Maintaining quaintness within a polished mix

[notbillcosby]

I was recently contacted by a local band, the Blendours, to record their first full-band full length. They are a pop punk duo with a strong Ramones tilt... Right now, they perform with the main dude blasting out bar chords on an acoustic while he sings in beautiful harmony with his girlfriend who's there strictly to provide backup vocals. I've completely fallen in love with their unintentionally lo-fi home demos, which are all performed beautifully if you look past some obvious technical issues:

http://theblenders.bandcamp.com

The subject matter leans toward the goofier side, but who cares? I think the songs are incredibly catchy and are just hook after hook in rapid fire succession. Even if the lyrics aren't incredibly complex or deep, they seem bluntly straightforward and like they're coming from real life experiences. The combination of some really raw, honest, borderline immature lyrics about love and broken hearts, the fact that it's all just acoustic, and hearing their voices blend together creates this perfect storm to me; There's a wonderful bedroom-recording quaintness to it all.

They're coming in with some friends to record full band versions of 17 of their 50-ish songs, complete with distorted guitars and a full drum kit and everything, and are shooting for an end product that is sonically similar to Green Day's "Insomniac." Recently, they've been posting "full band" demos done with a drum machine at home that suck all the heart out of the songs. We won't be recording with a click track and I don't plan on making it quite as slick and polished as Insomniac, but I'm still concerned that the songs won't have the heart that they have as acoustic blasts. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might do to still give them the semi sparkly modern-ish pop punk album that they want while maintaining whatever intangible quality it is that draws me to their current recordings?

[joelpatterson]

Just get them really comfortable and loose. Your equipment cannot help but capture clean sonic purity-- unless you intentionally try to add static and distortion, it will have that scintillating effervescence, that's the easy part-- you need to do all in your power to get them to perform with gusto and edginess. That's the core of what any listener is going to care about-- tension and drama and sincerity.

I am guessing the more they focus on the gear and think about production values, the less liveliness they end up creating. Maybe have everything set up and sound-checked (as much as feasible) before they even step into the room. Let their session be one long freewheeling jam session. "Jam-ish" at least? The last thing you want to do is start swapping mics and adjusting overheads-- get them to forget where they are and what they're doing.

[Nick Sevilla]

Recently, they've been posting "full band" demos done with a drum machine at home that suck all the heart out of the songs.

This, this here, is a problem.

Can you ask them to not post any songs that are not finished?

People like, get something called "Demo-itis" and the worse the sonic quality, the less emotional the material or the performance, the MORE they love the demo.

Cheers

[notbillcosby]

Just get them really comfortable and loose. Your equipment cannot help but capture clean sonic purity-- unless you intentionally try to add static and distortion, it will have that scintillating effervescence, that's the easy part-- you need to do all in your power to get them to perform with gusto and edginess. That's the core of what any listener is going to care about-- tension and drama and sincerity.

I am guessing the more they focus on the gear and think about production values, the less liveliness they end up creating. Maybe have everything set up and sound-checked (as much as feasible) before they even step into the room. Let their session be one long freewheeling jam session. "Jam-ish" at least? The last thing you want to do is start swapping mics and adjusting overheads-- get them to forget where they are and what they're doing.

I unfortunately can't get stuff set up ahead of time, but they did book 3 days with me so tracking may wind up happening mostly on day 2. They aren't gear heads and will keep their nose out of that side of things completely- They came to me because they like the work i do and trust my decisions! What a pleasant change from the bands who's drummer is over my shoulder telling me how much compression to add... yeesh.

I kinda new this guy in the Blendours already, and since he started talking to me about recording we've exchanged about 8000 emails and have gotten to know each other pretty well. The two friends they are coming in with are from a band I've recorded in the past and played a buunch of shows with, so I think everyone should be in a pretty comfortable spot. Also, I'm working out of my home right now, so feeling comfy and relaxed is pretty easy here. So I've got that going for me! We're also tracking the core of the songs live and in the same room, which has definitely gotten me good results in this room before. My band tracked live here, so I have an OK idea what I need to do to tastefully control bleed, so I won't have to fight with that while the band is here waiting.

Maybe everything will go fine. I'm sure they'll give an excited performance, because I know they're thrilled to be doing this. The guy from the Blendours has wanted to do a full band thing for years and never had the opportunity until now, so excitement will be high.

I was thinking about the Blue Album from Weezer- THAT still sounds pretty quaint and honest in a way that I think this album will need to, but there's a;sp zero double tracking done to the vocals; The Blendours have already made it clear that double tracked vocals are a part of their sound (it is. They nail the double tracking and it gets a Brian Wilson thing going) and I'm worried that could potentially be the sheeny nail in the coffin too. I'm probably worrying too much about this and should just let them play their damn songs and hope I like the end product.

[joelpatterson]

Cool and four thumbs up to the relaxed home environment thing,

I maybe somehow kinda wonder if there's going to be some key to it all that will float just the boat you're searching for-- I always say vocals with a band are the primal thing, if you break it down. A song exists to be sung, and all the instrumentation in the world exists just to enhance the power and rhythms and flows of the words. The push-me pull-you of the bass and the drumkit and the acoustics and the tambourines and the mouth harps-- all that's gotta be correct to get people dancing, but it's the magnetic force field of the message, and how much people believe it and embrace it as their own-- that's what bores into and infests their brains.

I might find some kind of vocal reverb strategy that unconsciously had you hanging on every word... the "unconscious" part being the most important. A monstrously complex skein of plates and gates and side-chains... so the listener never looses contact with the singers, indeed feels that he or she is discovering these singers for the first time, and must rush out to tell their friends...!

[notbillcosby]

Yeah, I'm wondering how much of the heartlessness in those drum machine demos I mentioned is due to the drum machine and lack of that push/pull between the instruments since it was all coldly programmed and then dubbed over the top. Reverb is absolutely not the key to me on this one... I want it to be more about the lack of reverb, really, to keep some of the bedroom vibe alive among the (comparatively) overblown instrumentation. I need to make it feel a little homemade still. I'm gonna try really hard to take advantage of any minor goofs that might happen, just to keep it sounding a little imperfect. Normally some between-song studio banter can help with that too, except I know this is going to be sequenced just like one of their live shows that have literally one beat of silence after a song before starting the next one.

[joelpatterson]

A good-to-great bedroom reverb... wasn't there a Lexicon box that was perfect for this?