What Did You Work On This Year? (best and worst of 2005)

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cgarges
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What Did You Work On This Year? (best and worst of 2005)

Post by cgarges » Sat Dec 31, 2005 2:16 pm

What were your favorite and least favorite projects from 2005? Why did you like or dislike them? Did they provide any good anecdotes? Do tell...

Chris Garges
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Post by mertmo » Sat Dec 31, 2005 5:35 pm

I had an intersting year, only finishing one record. (I didn't work at all until June, had no studio to work out of)

Having said that, my worst and best record are the same record. The band, who shall go unnammed, plays a VERY authentically raw brand of rock and roll. Authentic in the sense that they didn't sit back and say, "let's do a raw garage rock thing." More like, this is all they are capable of, they can't play any better. Which was torturous, but then again it was really refreshing. The authenticity could not be stifled, their spirit just shines through no matter how fucked up the playing and singing are.

They pretty much tracked most of it themselves, I came in and made a list of things we "had" to retrack, and did the mix and some ghetto mastering. Instead of making editing decisions while they were tracking, like a producer might do, they just threw multiple overdubs and sounds at each song and decided to sift through it later. Well, I was the one who had to do the sifting of course. Brutally tedious, but nice results. One of the things that made it the best record of the year for me was that, to my continuing pleasant surprise, there was usually a really wild sound on each song that I could go crazy with. It was like each song was a straight up rock thing, except for ONE overdub where they were thinking they were radiohead or something. It made it really fun to mix each tune, there was something tweaky to grab on to. And often, the wild card sound would echo a lyric, or echo the subject matter which I thought was very cool. For instance, one song was about how smoking cigarettes was killing this guy slowly. It was called "nails". The lyric was "i got nails... in my coffin...", suggesting that every single cigarette was another nail. On that song there was this cool metallic "hammering a nail" sound that matched the snare hits.

So: worst album because these guys can barely play, definitely can't sing, and I had to do damage control on a whole record tracked by amateurs. Best album because it was so undeniably real and that is fucking rare, and the songs were a blast to mix. (and were well written, I might add) It's weird, these guys have really finely developed rock and roll sensibilities and insights, but they just can't execute very well.

All in all, it was pretty fun and the company was definitely good. One high point for me was when the singer, who is BIG into car racing (he's a hell of a mechanic) was explaining to me how nascar drivers were'nt just drivers, "those guys are fucking WARRIORS."
Kinda cool to write about the record right now, I literally just walked in the door from putting the final touches to their master, on the last day of the year...


On to the anecdotes:

The leader of this band lives HARD, that's all I gotta say. So plenty of good partying went on.
But more entertaining than that is his overexaggerated sense of how great he and the band are. He tells me this one night...

"dude, my other band is playing tomorrow night. you should come down. bring your girlfriend...I guaranTEE you'll get laid!"

But the best story is this: (not an anectode from the recording sessions, but this story begs to be told)

The singer is hanging out while another band plays this wild party. The band's lead guitarist is the same guy that plays lead guitar in the band I recorded. He and the singer have been best friends for like 17 years. So this band is rocking out, and another guy walks up to the singer and looks disturbed by the music. Singer says, "what's wrong?" The guy says, "man that guitar player is way too loud, don't you think?" The singer, recognizing that he can tell this other dude whatever he wants and the guy will believe it, says "dude, that's Ben Action, man. Haven't you ever heard of Ben Action?" The guy says no of course. Singer: "dude, Ben Action can play as loud as he wants, man, he has played with Stevie Ray Vaughn, recorded with Bowie, fucking toured with Charlie Sexton..." etc. etc, just building up this guy as a total fucking legend to this other dude who clearly knows no better. He ends his story by suggesting that this guy just kick back and enjoy the fact that he is getting the once in a lifetime opportunity to see a guitar legend sitting in with some buddies at a random party. So the show goes on and "ben" just keeps ripping out the crazy guitar licks all night long, just being a total guitar hero. The band gets to the end of the last song, and they are going crazy with the ending, people are crashing their instruments together, throwing them around, etc. So Ben takes his guitar off his neck and is holding it up in the air, letting it feed back, and on the last drum crash, he throws it down on the ground, it lands upright, falling back against the guitar amp. The impact of hitting the amp causes a string to break at the bridge. The string arcs back over the top of the neck, and sticks PRECISELY INTO THE ELECTRICAL OUTLET THAT THE AMP IS PLUGGED INTO!!! Electricity shoots up the string, and short circuits the amp, causing a burst of flame to pop out of the front of the guitar, followed by smoke etc. Everyone paying attention to this is freaking out at the sheer rock factor, and the singer looks at the guy who he sold the bullshit story to, and the guy is just looking back at him with his jaw on the floor, blow away by what he just saw. The singer just points at the guy and nods at him with a look on his face that says, "told you he was badass..."

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joelpatterson
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Post by joelpatterson » Sat Dec 31, 2005 9:16 pm

Top that!
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cgarges
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Post by cgarges » Sat Dec 31, 2005 9:57 pm

HO-LY SHIT!

CG

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Kilroy
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Post by Kilroy » Sun Jan 01, 2006 1:17 pm

hahaha, omg that is incredible. All i did this year was record a bunch of crappy rap and a good singer songwriter. But nothing as awesome as Mermo's stories. I have no real stories to tell. Just having to drink to get through the really crappy rapper sessions. I wouldnt of taken the job, but i needed money.

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JohnDavisNYC
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Post by JohnDavisNYC » Sun Jan 01, 2006 2:25 pm

highlights of this year include:

rebuilding my studio after a huge flood wiped out most of what i owned and the 8 months of dealing with insurance bullshit....

tracking and mixing a bunch of stuff with Ambulance LTD. which may or may not be released as an ep at some point... really fun hang and great songs.

doing the new phonograph record.

mixing the new Spielerfrau record that my friend Aaron tracked and produced (as well as playing a ton of the instruments on it)


shitty stuff this year:

doing a song with a band and the whole time dealing with super wierd lead singer/his token model girlffriend drama... particularly when she decided she wanted to sing on the song and no-one in the band wanted her to... ugh... ugly scene to say the least.

a modicum of mediocre sessions... not really shitty, just boring.

that's about it. all in all it was a great year!

cheers,
john
i like to make music with music and stuff and things.

http://www.thebunkerstudio.com/

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Best and worst

Post by xpulsar » Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:58 pm

I had a good year. I got to wire and setup The studio in Jack Whites house for "get behind me satan" . That was alot of fun. He was a real gracious host. He let us have free reign of his kitchen. That record was done with all Coles 4038's (6). A Neve Melbourne 12 channel console. Some Helios modules.(2) API 7600. Fairchild 670 . (2) Pultec Eqp1a, (2) distressors. Alan Smart C2. My presto 900 tube Pre amp. RCA BA6A Tube compressor. (2)1176 . And a Studer A80 1" 8 track.

I also have gotten to Mix 2 songs for India Aire. A song for Floetry "still". A song for Snoop Dog "smoke so much "(didn't get credit). Recorded a Bunch of things for Matt Dear,Amp Fiddler, and The Elanors .

I have also been busy playing the drums alot with my Band Zoos Of Berlin. Recordings soon to come.

Collin

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2005

Post by fireproof » Sun Jan 01, 2006 11:10 pm

I had a great year...
I produced and mixed the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record
no one knew when we were making it that it would make such a splash
I knew it was going to be an indie rock classic and am psyched to see it
hit # 7 cmj and # 34 Spin top 40 of 2005 and about every bloggers top 10

it was very cool to see it do so well without a label or publicist.
I think they have helped paved the way for more bands to get attention and sell albums without the big corporate bullshit record companies!!
the record is selling as many downloads on Itunes as Eminem right now.

It was a fun and quirky record to make and was the first time since oh 1987 that I used my lexicon and spx 90 gated reverb patches
got to push my console and compressors to some extremes to get a new order,talking heads,cure,smiths kinda vibe

It was a big year also for me in that I had a baby boy Ben in october and Moved my Apartment and My studio Fireproof recording from brooklyn to Los Angeles a month ago.
I have a house that someone had built a studio into the guest house and am doing some more soundproofing and getting it ready to roll in a couple weeks
The move was 18 thousand lbs of stuff!!

hope the hit record keeps the kids coming to my new Joint in LA

Adam

www.fireproofrecording.com

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Post by Jim_Boulter » Tue Jan 03, 2006 12:16 pm

My worst - recording my own stuff on crappy, noisy equipment. Didn't seem too bad until I ripped 'em to MP3s, at which point the noise became unbearable.

My best - my hard drive on my computer crashed, and I lost all of the above! :lol:
Now, I get to start anew with better equipment, and it will (hopefully!) be listenable this time.

I've got the garbage out of my sound; now if I can just get the garbage out of my music!

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Post by mpedrummer » Wed Jan 04, 2006 1:22 pm

My best of the year was an EP I did with a group called Far From Westfall. They're up on iTunes if you want to check it out. I reccommend Enough's Enough and I See.

The drummer lived in an old stone barn in the middle of nowhere, PA. The living room was about 25'x35', with 3-story vaulted ceilings. Awesome sounding room during rehearsals, so I decided to bring the studio to them and record in the barn.

It was awesome. I stayed there with them for about 2 weeks (my wife was in Italy with her Godmother) and we just had a blast - recording 12 hours a day, playing video games and drinking beer and hanging out for the rest of the time we were awake. I'd been working with them in pre-production for a while, and everything just came together nicely. We actually re-wrote one of the songs in the middle of the process, and it wound up being my favorite.

We had enough time (and they had enough dedication) that the final mix actually is not tuned at all. If it was out of pitch, we fixed it. This isn't to say that we didn't miss a few, but nothing horrible.

There was one little glitch, and man, mark me down for lesson learned...day two, I rebooted the PC, and got a BSOD - hal.dll is missing or corrupt. After fighting it for a while, I drove 2 hours back to my place to get a spare drive and a disc image I made (and promptly forgot) drove 2 hours back and - same problem. To make this story less dull, here's the moral of it - apparently, my mobo initialized the USB ports after it read the MBR, but before it actually booted off it - so when it initialized the USB drive that I had forgotten to unplug, it changed the count of drives, and was trying to boot from the USB key. Dammit.

Anyway, loved the process, loved the results.

MPEDrummer

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Post by soundguy » Wed Jan 04, 2006 11:25 pm

happy holidays.

dave
http://www.glideonfade.com
one hundred percent discrete transistor recording with style and care.

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joelpatterson
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Post by joelpatterson » Fri Jan 06, 2006 11:27 pm

soundguy wrote:happy holidays.

dave
Oh, no you don't! Where have you been? And who is Brian Roth anyway?
Mountaintop Studios
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agauchede
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Post by agauchede » Sat Jan 07, 2006 7:39 am

What I like about this year - learned a lot about the value of better gear and more importantly how to use it. New rule: don't buy anything expensive when you can build it for less! I'm getting an education in electronics and having fun with solder fumes (get lead-free solder, everybody!)

What I didn't like: I worked so little. In 2004 I had at least a gig a month. 2005: I think I did 6 gigs - and some of that was with my own band! Granted, I do need to put myself out there a little more. Anybody looking for an audio engineer in Portland, Maine? I can solder!

Chris

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Post by i am monster face » Sat Jan 07, 2006 8:38 am

2005 was very good for me.

I worked on a few albums and it was the first one I did that was released nationwide.

In the end, the album was over mastered, and that sucked, but it was fun to go to record stores and see the band.

I love that "Clap Your Hands..." album. Congrats on that.

Ian

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Post by carlsaff » Sat Jan 07, 2006 8:42 am

Worked on lots of cool projects this year, with this being particularly notable:

Image
Carl Saff Mastering
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