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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. |
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wThursday, November 06, 2003 |
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New Black Day 5: Mixing More - Nov. 3
i really shoulda written this earlier before i forgot everything, but i'll try and recall. i woke up that day feeling like shit. greg was coming down with a cold on saturday during mixing, and he apparantly passed it to me. i went home from work sick and slept all afternoon. greg called around 6 and said he was just recovering also, and he asked if since we both felt like shit, maybe we should do it later. but fuck it. we have deadlines to meet, so we went in and did it up.
we got to el normo castle and headed downstairs to listen to the last song we had done, with it's crazy tape editing. it sounded a lot better than we remembered it - which was cool. greg noticed a small fluctuation in the bass drum at the beginning of the song (what, me screw up?! never!) and had the idea of copying another section and splicing it in. he got out the razor and went to town. the edit after 2 bars was in time, but it was obviously an edit and sounded funny. greg went back to it and narrowed it down to 1 measure and copied it on tape 4 times, and spliced the same measure repeated. it sounds pretty cool. it's an obvious tape edit and sounds mechanical, which goes with the song. then after the 4th the song starts and it's like the starter finally catches. good job to greg. i never would have thought twice about the part, the timing fluctuation was real minor, but it provided for a real interesting solution to the problem, and made something new that wasnt there before. good idea greg.
2 more songs to mix. the next song starts off kinda quiet, and then gets loud at the end. greg was having to ride the faders quit a bit. to make it easier he mixed the first section up to where it got loud, then stopped the 2 track, and then mixed the loud section separately - then spliced the 2 sections together.
the last song had more stuff going on in it. the opening likewise is kind of quiet so greg mixed that in one pass. then he did the middle. the end ends with a bass/drums thing which is kind of neat. the main song has the kentucky room drums, without the mono mic in the mix. they're panned normally. at the end section greg had a group controlling the live room drums and the bass mic. he then had the mono kit panned left and the talkback mic panned right so you hear the spill of the drums from the other rooms and just the ambient string noise. the end repeats itself and we got wacky with the 2" tape. greg cut it off in the middle of the playing so it just kind of flutters off the machine at the end. then he also crumpled up the tape so there are wierd dropouts in places. it still wasnt fucked up enough for us so he then took a random chunk of 2" and cut it out, and flipped it over so a random track would pop in backwards. it turned out to be right on a snare hit so out of nowhere this snare hit pops out. then he scrubbed the reel some more and found a couple of fills, marked them with the china marker. then he cut them out. they were pretty much the same size, so he swapped the locations of the tape also putting the fills both in reverse and in non sequential order. the whole thing sounds pretty neat. he did a take like that and spliced the 3 sections together on the 2 track.
we then had some discussions abuot the splices and if everything went ok and if vocal levels were ok. i figured while we were there and had the mix up, we may as well put an alternalte version on tape for posterities sake. greg did the middle section fine and then at the end was totally fucking around and absolutely pegged the machine. the meters were completely buried in the red and not even moving. greg was about to erase it, but then said, do you wanna hear what that sounds like, just to see what it sounds like when you slam tape that hard? we listened to it, and i think greg thought it was kind of a joke, but we all thought it sounded awesome. the drums completely bury the bass but it's so blown out and ugly it's awesome. the current mix has the first version in it, but we may splice that end in during mastering.
then we all sat back, grabbed a beer and listened to the first reel all the way through for the first time to hear "our record". it was pretty satisfying. we fucked around and hung out and patted each other on the back and eventually headed home at 2am.
outstanding work greg norman.
next up is mastering with trevor sadler at mastermind next week.
also during this we were going back and forth on artwork with jef lear at polishoperative. he designs look way better than any of us could have imagined.
we had a day of practice yesterday to get the cobwebs out again for our show this weekend at the fireside. fun stuff.
unrelated studio stuff
between these mixing sessions i brought my console to soren to have him check it out and fix the meterbridge problem. no word yet as to the status of it. problem is 24v supply isn't being seen at the meterbridge, yet it is coming in off the power supply and is hitting the LEDs - but i was unable to track down where exactly the signal breaks down. unfortunately, i gave in and called the professional.
upcoming sessions: may or may not, new black christmas/hanukah record, chris engler, yowie
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 2:17 PM
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wSunday, November 02, 2003 |
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New Black Day 4: Mixing @ Studio Greg Studios II
the day started off to a strange, sort of slow start. some miscreant kids had egged my car the previous night on halloween. somehow, i've turned into the man. it's one of those things that you can't really get mad about, because you know you did the same shit when you were a kid, and you know that the kid who egged my car is gonna get his car egged in like 15 years and be like, "stupid kids". this goes in hand with as i woke up about a month ago to see the side of my car had been splattered with tostitos salsa - with a handful of empty beer bottles laying about on the ground. we live on the end of a dead end street - and it's a popular place for the kids to smoke weed in thier cars, or have little mini partys. again.... kids. i tell ya.
so anyway, the day starts out and we have to get the egg off my car, so we go to the carwash and do that. it was pretty fun, but took a long time. we then picked up patti and got breakfast at flying saucer. liam and i had breakfast burritos. patti, pancakes - rachel waffles. all in all - great breakfast.
we hit the highway and headed down to the 47th street exit and took a tour through back of the yards, and cut over to normo's. patti and rachel sat upstairs while greg and i dicked with the tape machines. the 24 track was showing some wierd below normal responses on the repro side on one of the channels. greg cranked the gain up and it still was wierd. then he pulled off the tape, and re-swabbed the heads - and it was a speck of dirt or old tape particles that was on the head making it act funny. after he was done he did a tone sweep - and i was really impressed with how flat the frequency response was - the tone generator goes up to like 50k or something - and it was pretty flat up to about 20k - but that's above the threshold of hearing ya know.
we start mixing. i started to take religious notes in gregs book about all the compression/eq/delay settings but then it got tedious and i gave up. generally, it was pretty normo - compression used sparingly and lightly - i don't think anything more than 4:1 was used. some delay here and there, some de-essing on a couple tracks.
robotor was a bitch to mix. it took a long time because of the 3 drum tracks, and patti's robot voice. eventually we got it and it kicks ass, but there was a lot to mangage compared to some of the other songs. greg showed me how to do the robot voice (ring modulation) - he sent the track to the dynamite compressor - and sent the tone generator from the console to the VCA (voltage controlled amplifier) input of the dynamite. as you adjust the frequency of the tone you send - the pitch changes, but so does the "on/off" frequncy of the wierdness. pretty cool stuff.
beatrice was also a little wierd - we panned the dry room drums hard right, and the mono live room drums hard left. it sounded real cool - but it felt like there was a hole in the middle, so greg threw the kick and snare from the live room in the center to anchor it, which solved the problem.
for last wave we put some plate reverb on patti's vocals since we were going for a 60's sound. there's some really cool spatiality and stereo imaging going on in this one. the soundstage is very deep and wide. a real pleasure to listen to.
we got to booze olympics, it was getting late and greg was feeling sick - but we pushed on and mixed it. after getting everything set, liam wanted his vocals a little more dirty/lo-fi - so i suggested we send the vocals through the headphone system through a shitty pair of headphones, turn it way the fuck up so it distorts, then mic that and bring it back in the mix. everyone like it. greg used that as the close signal and kept the original room mic in there for depth. he did a little EQ on the headphone/distortion thing as well to set it in better. patti loved it and thought it sounded like video killed the radio star.
then we dicked with all kinds of fancy editing. we came up with an idea to run a section of the song in reverse. it was great in theory, but after trying about 5 or 6 different edits (with greg and the razorblade marking and slicing sections at a time - a pretty time consuming task) - only one option seemed to be doing it for us. we left it up on the machine and decided we'd come back to it monday. it was late and we were tired and crabby. it was raining hard and we headed home at 2am.
monday we;ll go back in and listen to what we've done, and then mix the last 2 songs.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 10:19 AM
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