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.