 |
|
wMX70 |
|
|
 |
Dorkfest. Recording junk. May include lengthy details of electronic circuitry or the innane. (Just like every other blog) Mostly the whatsit and whosit of whatever audio and recording related things I'm working on but I want you to participate. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
wThursday, October 23, 2003 |
|
|
|
greg and andrew playing pingpong in center field. andrew (intern_8033) is decent. russ, while in none of these photos, does a good job entertaining when we page him to the studio. i kick liams ass consistantly in ping pong.
liam and greg checking different amp and speaker settings. we ended up not using any of liam's cabinets, but an EA 1x15" cabinet.
the toy guitar that plays and has to find its way onto the record somehow.
nick and liam fucking around in the control room.
view from center field into kentucky at the drums. the big pieces of foam were to cut high end bleed from the snare and hi hat from leaking too much into the ambient mics.
shows placement of the rca mono ribbon mic that gets compressed. also note outside josephson bass drum mic that captures low frequencies and inside mic is the normanophone. likewise, the josephson E22s on the toms
this shows the ambient neumann omni mics in the foreground right and back - they're gold colored on the floor. also you can see the lomo 19a18 overheads.
this must have been taken while aligning the tape machine - during checking the azimuth. the oscilloscope shows the waveforms of the outside tracks. when greg first put the tones up, the azimuth was pretty far off and he had to correct it. this also shows the patch bay before anything has been plugged into it. the multicolored rack unit on the right is the massenberg parametric eq that the lomo overheads hit before going to tape.
this shows the micing of the bass cabinet, beyer 380 on left and sm57 on right. note the alignmnet of the 2 mics diapragms to minimize phase issues. also - the 57 got swapped out for an audio technica pro 37 as the keeper mic, this photo was from early in the session.
this is an overview of the center field room, where the guitar amp is - and the piano is for those overdubs. this shows the relatioship of the amp to the ambient mic which is under the small table next to the post which you'll see in another shot. you can see the room is huge and the ambient mic is like 15 ft from the amp.
this is a close up of the guitar ambient mic. by the way, mics are placed on the floor to minimize phase issues. you can see they're placed under mic stnads or tables or something to keep people from walking on them. putting them on the floor makes it so the frequencies can only hit from the top, and elimiates the reflectis from the floor up to the diapragm. that;s sort of a bad, quick explainatin but it'd make more sense if i could draw a picture for you. but this techinique is used both in drum ambient mics and guitar ambients.
better shot of the lomo overheads and positioning of the shure ksm 141 snare mic - and positioning of joesphson tom mics. also shows the EA floor tom used.
this shows the dead room, alcatraz. the close amp is rachel's keyboard amp, liam's bass cabinet, and rachel's keyboard. while tracking basics liam stood in front of rachel looking both into kentucky at me playing and through the window you can see to patti in center field. you can also see the steinway grand piano rachel plays on twisted lips through the window.
this shows the close micing of pattis amp. you can see the LDC near, and an STC 4038 far. the 4038 got swapped for a d112 first, then finally ended up being a beyer 201.
yayyyy for pictures.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 8:15 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
w |
|
|
|
greg and andrew (intern_8033) playing pingpong in center field. andrew is decent. i kick liams ass consistantly.
liam and greg checking different amp and speaker settings. we ended up not using any of liam's cabinets, but an EA 1x15" cabinet.
the toy guitar that plays and has to find its way onto the record somehow.
nick and liam fucking around in the control room.
view from center field into kentucky at the drums. the big pieces of foam were to cut high end bleed from the snare and hi hat from leaking too much into the ambient mics.
shows placement of the rca mono ribbon mic that gets compressed. also note outside josephson bass drum mic that captures low frequencies and inside mic is the normanophone. likewise, the josephson E22s on the toms. you can also see one of the ambient mics nicely here by the rca - it's gold and laying on the floor. his also shows that this room really isn;t all that big. it sounds fucking huge though. the mono mic is only a couple feet back if that, and the room mics are still only maybe 6 ft from the kit. it's very suprising to me how huge it sounds for a relatively small room. also chalk in the 15 ms delay on the room mics....
this shows the ambient neumann omni mics in the foreground right and back - they're gold colored on the floor. also you can see the lomo 19a18 overheads.
this must have been taken while aligning the tape machine - during checking the azimuth. the oscilloscope shows the waveforms of the outside tracks. when greg first put the tones up, the azimuth was pretty far off and he had to correct it. this also shows the patch bay before anything has been plugged into it. the multicolored rack unit on the right is the massenberg parametric eq that the lomo overheads hit before going to tape.
this shows the micing of the bass cabinet, beyer 380 on left and sm57 on right. note the alignmnet of the 2 mics diapragms to minimize phase issues. also - the 57 got swapped out for an audio technica pro 37 as the keeper mic, this photo was from early in the session. i was initially pretty suprised when greg pulled out a 57 - but his reasoning was because of the midrange boost they have - it was an attempt to give some definition and punch to liams flabby, dirty, fucked up sound. it didn;t do enough, so greg switched to the small diapragm condenser - which is a lot brighter and captures the transients better.
this is an overview of the center field room, where the guitar amp is - and the piano is for those overdubs. this shows the relatioship of the amp to the ambient mic which is under the small table next to the post which you'll see in another shot. you can see the room is huge and the ambient mic is like 15 ft from the amp.
this is a close up of the guitar ambient mic.
better shot of the lomo overheads and positioning of the shure ksm 141 snare mic - and positioning of joesphson tom mics. also shows the EA floor tom used. i'm suprised how far off the heads greg puts the josephsons - it results in a real nice, natural sound. as i recal, the last time he recorded me, the josephsons were much closer into the heads, but that was in studio b - where it's much more live.
this shows the dead room, alcatraz. the close amp is rachel's keyboard amp, liam's bass cabinet, and rachel's keyboard. while tracking basics liam stood in front of rachel looking both into kentucky at me playing and through the window you can see to patti in center field. you can also see the steinway grand piano rachel plays on twisted lips through the window.
this shows the close micing of pattis amp. you can see the LDC near, and an STC 4038 far. the 4038 got swapped for a d112 first, then finally ended up being a beyer 201. greg explained the d112 on gtr is an old heavy metal trick because of the pronounced boost near 500hz (i'm guessing on that number, but it's the same frequency that gives the d112 that "clicky" emphasis on bas drums - so it's flattering for an in-your-face metally guitar. as i recall off playback, it wasn't very bright sounding, and was kind of dull. so greg put in the beyer 201 - which is a dynamic mic that sounds a lot like a condenser.
yayyyy for pictures. man, i can't wait to get back and start doing vocals.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 8:15 PM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
w |
|
|
|
no recording yesterday, but liam and i went to see challenger (al and dave from milemarker) and panthers at the fireside, then to the abbey for shonen knife. nothing really stuck out. challenger wasnt as good as milemarker.
i scanned one of the tracksheets cuz i thought it may be interesting to someone.... (besides me)
top of one tracksheet
back of that sheet with song maps and tape locations
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 10:17 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
wWednesday, October 22, 2003 |
|
|
|
oh yeah, wanted to add we tried a traynor bass head on the bass that got switched out, and the new SDC on bass was an audio-technica pro 37. also, greg fessed up about his normanophone mic - it's apparantly like the new tapeop mic, but he was quick to point out he built his before the article came out. it's an electret condenser but apparantly unlike the tapeop model, his takes phantom power and doesnt need a battery. so - it looks like there were no dynamic mics used at all on the drums. come to think of it, the only dynamics used so far are a beyer 201 on pattis gtr, the rca am gtr, the beyere m88 on key, and the beyer on liams bass. hmm. interesting. also, the bass is hitting a dbx 166 compressor before tape. also want to note after the neve pres the bass drum mics are hitting the urei eq.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 9:00 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
w |
|
|
|
ok - i just noticed all the times are fucked on the previous posts. lest anyone get the impression we started that early... no way. it was really like 11am when i was writing them. start times have been noon so far for recording, and we've gone till like 2am. this post covers monday's studio action. i was going to do this yesterday but was exhausted and fell asleep after work and slept 12 hrs straight. day jobs suck after making a record. so......
greg comes over - and shows up wearing the same clothes he was the day before. i ask if he slept in his clothes and he says he did. turns out he was too drunk to go all the way home after drinking all our grenades of high life the night before, and he just went back to the studio and crashed there instead. we went to flo - and it was closed. no red chile for anyone. we then went to munch, which has apparantly been renamed LTs place or something, and has a new southwestern motif going on. not as good as it used to be. anyway, we get food and head to the studio.
greg puts up a new reel of tape (i don't think i mentioned it yet, but everything is to 2" tape, recording at 15ips - it's emtec sm 900, 500nWb/m (+9). no NR except on bass - which isn't going to be decoded on mixdown to give it a bit more punch and dirtiness. their 900 tape has plain silver reel flanges instead of the goofy blue swirly ones that i always get on the 1" versions.
we only have 2 more songs to get basics on. the first one we do pretty well and get in the first couple of takes, and then the second just isn't feeling right. i feel really tired, slow and just not really in the mindset of playing a record. it's like 1 or 2pm. who is in the right mindset for rock at that point? anyway, i go in and play a bunch of fast punky rock songs with liam to try and warm up and get the energy right and that seems to work. eventually we all get back in there and knock the take out. patti breaks a string on the end of the take and then we take a bunch of time as she restings her guitar. there's something stuck in the nut on the guitar that keeps breaking the strings - as she puts a new one on, the string just snaps again. greg files it down and we try again. finally we're ready again.
we listen to all the takes we have on tape so far to make sure that every version is either a keeper - or see if we need to redo it. we listen through, and all of the issues we had either turned out to be happy accidents, or we thought we could fix them with overdubs. so, hooray - we're done tracking basics at like 3pm on day 2.
first order is redoing some bass parts because we don't like the tone we;ve got on tape. liam brings his head in the control room and redoes the parts. he gets it in a couple passes. awesome. at this point we have it in our minds that we have to prioritize the things that need to be done at electrical - and can't be done at greg's house. anything that can be done at gregs will be (basically vocals). things that need the awesome rooms and things like grand piano obviously need to be done at electrical.
next, we get patti in to start doing her lead parts and overdubs. we pull her head in the control room, and greg does a couple small changes. he throws the eventide delay that was on the drum room ambient mics on patti's ambient mic to shift the tone a bit for the OD. not sure if i mentioned it - her mics are going through the sytek pre. she does her "shredding" and is told to think of euroboy from turbonegro. patti has a huge crush on euroboy. she kicks ass and we move on to piano.
greg puts a sony SD tube condenser in on the piano (strangely not on thier mic list, so i don't know the model) as a close mic and an earthworks omni way out in the corner as a room mic. i dunno which model it was. rachel played her stuff and it sounded awesome.
we had the idea to use a vocoder on pattis vocals on a couple songs, so we needed to try that out (since greg doesn't have one at his house). greg warned us that the vocoder is kinda tricky and takes a lot of dicking around to get to work right, and only sounds cool or ends up working about half the time. he goes and gets a vocal mic - the sony c48 - to the hardy pre to the manley leveling amp/compressor to tape, and patti does a take. (aside - rachel's keyboards are also softly hitting this manley before tape) it's easier to get something on tape and send that to the vocoder and mess with it there rather than have patti talk to a half hour while greg twists knobs. greg then runs and gets something to key the vocoder with - this wierd ass keyboard - the wasp. it's a wierd, british made synth that has flat keys on it, like an atari 400. it sounds awesome, but the build quality is very light. any way, we use that to try keying the vocoder, and mess with it for a while, but nothing seems to be working quite like we want it to. then greg throws the signal over to a ring modulator and it sounds pretty awesome. he says he can do that at his house so we decide to move on.
patti brings her head back to the live room and overdubs feedback. it sounds cool and we move on. i overdub some keyboard parts. we get that done. i also had some notes about adding in some high end stuff on some songs, so liam and i overdub some handclaps in a couple sections. we use an old motown trick where liam claps, and i'm hitting a phone book with a drum stick at the same time. when all by itself - it sounds kinda wierd, but when in the mix - it totally sounds like a bunch of people clapping. then i overdub a couple tambourine parts.
i forgot somewhere in there we broke for dinner, and ate at cafe bolero. it was before i started playing again, probably after the piano overdubs. we all had mojitos for the first time, it was pretty cool.
we're up to about 11pm or so and the girls are both curled up on the couch sleeping while greg, liam and i are doing these overdubs. i had been talking earlier abuot wanting a real tight, dead sound on the drums for a couple of the songs - and when we were initially tracking, greg pulled down the overheads and room mics, and they sounded really cool - so i didn't sweat it and figured at the worst, we'd just use that as the sound i was looking for and go from there. well, we got everything done that we wanted to, so it was all gravy from here. we pulled all the mics off my drums in kentucky, and moved them into alcatraz (which is really dead sounding, where the bass and keyboard amps were). greg put the rca ribbon outside the kick, the ksm 141 on snare, and one of the E22 josephsons as an overhead. these all went to the neve mixer and were summed to one track. i replayed the two songs along with the old tracks. i figured since we had them, i started to play differing parts - so the dry track wasnt always the same as the live track. the result when both are playing sounds pretty cool. i'm pretty stoked since this was totally a wish list thing, and i didn;t think we;d get along to it. greg's pretty suprised how much we've gotten done in 2 days - and tries to convince us all to quit our jobs and come back tommorow. as much as we all want to.... not quite yet.
we end up playing back the tracks we did and greg plays around with the 2 different drum tracks. he has the live room drums on a mute group, and the dry ones are mono on one track - so he just fucks around with muting verses and sections, and panning things wierd and all. at this point, we're all just totally screwing around and having fun. greg turns off the lights in the control room while we're listening so all you see is a bunch of red and yellow LEDs glowing from everything. then he turns on the neve flying faders automation computer and tries to show us "a christmas show". he can't figure it out so he calls russ (at like 1 or 2 am) to try and figure it out. russ doesnt answer so he leaves a harrassing, funny message. he settles with showing us the fader calibration thing which is cool because the faders start jumping aroiund really fast up and down in groups, and then snap back to exactly where they last were. somewhere in here liam adds some overdubs with the wasp that sound like a phone.
everything's kind of degenerated into fucking around by now - we'd been drinking for a few hrs and were pretty pleased with our progress so far. we decide we want to go out to celebrate our progress, but it's already 2am. hungry brain is closed. we can only think of stupid wicker park 4am bars to go to - so we decide to say fuck it and just go to my/rachel/liam's house and hang there and have drinks on the floor.
we load up all our stuff and go to my house (which is only like 8 blocks from the studio) - unload and shoot the shit. we move it to liams apartment and watch the darkness video for "i believe in a thing called love" and laugh our asses off. then we watch a bunch of turbonegro videos. eventually we get tired and decide to go to bed. greg gives patti a ride home since her apartment is on the way to his house. we pass out at like 3:30 or something. my alarm goes off at 8:30 for work and it sucks suck sucks sucks sucks. yesterday at work sucked. i was completely exhaused and wanted nothing to do with a job after an awesome fun weekend of shows and recording.
we're reconvening saturday to start on vocals at studio greg studios II. all in all, the most fun making a record i've had. maybe liam or rachel will post about the monkey mask, or greg's dummy. i've gotta do some work now.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 8:54 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
wMonday, October 20, 2003 |
|
|
|
still a bit tired here, waiting for the coffee to brew. had a big, long and productive day yesterday. we got there at about noon, and greg had just gotten there a second before us. i set up my drums and got them to sound good. greg suggested switching out my floor tom for one of the studios - since mone as sounding kinda marshmallowy. we went to the basement where all the extra stuff is and found a cool orange 60s ludwig floor tom with a coated ambassador on it. it sounded cool, so we used it. wait, gonna get a cup of coffee - it's done brewing.
ok, that tastes good. this is what i remember the setup to be so far...
kick in - custom normanophone (he wouldnt say what it was similar to, but i'm guessing a PL-20 or something - it's kinda splatty sounding but present...)
kick out - josephson 609
snare - shure ksm132 - i have decided this to be my next mic purchase, it sounds awesome on snare
both k&s were through neve pres
rack top - jospehson EA model prototype
rack bottom - 609
floor top - josephson EA prototype
fl bot - 609
i dont remember what pres these are in
OH - lomo 19a18 - into a massenberg eq. greg said the output of these mics is so high they dont really need a dedicated preamp and the eq serves as the pre it needs to get to tape
mono kit - rca bk5 ribbon (the one that looks like a phaser) compressed heavily to tape with an LA2A
ambient - neumann 582 - hardy pres
drums are in the kentucky room which sounds way bigger and better than i thought it would - the physical room isn't so bit, but damn it sounds great. very deceptive - i thought all those big EA drum sounds came from being in the center field room, but kentucky sounds awesome. guitar is in center field, bass and key in alcatraz.
bass - used an EA 1x15 cabinet, beyer 380 and something else, a SD condenser. initially greg started with an sm57 to get some punch, but it got switched out. we may redo a bunch of bass parts today since the latest incarnation sounds way better. we also took a direct signal that sounded like ass so it never got used.
key - beyer m88
gtr close L - vtr cr3
gtr close R - started with stc 4038, went to akg d112, settled on beyer 201
gtr am - rca bk1
oh yeah, my drum machine and keyboard are direct. we'll probably reamp them in mixdown.
we took until 6pm getting tones and then went to thai linda in roscoe village, we brought along andrew who's pretty cool - intern_8033 on their board. we were all kinda feeling a little tired. after filling up we headed back and started working. we were actually really fast and effective. we worked until 1am and got basic keepers on 7 songs. i don't think we did more than 4 takes on anything, most were keepers on take 2 or 3. the 24 track is pretty awesome, it can instantly play in reverse which is cool. anyway, greg was dicking around and played the tape in reverse in one section of the song, and it's totally going to work. we're going to mix it, then he;ll splice the 1/4" and lay it in. also, as an aside when we calibrated the machine at the beginning of the day, it is SO easy. for repro alignment, you just play the tape and the machine automatically increases the gain on each channels amp card until it gets to zero, then memorizes the value and stores it. it's like watching a little race as the VU meters head to 0. and bias setting is also stupid easy. you just specify the overbias and it goes.
ok the troops are restless. it's time to go eat red chile at flo. greg's at the studio, we're calling him and going now. finish basics on a couple few more, do a shitload of overdubs and rock.
this record has been the most fun of any i've made so far. and it sounds the best too - studio a is sick. gotta put on socks and go. and brush my teeth.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 8:37 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
wSunday, October 19, 2003 |
|
|
|
Just sitting down waiting for a pot of coffee to brew before we go into the studio. Our show last night with I am spoonbender was pretty cool. Call me lightning was awesome. There was one technical fuck-up that happened on my part. To the left of my hi-hat pedal, I have 2 footswitches. One is a sustain/hold pedal that goes to the Oxygen keyboard, and the other is a start/stop pedal that controls the drum machine. Well, at the appropriate time in one of the songs I hit both pedals accidentally - instead of just the sustain one - so a totally off drum machine pattern came in in the middle of the song. Fortunately we recovered nicely and we were pretty well received.
Greg met us at the show after we had played - he was finishing up another session at his house earlier that day. We started shooting the shit and talking about the record and so on. The we loaded up at headed to the studio after the show last night, and unloaded our gear. I've been in studio A a handful of times before, so I knew what it was like - but it was the first time for Liam, Rachel and Patti - everyone was real excited to be there. Rachel said, "You know it's really gonna suck after playing rockstar all week to go back to work."
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 8:42 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
