Well gosh darnit, getting a good mic’ed guitar sound certainly is a bitch. I changed strings, played with EQ settings, and moved mics around for a couple of hours yesterday. So far, Greg’s bass drum mic in the port of the Freda and the condenser mic a couple inches away from the Bogner and slightly off axis is ‘close’. I’m worried it’s still a little muddy though. I want my guitar to sound the way it sounds when I’m standing in the room with it. Mic’ing distortion is the hard part. I’m fighting a fizzy sound, and trying to get it more natural. It needs to cut but sound warm and full at the same time. Grrr. I think I’m close though (I hope).
Also, after messing with it for a couple days, I’ve decided to return that Boss noise gate. It colors the sound too much (even at the lowest settings), and that’s worse than any hum I’m getting.
Last but not least, we’ve got a new addition to the family.
So, after moving my amp around the house, I decided to just record the guitars upstairs in our hallway. It’s got a nice dead sound and it’s close enough to my computer for me not to have to move it. I’m lazy. I started the process of mic’ing up my guitar amp yesterday. Nerd alert: I’ll be using my Orange Rockerverb 50 head through my Bogner 2×12 open back and my Freda 2×12 ported cab. It’s basically what I’ve been using at shows lately. I think the Bogner and Freda mesh well together, and it’s a lot easier carrying 2 2×12s than that monster Mesa 4×12. Especially the Freda…so light!
Anyway, I tried several of our mics on the Bogner to figure out what sounded best. The sm57 sounded weird with distortion but really good clean. Same thing with the CAD tom mic we have. The two that sounded best were Greg’s expensive Seinheiser bass drum mic and our cheap CAD condenser vocal mic. They weren’t particularly warm sounding, but they didn’t sound like a tin can when I went into distortion.
Next came mic placement. I noticed when I miced straight on the speakers there were lots of clear highs but it was thin and sterile sounding. After moving mics around the speakers (including trying to mic the port in the Freda), it seemed to sound best when each cab was miced slightly off axis. I’m a little worried about the heavy distortion being too muddy, but I can always play around with the EQ to fix that.
One thing I noticed was that I’ve got a bit of a hum coming from my amp. I couldn’t figure out what source of interference was (it’s in our hall upstairs…not close to any monitors or electrical equipment). Rather than going on that wild goose chase to find it, I decided to just pick up one of those Boss noise gates after work. I can then incorporate it into my live setup. Maybe my amp was always noisy and I just never noticed till now.
I want to take my time on getting the guitars to sound right before tracking. We don’t really know what we’re doing, and fumbling around in the dark takes time.
Things that I am excited about right now, in no order: riding my bike in the rain, Darkthrone, red wine, The Great Depression II, Markings, drawing things for work, my soon-to-be-delivered new bass, my own blog, butts, dinner (and what’s for it?), 2009, The Antichrist, and my beard.
We knocked out the drum tracks on the last 4 songs tonight. Greg took some pictures that he’ll maybe post on here. To our neighbors: we’re sorry! We’ll try to record the guitars and bass in the basement (possibly). I’m anxious to start playing with mics and getting guitar tones lined up for tracking.
Oh and I’m selling some equipment, so if anyone wants a Mesa 4×12 cab, a Mesa Triple Rectifier head, an ESP semi-hollowbody guitar, or an old beat to shit Ibanez Les Paul Jr knock off from the 70s, let me know! I need to get rid of some equipment to justify buying more, and I’d rather not fuck with eBay if I don’t have to. (I know..Craig’s list)
Also, is $400 a good price for an Mexican Standard 5 string Fender Jazz bass?
We started tracking drums yesterday afternoon. It took a while to get the hiccups* out of the headphone mix, and playing along to a metronome was initially about as easy as adding a new member, but things ran smoothly after a bit. We’re planning at least one more drum tracking session, but will probably push through until we have a good take of every finished song, if only for archival purposes.
*Hiccup cures: 1) Moderate sharp blow to the sternum, 2) A few drops of bitters and lemon juice in club soda, 3) say “hiccup” nine times fast while holding breath**
**This blog should not be constituted as medical advice.
We checked it with a metronome–you can make love to pretty much all of our songs. There are a couple with tempo shifts, but you could work that in. The drums sound great. The house is a mess.
We saw Ley Lines last night at Secret Society Ballroom. Super-nice room, with high ceilings and wood floors: they sounded really great in there. One guy in the audience said, “These guys look like hippies”–I thought we would have to scrap but then it became apparent that he liked hippies, so all was well. All the old pictures from when the place was a Masonic Lodge are hanging in the stairwell. Apparently boxing promoter Don King was a Mason.
Humility. Trying to mic a drum set with 4 mics is pretty hard. The first 90% is easy. Trying to get the last tweaks on the hi hat, the floor tom, the blahblah is hard. It is amazing how much of a difference 4 or 5 inches one way or the other makes. It’s also amazing how two out of phase mics can make your snare sound like poo. The solution? Put them the same distance from the snare. Are the hi hats too loud in that mic? The solution? Put a piece of foam in front of them. Still working on tuning this and moving that around. Hopefully we can start tracking drums by Sunday. No rush though. We’ve got time, and this is fun thus far.
The drum-mic set-up is getting pretty close…the room sound is so sweet. Our headphone/pre arrangement seems like it’s going to work well. We even tried playing together to a metronome, which led to the discovery that we do, in fact, change tempos mid-song (on purpose) sometimes. Tricky. I think that’s what I really liked about that Franz Ferdinand song, “Take me out”. An intro straight into a breakdown, slowdown, and then disco chorus for two minutes. Brilliant!
If you feel like it, be sure to stop by minorseconds.info. I’m posting song(let)s (almost) everyday.
We’re set to begin our next attempt at home recording. It seems like we may have found a way of getting what so far seemed semi-impossible to achieve by our own means: a live, clear, seperated drum sound, without bleed from other instruments. We’re also going to experiement with different spaces in The House for guitar and bass tracking, in hopes of getting something alot warmer than what our basement has previously provided. Tonight we’ll work out the kinks in our headphone/dummy-track set-up and drum mic-ing. For the time being we’re suspending rehearsals and shows to focus on recording sessions–unless, like, Dead Science or Danava asks us to open for them, or something equally awesome and unpassupable. Anway, no predictions or promises, but as soon as we’ve got some goods you’ll hear about it here.
