I finished my new record, it's on bandcamp here: http://gregmcleod.bandcamp.com/album/little-gwaii
The recording process went pretty smoothly. I'd done fully-featured demos ahead of time, and I had all of the parts mapped out and maybe three quarters of my arranging done. So the recording process was more about making nice-sounding versions of short samples, and I could work comparatively quickly. I did drums in a day, renting a Gretsch snare and a nice ride cymbal and otherwise making do with a Taiwanese kick and cheap cymbals I had lying around. I decided not to use toms on this record.
One thing I tried (that I got from seeing Paul Boechler work at Fader Mountain in Vancouver) is the idea of a "crush" mic, incorporating a mic a few feet away from the whole kit and compressing it heavily. Blending this with the rest of the kit results in a kind of parallel compression that can thicken the sound of the kit or give it a bit of an edge. For some of the songs I time-shifted the signal slightly to be better in phase with the close overheads, but sometimes it sounded better without doing so.
The bass I did using my dad's homemade DI with a Jensen transformer. Since I was working with such short bass loops I paid a lot of attention to timing and fretting/fingering noise. This is the first time I've tried specifically tuning to the part of the neck I'm going to be playing on. Not that the intonation on the bass was bad, but I think it's an interesting approach.
After I had bass and drums solid, I still had to record violin, trombone, percussion, guitar, keys, and vocals. I wanted to work with mics I own, so I set up the NT1a and an SM57 next to each other behind a pop shield and used whichever sounded more appropriate to me. Since I wanted things captured really dry, I did everything in a little makeshift vocal booth.
I used the 57 on the trombone and most of the vocals. I found it worked a little better on the percussive, rap-style vocals, but still preferred the NT1a on the sung vocals. Probably I would have liked an SM7b even better. The guitars were all done DI into Guitar Rig, with strategic EQ cuts (at 3.6 and ~4 kHz) to reduce the harshness that I sometimes hear in amp modelling plugins.
The vocals were mostly done in triplicate, with the second and third parts panned left and right and brought in for emphasis, usually on the ends of lines. Once I had the vocal takes, I sent these through the Boss digital delay pedal and played with the delay time knobs. I can do this live as well, and it works stylistically because it's similar to DJ scratching.
I rented Yorkville YSM6 monitors to mix the album, which was amazing. In the past I've worked on small monitors or headphones, and this was a great experience. The biggest differences to me were the upper mid clarity, the stability of the stereo image, and how well my mixes translated to other systems. The bass was the only thing I still had slight problems judging, but comparing on other systems helped. Given the choice, I'll always use monitors like these in the future.
I'm also finding that the level I mix at is a big factor in how well I manage to hear the balance I create. Paradoxically, the quieter I'm listening, the easier I can hear problems with the balance. With a free level meter app, I found I was most comfortable mixing at around 65 dB, going quieter for context on balancing decisions and louder for corrective EQ and fiddling with compressors.
I tried a few new things mixing as well. A major one was high and low passing everything, to make sure nothing extra was clouding my mix. I decided to low pass everything except the vocals starting down around 12 kHz. I wanted the vocals to really breathe life into the tracks (and I wasn't crazy about my cymbal sounds) so I figured I'd give them the upper frequencies almost to themselves.
I also automated levels more extensively than I have in the past, essentially treating different song parts (verse and chorus, for example) as different challenges as opposed to trying to compress and find a fader position for the whole song. I found just using a mouse and looping the relevant section I was able to get what I wanted within three passes. The vocals were pretty heavily compressed in two stages, so I used quick level cuts to reduce the volume of breaths that had gotten out of control.
I only rented the monitors for a week so I'd be motivated to finish the mix quickly, which I did, but that meant that I had to finish the mastering on headphones, comparing with other systems. I used Izotope Ozone 5; the main things I did were bring up the highs a bit overall, reduce the stereo width of the bass, and apply quite a bit of tape saturation (mostly in the highs and upper mids). I made them a bit hotter than I've done tracks in the past, with the maximizer set high enough it would bring levels down on the loudest parts of the verses, and worked pretty continuously on most choruses.
I finished the masters at 5am and uploaded them to bandcamp. Again, they're right here: http://gregmcleod.bandcamp.com/album/little-gwaii
I think the next post will look at my lyric process. I'm starting to write a new record now, so I'm going to look at how I've been writing songs recently.
The vocals were mostly done in triplicate, with the second and third parts panned left and right and brought in for emphasis, usually on the ends of lines. Once I had the vocal takes, I sent these through the Boss digital delay pedal and played with the delay time knobs. I can do this live as well, and it works stylistically because it's similar to DJ scratching.
I rented Yorkville YSM6 monitors to mix the album, which was amazing. In the past I've worked on small monitors or headphones, and this was a great experience. The biggest differences to me were the upper mid clarity, the stability of the stereo image, and how well my mixes translated to other systems. The bass was the only thing I still had slight problems judging, but comparing on other systems helped. Given the choice, I'll always use monitors like these in the future.
I'm also finding that the level I mix at is a big factor in how well I manage to hear the balance I create. Paradoxically, the quieter I'm listening, the easier I can hear problems with the balance. With a free level meter app, I found I was most comfortable mixing at around 65 dB, going quieter for context on balancing decisions and louder for corrective EQ and fiddling with compressors.
I tried a few new things mixing as well. A major one was high and low passing everything, to make sure nothing extra was clouding my mix. I decided to low pass everything except the vocals starting down around 12 kHz. I wanted the vocals to really breathe life into the tracks (and I wasn't crazy about my cymbal sounds) so I figured I'd give them the upper frequencies almost to themselves.
I also automated levels more extensively than I have in the past, essentially treating different song parts (verse and chorus, for example) as different challenges as opposed to trying to compress and find a fader position for the whole song. I found just using a mouse and looping the relevant section I was able to get what I wanted within three passes. The vocals were pretty heavily compressed in two stages, so I used quick level cuts to reduce the volume of breaths that had gotten out of control.
I only rented the monitors for a week so I'd be motivated to finish the mix quickly, which I did, but that meant that I had to finish the mastering on headphones, comparing with other systems. I used Izotope Ozone 5; the main things I did were bring up the highs a bit overall, reduce the stereo width of the bass, and apply quite a bit of tape saturation (mostly in the highs and upper mids). I made them a bit hotter than I've done tracks in the past, with the maximizer set high enough it would bring levels down on the loudest parts of the verses, and worked pretty continuously on most choruses.
I finished the masters at 5am and uploaded them to bandcamp. Again, they're right here: http://gregmcleod.bandcamp.com/album/little-gwaii
I think the next post will look at my lyric process. I'm starting to write a new record now, so I'm going to look at how I've been writing songs recently.
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