MSE solo record #1

Discussion on new albums, developing listening skills, critical listening to others' work, as well as TOMB members' MP3 links, online recording critiques

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SpencerMartin
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Post by SpencerMartin » Fri Apr 03, 2015 2:43 pm

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:the drums....it's all just compressed room mics. tracks 2 and 5 were done out in my living room, which is big. the room mics are probably about 80% of the drum sound. just enough kick and overhead in there for definition and attack.

drums on 3 and 4 were done in the mastering studio, just kick and overhead. there might be a teeny tiny bit of fake reverb on #4, i don't remember. if there is it's barely audible. i think there's a little 1/8 note delay on that one too, again barely audible.

the drums on the first song were the only ones from the original recordings i did back in 2001. i only had a stereo mix to work with and it was ALL HIHAT. if i wrote out all the ridiculous bullshit i had to do just to make it sound like a reasonable representation of a dude playing drums in a room....you'd all fall asleep before i got to the end.
Very cool - I'll definitely be doing some further listening to the differences between drum setups on my primary monitoring setup. Especially once my ear infection heals... Take it as a great sign that your tracks translated exceptionally well on not only a goofy monitoring setup, but through the lens of an ear infection as well. Even though everything seemed panned left of center, it still sounded great!

Actually, I'd be very interested to hear how you handled the hihats. In the past, I've had a tendency to mix on the slightly darker side, and upon getting tunes back from mastering would quickly identify which elements stuck out a little too much after the high frequencies of the entire mix were pushed. I'd most often find myself getting a little more drastic with the de-esser settings on the overheads and sometimes vocals in order to smooth out a second draft. Other than de-essing overheads or an unruly drum bus, I'm curious to know other black magic voodoo spells for dealing with prominent hi-please-get-the-hell-out-of-my-otherwise-beautiful-drum-sound-hats.

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Fri Apr 03, 2015 3:39 pm

the short answer is DMG essence. that thing is pretty unbelievable. i had to use that on the room mics on the last song, i was (obviously) going for 'when the levee breaks', and from memory i knew the hats on that were nowhere near as bright as mine, so i had the DMG taking out a bunch of ~11k, and it really helped to just pull the hats back in the mix a bit. it wasn't like they sounded bad, i just find that too much high frequency stuff distracts from all the nice midrange stuff. like i'd find myself listening to the hats instead of the snare.

i used that on the overhead on 3 and 4 as well. if you take a bit of time setting it up, you can get it so it's taking a bunch of highs off the hats and not touching the snare at all. or just barely on the louder hits.

the long answer, as far as the first song....i'm gonna write this out just as therapy...

so.the original tracking would've been a d112 on kick, an octava 219 on the side of the snare, and an akg c33e stereo overhead. recorded on tape and then i just sent a quick (too quick!) stereo mix into the computer.

the overheads were way too loud. and that akg is crazy bright, so not only were the hats loud, they were all like 15k glare. just not what we want at all. so i don't remember exactly what i did, but it was something like:

send it out to my analog chain, probably shelving the high end down and the low end up, compressing lightly with the drawmer 1968. record that back in.

put the original track into m/s, kill the sides completely, out to distressor, probably some eq as well. record back in.

put a heavy handed expander on the original track, gating out everything but the snare as much as i could. save that as a new track.

made a blend of the 68, distressor, and gated snare tracks. put an eq, a tape sim, 2 instances of brainworx dyn eq (one to bring out the kick, one for the snare), another compressor very lightly in parallel. save that as a new track.

put another eq and the DMG on that track. that's most of what you hear, then tucked in underneath are some kick and snare samples, done the super old fashioned way, meaning i went out and played just the kick, then the snare, then lined all the hits up. tons of eq and compression on the kick track, on the snare i just used the room mics with the usual heavy handed compresion.

hm, that doesn't look like that much written out. haha. it was a total pain. at one point i was like fuck it, just go play the damn thing again....and it's not like the original performance is anything great, but when i tried to redo it, it was just immediately apparent that.....no. it sounded like a bad cover version. the original had the enthusiasm, so i had to make it work somehow.

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Post by SpencerMartin » Fri Apr 03, 2015 7:25 pm

MoreSpaceEcho wrote:at one point i was like fuck it, just go play the damn thing again....and it's not like the original performance is anything great, but when i tried to redo it, it was just immediately apparent that.....no. it sounded like a bad cover version. the original had the enthusiasm, so i had to make it work somehow.
I know exactly what you mean. Once I stayed up all night in inspiration mode making this really awesomely weird layered tune and then found out the next day when I went to show a friend that I had basically lost everything due to haphazardly moving folders around in a sleep deprived state. Luckily it was my material and not someone else's. I tried to restart the same setup/arrangement but it wasn't the same at all. Totally futile. I was so bummed!

The DMG Essence looks powerful... But also, sending the middle out for processing and triggered expansion is pretty brilliant - I figured you'd have to have extracted the kick/snare somehow. I don't imagine that when you manually lined up the overdubbed kick/snare you used "tab to transient" in PT because that'd most likely be the easiest approach for moving one sampled hit everywhere as opposed to lining up two entire takes. I'm basing that on my other initial assumption that you didn't quantize the two stems individually to a grid either. The only other streamlined method I can think of off the top of my head for lining up two unquantized drum stems would be to use VocAlign or something similar without causing too many noticeable artifacts. Otherwise, cutting/nudging/crossfading each individual hit would be pure insanity! It's doable, but I'd probably lose my mind. For a longer song like one of yours it'd have to take a few hours.

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Sat Apr 04, 2015 8:33 am

i don't have PT, i do everything in wavelab and there's no tab to transient....so yeah, cut up every hit of the overdub tracks and align each one by hand.

i put on sleep's 'dopesmoker' at a low volume (it's soothing) and just forced myself to sit there and plow through it. took an hour and a half or so.

pure tedium. so stupid. this is why it's important to make sure you record good sounds in the first place!

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Post by SpencerMartin » Sat Apr 04, 2015 9:07 pm

Hey man, you gotta do what you gotta do! There are those parts of the process that are the least fun / least rock n' roll things ever, but it takes the end result to that next level. Sounds great, man!

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Sun Apr 05, 2015 9:21 am

a mildly interesting fact:

when i was dumping everything back to my computer, i was looking at the dates on the files to try and remember when i was actually working on this thing originally. and it turned out that i'd recorded a bunch of stuff for the third song on 9/10/01.

at the time, the working title of that one was 'new new york'.

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Post by ott0bot » Sun Apr 05, 2015 4:32 pm

solid. lots of different shades of post-rock and dub-ish stuff I have always been a fan of. especially reminds me of 2001, oddly enough....probably subliminally since you mentioned it. that's when I was living far away from my hometown, playing a ton of video games, and smoking far too many doobies with an old friend of mine...soundtrack was Air, Massive Attack, Tortoise, Uncle, Love & Rockets "Lift", Primal Scream, etc. good/unproductive times.

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Sun Apr 05, 2015 10:47 pm

haha yeah, definitely listened to tons of post rock and dub in the late 90s.

there's also this band here in boston called club d'elf, they've been playing regularly since like '98....the bass player/leader has been a good friend and client of mine forever, and i've learned a ton from him. nowadays they play this weird moroccan trance type stuff, but back then they were doing more of a crazy funk/dnb/dubbed out ambient thing, i'd go see them all the time and it was like going to school. so thankful for being able to sit in front of people THAT GOOD.

really big influence for me, especially on this record. and by that i mean i'm ripping them off something fierce.

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Post by vvv » Mon Apr 06, 2015 5:41 pm

Cool stuff, this collection of tunes.
bandcamp;
blog.
I mix with olive juice.

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Post by Snarl 12/8 » Mon Aug 03, 2015 2:15 pm

Can I ask, just in general terms, how you got the "drum" sound around the middle (IIRC) of "At Sea At Night?" I put drum in quotes, because it's almost like there's everything but the sound of the drum there. The only analogy I can come up with is that it's like in a cartoon when someone runs through a wall and there's just an outline of their shape left? I can't get that sound out of my head, it's probably the wierdest earworm I've ever had. Is it just compressed all to hell?
Carl Keil

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Mon Aug 03, 2015 2:42 pm

the crazy distorted bit? it's a mix of the drums through a DOD gonkulator and a maestro phaser. one track on the left, another on the right. and once it kicks in there's the regular drums in the middle.

pretty sure that's the only use i ever got out of that stupid gonkulator.

that's a funny thing to get stuck in your head!

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Post by Snarl 12/8 » Mon Aug 03, 2015 5:50 pm

It's the bit that starts at 5:06. Now that you mention distortion, I think maybe I've approached something like that with my rat pedal, but I backed it off. Stupid me.
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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:38 pm

yeah that's the bit. man, bandcamp streaming really murders that. it sounds so bad. *weeps*

pretty sure there was some heavy handed de-essing around 5k on the gonkulator drums, to make them a lil less painful.

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Post by JGriffin » Mon Aug 03, 2015 10:40 pm

Listening to "Looking Out For The Ballerina" now. Wow, man. Great stuff. In love with "Someone's Winning." Freaking superb feel.
"Jeweller, you've failed. Jeweller."

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All the DWLB music is at http://dwlb.bandcamp.com/

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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:27 am

DWULBY! where have you been man?

thank you thank thank you for the dollars, you most certainly didn't need to do that!

glad you're liking ballerina, that one's mostly seemed to evoke crickets and tumbleweeds so far. haha!

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