My band's first full-length - Indie Rock / Powerpop

[witchfeet]

Hey everyone. Just wanted to share my band WitchFeet's first full-length record "Art Garbage". I play guitar in the band. We're based out of Chicago.

My bandmate and I did all of the tracking and mixing on this. We had it mastered professionally. It came out pretty good considering we have very little experience with recording and mixing. I learned a ton though. This was the second big project I've recorded and mixed on my own.

You can have a listen here:
http://witchfeet.bandcamp.com/album/art-garbage

[T-rex]

Sounds great. Just purchased it!

[witchfeet]

Wow T-rex, thanks so much! Way cool.

[T-rex]

So I finally got a listen to the whole thing. Sounds great man. Incidentally, my wife is digging it too.

So give us the geeky details. Did you record this yourselves? Mix?

[witchfeet]

Cool, really glad you're enjoying the record. It took forever to record!

So here's the geeky details:

My bandmate and I did all the tracking and mixing.

Drums were tracked to tape on an Otari MX5050-8. Pres were generally from a Soundcraft Spirit Studio 24 track mixer. I did use a Focusrite ISA One on the vocals and some guitars. The drum tracks were dumped to digital with an Echo Audiofire 8. All the guitars, bass, and vocals were recorded digital with the Echo.

I used Logic as my DAW. During mixing I ended up using a sample on the snare on most of the songs, pulled up next to the real snare track. I didn't get the snare sound I was wanting during tracking, so I had to do that, I'd have preferred not to, but it was making the drum sound really weak. I mixed it all in the box with stock plug-ins aside from using the free Bitter Sweet transient designer by Flux. I used that on drums to add some punch.

All songs were mastered by Mike Hagler in Chicago. I ended up remixing track 1 called "Forty Minute Hour" and having that remastered by Steve Corrao at Sage Audio in Nashville. The track was bugging the crap out of me. If we had more money for mastering, I'd have remixed the entire record to sound more like the first track and had it mastered again. Some time away from the mixes let me find the problems in them, but alas, time and money forced me to go with what we had.

On a side note, I'd really recommend Steve Corrao for mastering. He did really good work, and he really added a lot of energy to the track I had him master. He does 100% remote work and has a good system on his site for listening to and approving the mastered tracks. Very professional he has some high end gear, and most importantly did really good work.

The record is on vinyl too, and will be here next week for our record release show next Friday!

Thanks again for checking it out!

[T-rex]

Cool. I love the Flux stuff, I will have to check out that plug. I didn't know about that one.

I would love to have an Otari like that just for drums or small projects but I just haven't felt ready to commit to tape yet. Even though most of my workflow is mainly using the computer as a glorified tape machine.

[witchfeet]

It's really fun to use, but takes some getting used to and learning to set it up is somewhat of a pain. I think it's worth it for the drums though. Maybe someday I'll move up to a 2" 24 track and just do whole albums on it.

[T-rex]

My first band recorded to 2" 24 track for our last album many years ago and it did sound phenomenal.

[lukievan]

hey - thanks for posting this. songs are great and the recording is really good. well done!

[witchfeet]

hey - thanks for posting this. songs are great and the recording is really good. well done!

Thanks for checking it out and thanks for the compliments! I think the recording came out well considering my lack of experience and knowledge!

[coolnm57]

This is good stuff dude. I like how beefy the guitars are, and there's plenty of space between instruments. Keep it up!

[witchfeet]

This is good stuff dude. I like how beefy the guitars are, and there's plenty of space between instruments. Keep it up!

Thanks!