02-27-10
Out Now! On Cassette Tape!
Last night I went to see Danger Bay play at Rancho Relaxo, one of Toronto’s smallest and loudest venues. Since I finished their mixes last fall, they’ve had them mastered by Ryan Mills, a local mastering engineer who has done a whole bunch of stuff for Canadian bands including Arcade Fire and Rural Alberta Advantage. I think he’s done a really nice job, considering the lofi punky sound of the band. Until they manage a vinyl release, they’ve released it on Tape with a digital download code, which you can get at their shows, or from PopSick Records. Check out Ambivalent Weather Controller below.
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02-18-10
Still that spark
Last night I went to see MJ Cyr play at the Opera House. I remixed and semi re-recorded MJ Cyr’s first EP last year, and we almost immediately began recording her next. And since me, Cameron Britton and Dave Murray started sitting in on her live shows and filling out the songs with more instruments than a sound guy would ever want to deal with, it made sense to record them in their new guise. Here’s a clip from ‘Spark’.
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02-16-10
Just put it really low in the mix…
When I said a session is never over, I meant it. As well as digging out the session I did with Kick Up The Fire (a sample of which is still on the Audio page) three years ago, to add a new guitar line, we revisited Neverever Ending Story. This was one of the songs from the most recent session, that I rush mixed before going to Canada, so they could have some music to shop around. They were hesitant to let anyone hear it because the gang vocal section in the middle eight sounded a bit dodgy. They’ve been doing it live for a while, but hearing it recorded, they thought the notes were too low in their range to sound convincing. So, the day before I left we added a gang harmony, up a fifth, and while we were at it, up the octave as well, which required singing falsetto. Hilarity ensued. Hear the final result in the clip below. It has a certain Paul Simon, Graceland feel.
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02-12-10
No DSPs were harmed in the making of…
I just got back from Weymouth, where I was recording Asbestos, a teenage hardcore band. I recorded these guys a couple of years back, when they were a punky four piece, in the same community centre called Steps. The place is an awesome venue for recording, with high. angled ceilings in the main room, and a disused sports hall out back. To take advantage of the acoustics, I stuck this room mic up while tracking the drums. I tried moving it around, placing it closer to reflective surfaces like walls, and office windows, but ended up sticking it back where I’d set it up initially. Phil (pictured) has become a pretty hard hitter, and each snare crack was bouncing around the room like crazy, but with the baffles behind the kit, the close mics didn’t get much of it, leaving me with a channel of room sound that I can fade up and down instead of a reverb bus.
At the end of the session, we set up in the sports hall (the size of a basket ball court with a suitably ridiculous acoustic), to record some clean guitars. Having a room mic on these, panned to the other side of the close mic gives the quiet sections spooky atmosphere. I got very excited about all this natural reverb. It just sounds better than any Digital Signal Processing I’ve heard. In keeping with the old school vibe, I decided not to use any compression plug ins, and to only use EQ plug ins subtractively. So the only digital effect/gain on the clips below is the multi-band compression I used to master them.
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02-08-10
SRSLY?
Numbers
TR8R | MySpace Music Videos
I’m not one to publicly criticize anyone’s production or mastering skills for cheap laughs, but someone posted this video on facebook today and it blew my mind. The publishing copyright is 2009, so this is current music, yet Gary (yes, the engineer put his name on it) failed to apply the most basic and standard tools that today’s digital recording technologies have to offer. I’m not going to say the girl can’t sing, because she can carry a tune, but her tuning leaves a little to be desired, and for a studio that boasts, “All media is laid down to DAW where editing choices are almost endless, and processing made easy” you’d think they’d at least get busy with Melodyne, or maybe the less advanced pitch correction plug-ins that come free with Logic, Cubase and ProTools. If they had, I might have let them off single tracking the guitars (I don’t think the band came in looking for that raw punk edge), or mastering it so badly that the drop comes out quieter than the intro.
I guess I have to be thankful that there are still studios like this out there, keeping me in business. That said, if TR8R ever read this, and promise to change their name, I will in return promise to rerecord this song, for free, and make them sound like Paramore.
02-06-10
Kick up the Fire
After a rousing gang vocal session with these guys, we reckon we’ve got everything down, but I’m off to Canada next week, and currently in Weymouth recording a hardcore band called Asbestos. They wanted to get some tracks online as soon as possible, so I ran off a couple of mixes. I’m not entirely happy with the mastering (when am I ever?) but will no doubt revisit it when I mix the rest of the tunes. Here’s a clip from ‘Cocktails and Gold’.
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02-01-10
Stereo pair?
It says on my gear page that I have a pair of AKG C451s. This isn’t technically true. I actually have one of the discontinued AKG 451EBs with a CK1 capsule, and a brandless body with a CK1S capsule, both of which I bought off different people on eBay. I figured the CK1S was just a newer version of the CK1, but Matthew from Recording Hacks told me that the S capsule has a more pronounced high end. He also suggested doing a white noise and a sine wave test on the mics to get the specs on exactly how different they were.
I’ve been living with their gain differences for years, but now I know the numbers, after setting up the mics in front of one of my monitors, playing white noise and sine wave sweeps at them using the Test Oscillator plug-in in Logic Pro, and then switching the capsules around.
In the above picture, the blue waveforms are the AKG body, and the green waveforms from the brandless body. The darker versions are the regular capsule and the lighter, the CK1S. As well as the hump in the second half of the light blue waveform (turns out Matthew was right about the pronounced high end), I discerned that the S capsule is also on average 3db louder than the regular, and that the brandless body is on average 4db quieter than the official AKG body. So, until I get me a proper matching stereo pair, I’ll just stick the loud capsule on the quiet body and vice versa. Using them as drum overheads, this isn’t really an issue, but might be noticeable when trying to capture a realistic stereo representation of a quiet noise in the middle of a symmetrical room.
01-26-10
Prolonging Plastic
Like I said two blogs ago, it’s never over. Today Culley sent me a keyboard part for the song Death Valley, the song that I initially remixed to get them to come and record with me. He played it on his MicroKorg, and while I can’t knock the MicroKorg, I felt that the part would sound better on a real organ. While in Toronto I had the Hohner Pianet (a poor man’s Rhodes), here in London I have an Elka (a poor man’s Hammond B-3), so I stuck my 451 pair on either side to make a feature of the rotary speaker, and started playing around with the notes he sent me.
In the clip below, I’ve faded out the band at the point when I switch the rotary speaker on to it’s faster setting. You can hear the revolutions increase and it really lifts the excitement for the final chorus. Of course, the final effect will be a lot more subtle when it’s sitting properly in the mix.
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01-21-10
Kick Up The Fire
The one thing I like more than recording good bands is recording good bands twice. I recorded these guys a couple years ago when they were a three piece called Raid on the Arcade (there’s a sample of that session on the audio page) and they have since gotten better and written more angular songs. The band/producer rapport that comes from a good session can only make the next one more efficient and enjoyable, allowing us to laugh at each other’s mistakes and create a relaxed atmosphere that is conducive to good music making.
One of Kenny’s guitar lines was hampered by an odd harmonic from the open B string. So instead of learning to play it differently to mute the string, I just leant my finger at the appropriate moments.
Since we have to get the rest of tracking done before I go back to Toronto in February, I should have something up in the next couple of weeks.
01-18-10
Plastic Patience
Since our session back in October last year, me and Culley, guitarist of Future in Plastics, have been sending notes back and forth and cranking out mixes. We settled on some at the beginning of December and agreed to sit on them over the holiday period, i.e. NOT listen to them. Distance, and the resulting subjectivity, is so important when judging a mix, which is why it’s good practice to send your music elsewhere for mastering, if not mixing. But since we couldn’t afford that luxury, we just gave it a month and came back to them, seeing as they’re in no hurry to release anything. With some final tweaks here and there, we’ve come to a stage when we’re all happy with the songs, sonically and musically, but it’s never over. If they want remixes in ten years time, it’s all here, sitting on a hard disc. Check out Early Bird Special below, and if you like it, there’s another song on the Audio page.
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