Diary of an album recording - mammoth post

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CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
edited December 2015 in Studio & Recording
There comes a time in a man's life when he has to cast off the shackles of his band ( @Drew_fx may relate to this) and do something totally introverted. I came to that realisation over the summer when I wrote an album of songs inspired by the refugee crisis and came to the conclusion that my band definitely wouldn't be interested in the project, but I really wanted to record it properly. I didn't really mean to write all those songs, but the thing about making music is that sometimes it just happens quickly and without too much of a struggle!

Preproduction

Doing a solo record is in some ways quicker than working with a band but in other ways much slower and more cumbersome, and nowhere is that more apparent than pre-production. Sure, if you've got a band you've got to teach them the songs and do a bit of firefighting, making sure everyone's playing parts that compliment each other, but once you're there it's really easy to spend a practice or two kicking ideas round, trying different arrangements, tempos, dynamics etc. If everyone's on the same page, you can quickly go from *song idea* to *band arrangement*, having fun and being inspired in the process.

When you're working on your own, the songwriting bit is just as fast but fleshing out the arrangment can take a while - you have to play all the parts one after the other to make a production demo, then listen and if you want to try something different - a different tempo, a new section - you have to record it all again where with a band you'd just say "Hey can we try xyz here?" and know whether it's better or worse within a few minutes. You miss out on those moments of spontaneity and it becomes a bit more cerebral and methodical, weighing up different ideas in your head rather than trying them all out.

So I fleshed out the demos over a couple of months, attempting to overcome my discomfort at my singing voice with some help from members of this forum here, and kinda used the demos to learn what does or doesn't work for each song. Then based on that, there's a bit of a leap of faith involved in making structure changes for the REAL recordings and getting stuck in, because you might have a good idea what you're aiming for but you never actually hear the full arrangement as a performance until you're mixing the track. With a band around you, you've heard the intended arrangement before you start recording more often than not.

So, preproduction complete I spent the last week in my band's rehearsal room recording drums for 20 songs. I record in Cakewalk's Sonar X3, and based on the demos I set up a tempo map in each song for the click track - sometimes it's the same tempo all the way through, more often than not there are slight bumps of 1 or 2 bpm for choruses to add some energy, or you let it get a bit faster towards the end for excitement or program in a slowdown in the last bar etc.
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    Drum Recording

    Setting up the drum recording session, I was aware I'd be doing everthing - playing, chosing sounds, miking stuff up, evaluating takes and doing the inevitable punch ins etc. It's not ideal wearing the songwriter, musician, recorder and producer hats but to try to make things easier I had the screen, keyboard and mouse to my right next to the floor tom - I work best recording until I've fucked something up, then punching in just before that point; never really seen sense in recording the stuff I can play easily over and over again just to keep trying for the hard bits!

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    This seemed to work pretty well, I could keep momentum going once I was warmed up and in the zone. Drums are a really physical instrument and you've got to work fast! (just don't rush the beat too much!)

    The room's hardly the world's finest acoustic space but it's a reasonable size, has quite a high ceiling (maybe 4 meters?) and we've made rockwool wall absorbers and corner traps to control the low end. It's not got much reverb but it does have some early reflections/ambience and I wanted to capture it. Before the panels were in, I always used the recorderman overhead setup to get the mics as close to the kit as possible and avoid capturing much room sound. This time, I went for a spaced pair of AT4050s directly over the kit facing straight down - wide enough to get some overhyped stereo image and pick up a more roomy tone, and high enough - maybe 1.9 meters off the floor - to not be too cymbal- heavy and to make sure the direct sound didn't totally swamp the room tone. It took quite a bit of fine tuning to get the kick and snare roughly central, in the end the left Ohead was maybe 10cm higher than the right one.

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    I had fun with the kick miking. Instead of the usual mic inside the hole in the front head, I had the main kick mic - an RE20 - maybe 60cm out in front of the kit; I moved it back and forward a bit to find a position where the phase relationship between the kick and overheads was complimentary and 60cm was about right with the phase inverted. Then a den of sofa cushions and a thick duvet went up to keep the cymbal spill out; I was amazed how well it worked. Subjectively I'd say it cut out 75% of the cymbals and meant I could push up the treble without runing into a wall of nasty off axis cymbal bleed.

    To get a bit of beater definition I also threw an Audix I5 into the drum, sitting on top of a pillow. It's vital in some songs, for others I probably won't bother with it in the mix.

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    The other mics were fairy bog standard - SM57s on the toms and snare top, SM7 under the snare just to get a little rasp which again, I may or may not actually need... I'll probably be thankful for that track in some of the tracks.

    Then finally, a lone Oktava MK012 way up high and pointing at the ceiling - basically just to get a bit more room ambience, I'll probably compress it loads and sneak it up in the mix to give the drums a bit of life.

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    How did it sound? Well once the kit was re-skinned and tuned up, I was pretty chuffed with it! it was a long week of recording and being slightly out of practice on occasion it took a while to nail more difficult sections. I'll put together some clips maybe tomorrow eve to put up.


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  • bigjonbigjon Frets: 680
    Fascinating, thanks for posting.
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  • Haven't got time to read it all at the mo so have bookmarked it for later.  Thanks for taking the time and effort to post it.  Reading others approaches is always interesting and is usually one of the only bits I regularly read in SOS.
    My muse is not a horse and art is not a race.
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  • Drew_TNBDDrew_TNBD Frets: 22445
    Oh dude... you reaaaally don't want the rockwool exposed like that, possibly breathing it in and getting it all in your clothes and what not.
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    Drew_fx said:
    Oh dude... you reaaaally don't want the rockwool exposed like that, possibly breathing it in and getting it all in your clothes and what not.
    We've been meaning to get them covered like the wall panels you can see, but you're quite right, it is something we need to get on with!
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  • Interesting bass drum mic'ing. Is it possibly to hear a short sample?
    ဈǝᴉʇsɐoʇǝsǝǝɥɔဪቌ
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    Yeah! I was hoping to get to the studio tonight to do some clips, but got home from work and felt like dogshit.  So it'll be tomorrow now!
    8-X
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  • p90foolp90fool Frets: 31368
    Fascinating, keep it coming!

    Re pre-production, unless it's a very rootsy-sounding style I've recently taken to roughing out entire songs in MIDI at the initial stage so I can do anything I like regarding tempo, choice of instruments, song structure and even key within a couple of mouse clicks.
    I don't start recording real instruments until I've sat back, listened with my eyes closed and decided that the whole thing works and flows the way it should.

    Judging from your drum recording method though it looks like you're far better than me at making decisions!
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  • Drew_TNBDDrew_TNBD Frets: 22445
    p90fool said:
    Fascinating, keep it coming!

    Re pre-production, unless it's a very rootsy-sounding style I've recently taken to roughing out entire songs in MIDI at the initial stage so I can do anything I like regarding tempo, choice of instruments, song structure and even key within a couple of mouse clicks.
    I don't start recording real instruments until I've sat back, listened with my eyes closed and decided that the whole thing works and flows the way it should.

    Judging from your drum recording method though it looks like you're far better than me at making decisions!
    I do the same thing, but even with audio. Timestretch is a life saver when it comes to preproduction!
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  • p90foolp90fool Frets: 31368
    I really need to start playing with that, I'm hopelessly out of date!
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    edited December 2015
    I was mixing another track last night, lost track of time and almost got locked in the studio complex. :-O Managed to bounce down a few seconds of audio though!

    This is just the outside kick mic on its own; the thing I quite like about it is that because it's out in front of the reso head, there's a bit of a midrange knock as well as the fundamental down at ~60hz;



    And here's the same section with the rest of the mics for a bit of context... in my rush to get out I didn't have time to bypass some processing I'd thrown on, the unprocessed sound has a bit more low mid ring and a little less treble.

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  • Drew_TNBDDrew_TNBD Frets: 22445
    Snare sounds lovely. Nicely tuned!
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    Cheers Drew, when I record my band's drummer I'm a bit reluctant to mess around with his kit's tuning but this time I went crazy with the lugs, trying to get the snare ring where I wanted it for each song and trying to avoid breaking out the moon gel. The top head's pretty sweet for hard hitting - Aquarian High Energy.
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  • CabicularCabicular Frets: 2214
    That's a well recorded kit Interested to see how you go. Thanks for posting
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    edited December 2015
    Spent many hours in the studio this weekend, to the point that I forgot to eat lunch and dinner yesterday - which did satisfactorily explain why I felt awful by 9pm when I decided to call it quits! There are some songs where I want to do a bit of editing to tighten up the drums in places, but there are other tracks I'm happy with so this weekend was mostly about recording guitar and bass.

    I'm quite a fan of setting up mics for each amp/ cab then leaving them in place once I've got a sound that works. To anyone who's not stuck a mic in front of a guitar speaker, it can be quite a shock to discover just how much the mic position affects the sound your record - even a couple of cm can be the difference between too bright and too dull as guitar speaker cones are a law unto themselves!

    So rather than enjoy the thrill of nudging mics about every time I want to record, I set them up on Thursday night so I could get on with playing, and I won't move them until I have to.

    Bass Recording

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    I used to struggle with bass tones - with guitar I've got a reasonably clear mental map of desirable tones that experience and my influences have lead me to and can reasonably assign sounds to parts as I'm writing the songs - chimy clean, scooped, mid pushed, fuzzy, washed out echoes etc... with bass I often find it harder to the point where I used to plug the bass in and my mental checklist would basically be "is it bassy? Yes/No". Useless.

    These days I kinda think that bass is a midrange instrument, just like the guitar, it just happens to play lower notes. So it's the midrange I listen to in deciding whether or not I like the tone, and it's the midrange that determines how the bass will sit in the mix - either the relatively clean, vocal sound of a Motown bass, or the low-mid growl of John Entwhistle or the brighter, cutting grind of Justin Chancellor. The low end is obviously really important, but I think it's quite easy to mangle with eq/ compression etc as long as there's no horrendous standing waves in the room or a shitty instrument making the lowend uneven.

    I used to without fail take a D.I. and mic up a cab, but I've kinda come to the conclusion that I only need the DI if the mic is broken or there's too much spill in the bass mic from the drums in certain parts of the song (in my band, we usually record the two together). Otherwise, I'll always just use the mic track.

    Partially, it's about phase issues. The DI recording will always be slightly ahead of the mic, because it takes time for the sound to get from the speaker to the mic whereas the DI has a straight path into the recorder at basically the speed of light. Because of this, generally one of the tracks is nudged slightly afterwards. The rub is, the amp and speaker cab will change the phase of different frequencies by different amounts so you'll never get them totally sync'd up. Of course, it's a tried and true technique and if the benefits outweigh the cons in terms of the extra control or the chance to reamp later if the bassist has terrible gear obviously it's worth it.

    For me though, I usually pull up the DI fader and go "ok... not bad...", then pull up the mic-on-speaker fader and immediately prefer it. And since I've got no one to answer to other than myself this time, I've just gone with the mic and sacked off the DI altogether.

    It's my RE20, a solid dynamic mic for low end and high volume (hence its use on kick too), about 30cm in front of an Ampeg 1x15 cab - far away enough to mitigate the proximity effect which is already pretty benign on this mic. It's sitting on a 4x10 but I'm not using that because I quite like what the 1x15 does to the pick attack. It just makes it sound bigger. The cab's being driven by the power section of a solid state SVT450. I don't actually think the preamp sounds all that awesome, it's not a patch on its valve cousin, so I'm bypassing it totally and using a Sansamp classic for tone shaping and gain.
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    edited December 2015
    Now, about the basses themselves...

    I have two basses to chose from. One is a really awesome Sandberg made out of coco bolo, the hardest substance in the universe... so I'm told. Active electronics, zero fret, low action, 5 strings, it sounds brilliant and gives a really solid low end and great string definition. The other is a fucked up Tanglewood 4 string my bassist picked up for about £50 when we were still in school. It's got four crackly pots, high action, 3 year old strings and the nut is broken so it barely holds the low E in place. However, it sounds amazing and has so much of that aforementioned midrange growl. Plus with the high action you can really lay into that thing - with some basses they kinda bottom out and at that point there's no point plucking harder, with this one the harder you hit the strings, the harder you hit the amp and I've not yet found the limit to that.

    Anyway, I'll put some clips up to demonstrate the difference between the two instruments later.
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  • Interesting stuff.

    I'm finding with bass the setup and playing style is massively important.  Some amount of fret 'clank' (where the string slaps the fret) can help with some sounds, but if set up for a light touch a heavy pick attack can 'choke' it.  It is a balancing act really, as playing lightly requires a lot of consistency which if isn't there tends to mean the amount of low end varies a lot.  It took me a lot of trial and error to get the balance right between neck relief and bridge height to get the actual instrument to sound/respond right when digging in, if that makes sense.
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  • Even if your not using it in the mix it sometimes the DI can be useful for editing, maybe less so with a bass but it's great for distorty guitars.
    ဈǝᴉʇsɐoʇǝsǝǝɥɔဪቌ
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  • CirrusCirrus Frets: 8481
    Even if your not using it in the mix it sometimes the DI can be useful for editing, maybe less so with a bass but it's great for distorty guitars.
    Like, for finding pick attack in distorted parts, that kinda thing?
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  • Well you can see the transients better, because distorted guitar can look like a solid block at times.  Personally I hate editing so I just play it until I retrain myself into accepting it is good enough haha
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