tambo would be able to use if we did use his lappy as a DAW but it'd probably be Logic or PT (ew)]) we have been confound to doubling on tracks. This has actually worked out well for almost all our recordings (Giant Octopus, Erik Schau, NWN, BKB, etc) and actually worked out great for Graham's song.
He brought us a guitar and vocals song, so straight out the bat Tambo recorded the guitar (it was his guitar [I want to say it was an Applause guitar... but I could be wrong as usual]) and we did a vocal track. We finally got a chance to double on the vocals and it finally worked out well. The only other time we've double tracked vocals was for NWN - IFHY pt. 1 and it was mixed results. We definitely had amazing results for Graham however. The crackiness and colder first take definitely helped add an edge to the more pronounced second take.
I don't recall the order of the rest of the tracking, but I believe it went percussion > bass > percussion > percussion > violin > backing vocals... I'll describe it in that kind of order.
The first dry run of percussions was mixed. This was actually surprising since the song itself is folky but still very hard and driving rock... you would assume some percussions that could come into play would be a snare, some sort of tambourine (possibly a ride or very light crash), some deep drums like but not limited to a bass drum, floor tom, deep djambe, or even something like a huge Arrowhead water jug or something... you know, folk rock type stuff. Weird enough, a snare (A SIMPLE SNARE AND BRUSHES) didn't work at all. It was too weak and the song definitely wasn't needing weak... it needed beef. We kept the maracas and tambourines but were left finding the right drum to keep the percussions anchored. We all decided on a bass drum... and the first take wasn't amazing. Finally Graham had a great take commanding the bass drum... on the same track, I commanded the maracas and Tambo was insistent on the cow bell. I am very against cow bell... Tambo was definitely in love with it as was his cousin Ally. Graham, saying he wasn't the greatest drummer, started to falter at the end of the track but he decided that it might be cool if there was a 'falling apart' end to the song. We definitely incorporated that into the second and third percussion tracks by including a part where we threw stuff at a pile of percussion stuff we weren't using, including an Orangina bottle and those damn brushes we weren't able to use on that damned snare... grr.
The decision came down to whether we should use a bass guitar or a second guitar for lead or something of that sort. We decided all on a bass guitar to follow the bass drum in the song. We definitely scored hard with the bass track as it is the keystone instrument to the entire song in my opinion. It gives off this very muddy deep vibe that sucks the polish off the song and converts it into raw rock. It's definitely against my own grain to go minimalistic and kind of this "TV on the Radio" minimal rock sound but damn... it sounded so perfect and right.
Tambo proclaimed we needed something high pitched... a lead guitar or something of that sort. Graham, a trained violin player, opted for the violin and we shrieked in perfection. The violin track came practically flawlessly, with us actually wanting to take things out and mute around the violin track because of it's overbearing awesomeness (or I guess... more so it's overbearing on the song itself).
The last track, the backing vocal track, was definitely the most interesting and most fun. I don't know if we explored it as much as we could have... but being only limited to one track for ALL backing vocals we didn't really have a choice to record something and decide later whether or not to keep it or record something else... if it is a good take, and you feel it from your throat to your feet, you can't really go back and recreate history. Not to make it sound more epic than it is, but when you step into a studio and you aren't bringing your A game, the recording session doesn't lie... you can always rerecord suckiness but you can't rerecord awesomeness.
Overall, the tune rocked pretty hard. The sync seems like it'll be a little hard since I am not completely familiar with the song as of right now, but for post we're thinking a frequency pan on the vocals for sure and doubling the backing vocals track and throwing that to each side. I'm not too sure what I want to do with the guitar and bass... whether to keep it centered or possibly double the guitar and freq. pan that for a little variation in each ear... I don't know yet. I definitely want to go balls out mad with the 3 tracks of percussion we have. As for the violin, I want to get some crazy wavy panny shit going during the verse but keep it pretty solid to the left and center for the rest of the track with backing vocals a little to the right to give a side line shouting type vibe to it.
Due to two exams staring me down this coming week I can't feel out the rest of this post until I feel out my cultural anthro notes and my biochem textbook... so I'll have to set this down until, at best, Wednesday.
If Graham says I can, I'll post it on this blog for download in a later post.
COMING SOON:
BKB prod notes
Erik Schau prod notes
GO prod notes
Extravorgasm prod notes
p.s. Shane Kalantari, aka Shahin the Machine, has been confirmed to produce BKB's 7th album. We're stoked.
a Mackie 8 going through an Alesis WS, summed into a Tascam CD-RW402. I can't remember pre's, but I think there is one eq pre and one gate/comp... maybe not though. Tambo and I really stick it strong with the fact that we don't filter much out of our tracks because we're more grime and grit and such but that doesn't mean we can't have a little g/c helping us out.
As for mic's, we were using only two... sm58 and some AKG mic (possibly a C 2000... not extremely sure).
Since we haven't had the chance to expand into a larger track'd board (or even an a/d/a converter to either my Cubase PC or Tambo's Mac [I don't know what Tambo would be able to use if we did use his lappy as a DAW but it'd probably be Logic or PT (ew)]) we have been confound to doubling on tracks. This has actually worked out well for almost all our recordings (Giant Octopus, Erik Schau, NWN, BKB, etc) and actually worked out great for Graham's song.
He brought us a guitar and vocals song, so straight out the bat Tambo recorded the guitar (it was his guitar [I want to say it was an Applause guitar... but I could be wrong as usual]) and we did a vocal track. We finally got a chance to double on the vocals and it finally worked out well. The only other time we've double tracked vocals was for NWN - IFHY pt. 1 and it was mixed results. We definitely had amazing results for Graham however. The crackiness and colder first take definitely helped add an edge to the more pronounced second take.
I don't recall the order of the rest of the tracking, but I believe it went percussion > bass > percussion > percussion > violin > backing vocals... I'll describe it in that kind of order.
The first dry run of percussions was mixed. This was actually surprising since the song itself is folky but still very hard and driving rock... you would assume some percussions that could come into play would be a snare, some sort of tambourine (possibly a ride or very light crash), some deep drums like but not limited to a bass drum, floor tom, deep djambe, or even something like a huge Arrowhead water jug or something... you know, folk rock type stuff. Weird enough, a snare (A SIMPLE SNARE AND BRUSHES) didn't work at all. It was too weak and the song definitely wasn't needing weak... it needed beef. We kept the maracas and tambourines but were left finding the right drum to keep the percussions anchored. We all decided on a bass drum... and the first take wasn't amazing. Finally Graham had a great take commanding the bass drum... on the same track, I commanded the maracas and Tambo was insistent on the cow bell. I am very against cow bell... Tambo was definitely in love with it as was his cousin Ally. Graham, saying he wasn't the greatest drummer, started to falter at the end of the track but he decided that it might be cool if there was a 'falling apart' end to the song. We definitely incorporated that into the second and third percussion tracks by including a part where we threw stuff at a pile of percussion stuff we weren't using, including an Orangina bottle and those damn brushes we weren't able to use on that damned snare... grr.
The decision came down to whether we should use a bass guitar or a second guitar for lead or something of that sort. We decided all on a bass guitar to follow the bass drum in the song. We definitely scored hard with the bass track as it is the keystone instrument to the entire song in my opinion. It gives off this very muddy deep vibe that sucks the polish off the song and converts it into raw rock. It's definitely against my own grain to go minimalistic and kind of this "TV on the Radio" minimal rock sound but damn... it sounded so perfect and right.
Tambo proclaimed we needed something high pitched... a lead guitar or something of that sort. Graham, a trained violin player, opted for the violin and we shrieked in perfection. The violin track came practically flawlessly, with us actually wanting to take things out and mute around the violin track because of it's overbearing awesomeness (or I guess... more so it's overbearing on the song itself).
The last track, the backing vocal track, was definitely the most interesting and most fun. I don't know if we explored it as much as we could have... but being only limited to one track for ALL backing vocals we didn't really have a choice to record something and decide later whether or not to keep it or record something else... if it is a good take, and you feel it from your throat to your feet, you can't really go back and recreate history. Not to make it sound more epic than it is, but when you step into a studio and you aren't bringing your A game, the recording session doesn't lie... you can always rerecord suckiness but you can't rerecord awesomeness.
Overall, the tune rocked pretty hard. The sync seems like it'll be a little hard since I am not completely familiar with the song as of right now, but for post we're thinking a frequency pan on the vocals for sure and doubling the backing vocals track and throwing that to each side. I'm not too sure what I want to do with the guitar and bass... whether to keep it centered or possibly double the guitar and freq. pan that for a little variation in each ear... I don't know yet. I definitely want to go balls out mad with the 3 tracks of percussion we have. As for the violin, I want to get some crazy wavy panny shit going during the verse but keep it pretty solid to the left and center for the rest of the track with backing vocals a little to the right to give a side line shouting type vibe to it.
Due to two exams staring me down this coming week I can't feel out the rest of this post until I feel out my cultural anthro notes and my biochem textbook... so I'll have to set this down until, at best, Wednesday.
If Graham says I can, I'll post it on this blog for download in a later post.
COMING SOON:
BKB prod notes
Erik Schau prod notes
GO prod notes
Extravorgasm prod notes
p.s. Shane Kalantari, aka Shahin the Machine, has been confirmed to produce BKB's 7th album. We're stoked.
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