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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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wSaturday, November 15, 2003 |
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new black - mastering wed 11/12 @ mastermind
greg, liam and i went up to milwaukee to master the record. we showed up around 5 and settled in. it sounded awesome in there. really awesome. for the most part trevor just added a touch of high end for clarity and sparkle with the manley eq. we went through the songs and let trevor do his thing. being able to see how much trevor improved my recordings of the demo vs. how good greg's recordings sounded straight off the tape was really encouraging - it reinforced how good greg is, and i think we made a real wise choice forking over the extra cash to go into studio a. trevor said it's real easy to do a good job mstering when someone brings in a shit recording, but much harder when the original source is real good. trevor did a great job, and didn't leave a big footprint on it which is perfect. way to go trevor.
eventually we got hungry and ate at a rediculous place (rediculous in the best way i'm totally going back) everything was fried. i had a butter burger, fries, onion rings and bbq sauce for dipping. it was amazing. we headed back to mastermind to continue working....
we started tossing around the idea of a comedy master which would be totally fucked up, and we would give it to the girls to hear and pretend we got really drunk and screwed the entire thing up. we ended up putting a huge hi pass and low pass filter on there, and this rediculous flange on the entire record. it sounded so retarded it was great. rachel totally shit bricks when she heard it. she looked like she was about to cry.
the only other quasi wierd things we had trevor do was load in the "overdubs" we did at the last minute at greg's house, and lay those in on top of the existing tracks. we overlayed a guitar part and a vocal part. after that - it was simply a matter of transitions and deciding on the timing of things. we went through the record and finished it up.
afterwards we went to celebrate at some hole in the wall bar and befriended the bartender (rather - he insisted on talking to us). he ended up being a real nice guy - ferris was his name - but the night ended very strangely as he realized it was after 2 and he had to kick us out immediately, after 2 thuggish fellas came in demanding an envelope of money. it looked like ferris was about to get his ass kicked so we split and went home.
trevor is going to fedex the master to thick and it's off to duplication. all the artwork is done too. awesome. i spent the last couple of days listening to it on as many sound systems as i could, and it sounds great. everyone involved really did a bang up job.
studio update
liam and i picked up my console from soren and reinstalled it. the metering is all fixed now. (thankfully) the problem was a broken connection in the wierd board connector thingy. i dunno how to explain it another way. he also replaced a bunch of resistors and assorted other crap. whatever. it's back in use now, that's the most important thing.
i did a quick dry run using almost all my external pres and found there are some serious grounding issues within my rack and patchbay. craptacular. however, i did fix the mystery channel 9 problem that has plagued me from day 1. it had always been intermittent - and i'd assumed a bad solder connection - yet every time i pulled it apart, the connections look great. i noticed however, a shitload of oxidization on the xlr pins. i cleaned the hell out of it with alcohol and voilla. problem solved.
the tape machine needs to be calibrated against the console again. if i send a signal to tape at 0dVu it returns to the console pushing +3. also there are slight discrepancies between levels on the record and sel/rep heads.
got some work to do before next weekend.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 7:49 PM
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wTuesday, November 11, 2003 |
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New Black Day 6: We Changed Our Minds - Nov 10
after all of the hullabaloo of mixing and after a couple days of space, we wanted to remix the first song. there wasn't anything wrong with the original mix per se - it was a very well mixed, hi-fidelity sound. but, it didn't quite have the oomph we wanted to start the record off with, and especially as the rest of mixing progressed, it got a little more loose and emphasized the feeling more. the original mix was a little too clean, and we wanted to muck it up a bit.
so, just when greg thought he was done with us, we suckered him back in and went back another night to REALLY finish it, for real this time. the main changes from the first mix is more of the mono kit and room sound in the drum mics, the bass guitar has some of the talkback room mic in it and it is more gritty sounding, and pattis vocals were mixed a bit lower, and liams a bit louder. the result: us really happy with the song now. as the opener, it sets the tone a little better.
patti then recalled that we forgot to fuck up her voice in the beginning of twisted lips as originally intended. we were at kind of an impasse because it would have been a huge undertaking to just change those few lines, since we'd have to rebuild the mix from scratch (add that to the fact that the mix we had was great - and that we were on a very tight timeframe (all ready over budget/behind schedule with mastering coming up tommorow). the quick fix we came up with was to put it off until mastering. what we did was made an acapella vocal track with the new vocal effect on it that we'll lay on top of the original mix during mastering. what initially looked like a 3hr process just got cut to 30 min.
then i thoght one of the songs was lacking something in one section, and wanted to put some high frequency/fast rhythm in there, so greg found a busted old fender strat with 3 strings on it. we plugged it into rachel's rickenbacher practice amp, set up 2 mics and went to town. initially i just made lots of noise with a bad cable connection. it sounded ok, but not quite right. then patti had a whirl at it and it wasn't it either. i went back in and just played some harmonics. greg put some delay and reverb in there and used the 2 track as a multitrack. putting the reference comp on the left channel so we know where we are in the song to match up in mastering, and the overdub on the right channel.
we also donated a jar-jar binks mask to studio greg studios - it is creepy. moreover, this marked the 6th consecutive studio day where rachel and patti both fell asleep together at around 11 pm. like clockwork those 2 have fallen asleep at that time every single day we've been recording.
so no really, this time. decision radical. tommorow it is up to milwuakee to master this shit.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 12:55 PM
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