There
are only a couple “field recordings” on MB-LP. There's a
glass-wiping noise that I manufactured for ENTJ out of a
freesound.org file. I had a rough idea of the order of pitches I
wanted, so I just cut up the sample and arranged the pieces until I
heard what I imagined. ISTJ has a recording of my backyard on it
during the breakdowns: a wet morning with the birds out and a
neighbour hammering, just cut up and high passed. The only song
sample on it is on INTP, where I took a bit of the bridge from KT
Tunstall's “Black Horse and Cherry Tree”, pitched it down 11
semitones, and synched it with the song's tempo. Unless these are KT
Tunstall's lawyers reading this, in which case that totally didn't
happen, shhh.
I recorded the guitars as I normally would, my Mexican Standard Strat through a Blues Deluxe with the NT1a and an SM57, but for the mix I just panned the two mics left and right instead of doubling. I'm not sure if there was a reason for doing that, other than that I didn't want to have to synch up another recording with the first one. Not much processing, except to remove some 3.5 kHz if it sounded brittle. Amp settings depended on the song, but everything was dry and clean on the way in, and there's only a couple instances of guitar effects on the album, on ENFJ and ISTJ. Both of those are long, weird reverse reverbs from the BreVerb plugin; basically presets that I changed only minimally. One thing I did change on the reverbs, and there weren't many, was to always roll the diffusion back to 0%. I read, probably in an old article, that that was a modern reverb sound.
One thing I did with the guitar that I'd never tried before is on all the solos on the album. I turned every string to the same note, probably to D, and then played the solos by barring and strumming across the whole neck. This meant I couldn't play the things I'd normally play, and made it hard to jump around between notes as much, but I found it very fun to play guitar like that: six (or probably four at a time) voices in concert, all at once. It felt powerful, and while it's not for everything, I think it worked well for these songs.
Bass, apart from ENFJ which was recorded earlier, was all done through a DI in my room in Toronto. The bass I used was the one I was playing in the musical, a Rickenbacker knockoff by Carvin with active pickups. It also had new, new strings on it at the time, which I somewhat regret since that meant that I had to roll off the tone knob almost completely, and I wanted some of it back by the time I was doing the mix. Thankfully, I recorded versions of the some songs at three different tone knob positions, so I could choose the brightness I liked once I was listening on the monitors.
The most complicated bass effect on the album is on INFP. It's a 14-bar pattern, with the last two bars intentionally leaving the bass note hanging. I had an idea where the last bass note would start pulsing louder and louder into the next repetition in triplet quarter notes, a sort of dubstep-style thing. I found a soft synth with the sound I wanted, and then automated the gain and a tremolo effect, but it wasn't sticking until I reamped it through my old 12” monitor speaker at a high enough volume that the speaker was struggling to reproduce it. Played quietly, it still kind of has that sense of “your laptop can't handle this” grittiness.
I left a hole in the bass for the kick at around 60 Hz. I read somewhere online where someone had recommended boosting 60 Hz, cutting 275 Hz, then boosting 3.5 kHz and 8 kHz, each by ~6 dB. That seemed to work for the kick I'd recorded, so I used those settings most of the time. A lot of EQing I did on MB-LP was more aggressive than I've done in the past, as I learn just how much you can do in the digital realm without running into crippling side effects. I generally cut everything in the midrange pretty aggressively to make room for the vocal; the idea being, most spoken/rapped stuff has instrumentation specifically designed to leave space for the vocal (in between sub-bass and cymbals). So in my productions, where there's usually either guitar or piano and some other midrange instrument, I decided I have to be more proactive if I don't want to drown out my vocal, which is the main deal.
I recorded the guitars as I normally would, my Mexican Standard Strat through a Blues Deluxe with the NT1a and an SM57, but for the mix I just panned the two mics left and right instead of doubling. I'm not sure if there was a reason for doing that, other than that I didn't want to have to synch up another recording with the first one. Not much processing, except to remove some 3.5 kHz if it sounded brittle. Amp settings depended on the song, but everything was dry and clean on the way in, and there's only a couple instances of guitar effects on the album, on ENFJ and ISTJ. Both of those are long, weird reverse reverbs from the BreVerb plugin; basically presets that I changed only minimally. One thing I did change on the reverbs, and there weren't many, was to always roll the diffusion back to 0%. I read, probably in an old article, that that was a modern reverb sound.
One thing I did with the guitar that I'd never tried before is on all the solos on the album. I turned every string to the same note, probably to D, and then played the solos by barring and strumming across the whole neck. This meant I couldn't play the things I'd normally play, and made it hard to jump around between notes as much, but I found it very fun to play guitar like that: six (or probably four at a time) voices in concert, all at once. It felt powerful, and while it's not for everything, I think it worked well for these songs.
Bass, apart from ENFJ which was recorded earlier, was all done through a DI in my room in Toronto. The bass I used was the one I was playing in the musical, a Rickenbacker knockoff by Carvin with active pickups. It also had new, new strings on it at the time, which I somewhat regret since that meant that I had to roll off the tone knob almost completely, and I wanted some of it back by the time I was doing the mix. Thankfully, I recorded versions of the some songs at three different tone knob positions, so I could choose the brightness I liked once I was listening on the monitors.
The most complicated bass effect on the album is on INFP. It's a 14-bar pattern, with the last two bars intentionally leaving the bass note hanging. I had an idea where the last bass note would start pulsing louder and louder into the next repetition in triplet quarter notes, a sort of dubstep-style thing. I found a soft synth with the sound I wanted, and then automated the gain and a tremolo effect, but it wasn't sticking until I reamped it through my old 12” monitor speaker at a high enough volume that the speaker was struggling to reproduce it. Played quietly, it still kind of has that sense of “your laptop can't handle this” grittiness.
I left a hole in the bass for the kick at around 60 Hz. I read somewhere online where someone had recommended boosting 60 Hz, cutting 275 Hz, then boosting 3.5 kHz and 8 kHz, each by ~6 dB. That seemed to work for the kick I'd recorded, so I used those settings most of the time. A lot of EQing I did on MB-LP was more aggressive than I've done in the past, as I learn just how much you can do in the digital realm without running into crippling side effects. I generally cut everything in the midrange pretty aggressively to make room for the vocal; the idea being, most spoken/rapped stuff has instrumentation specifically designed to leave space for the vocal (in between sub-bass and cymbals). So in my productions, where there's usually either guitar or piano and some other midrange instrument, I decided I have to be more proactive if I don't want to drown out my vocal, which is the main deal.
While I did want to make
something I could perform easily, I did add some things to the album
that wouldn't be straightforward to do live. There's a soft synth TR-909 drum
machine on a couple of tracks, and 4 or 5 tracks have an additional
snare on part or all of the song. Usually it was a Gretsch one from
Sonar's Session Drummer 3, with the original snare drum hits
converted to MIDI and then copied to the soft synth. I wanted ENFP to
sound a bit Kings of Leon-ish, and when I read an interview with
their mix engineer he mentioned overdubbing an additional snare on
the chorus of one of their songs, so I tried that a few times.
Another thing I tried was how he mentioned treating the bass: adding
a reverb for early reflections, and a quick delay, to muddy up the
bass a bit and have it sound a bit chorused. So I tried that on at
least that song.
One last new thing that I tried was something from the Boss RC-300 I wanted to replicate in the DAW, which was a global tremolo effect during the chorus of ENTP. I just set up a bus for it, inserted the tremolo, added sends to it, and then rode the fader on it and brought it up for the choruses as a parallel process. I also rode the fader on the drum room mic on several tracks, to add or remove ambiance depending on the part of the song. Some final reflections (forget early reflections!) on making the album next time.
One last new thing that I tried was something from the Boss RC-300 I wanted to replicate in the DAW, which was a global tremolo effect during the chorus of ENTP. I just set up a bus for it, inserted the tremolo, added sends to it, and then rode the fader on it and brought it up for the choruses as a parallel process. I also rode the fader on the drum room mic on several tracks, to add or remove ambiance depending on the part of the song. Some final reflections (forget early reflections!) on making the album next time.
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