The AVersions

The AVersions

Following on from the roots of reason album, the drummers partner ami asked if i would be interested in recording her band. Sadly i ran out of time to start anything before the summer but was keen to sort something for September. Keen to get going, i booked up ASAP.

The Aversions where a cover band consisting of a 4 piece playing pop/rock numbers from the 80s/90s. Being female fronted the band did a good job choosing songs to suit. We recorded-

Call me - Blondie

Kids of america - Kim Wylde

  99 red ballons - nena

crash - The Primitives

walking on sunshine - Katrina & the Waves

In terms of the cover instrumentation, i was a live take of just drums, bass , a single guitar , backing vox and lead vocals.

Set up

Drums

The kit the drummer played was very expensive and very nice sounding ( also very well tuned) so was quite pleasent too work with.

kick : Audix d6 on front

Snare: sm57 on top, earthworks er30 on bottom

 Toms:Beyer M201

Floor tom: use a d112 but had to change it for a sm58 due to mic shortage.

Over Heads: A OFTR Stereo pair of Earthwork er30s above the drummers head

I spent a bit of time fiddling with positions here. I pointed the tom mics at the center of each tom to get the most attack. The er30 on the snare was pointed in the middle of the snare wires with the top mic pointed half way between middle and rim. The d6 was just inside the kick but gave quite a bit of waffle (really need to remove all kick front skins in future.)

Its easy to see where each of the tom and snare microphones are pointing here.

 

Though slightly hard to see, the overheads can be seen above the drum kit, there over the drummers head.

Bass

DI: again! :S

Guitar

sm57 and sm7b (both shure). One on the Cone, one on the rim. (panned left and right with differnt eqs on the mix)

Backing vocals

 Spaced pair of C414s, with better singer on one pair, other 2 singers on other pair. Arrange in a cardioid figure 8 but with both in phase, if that makes sense.

You can see one the c414 pair.

Main Vox

Neumman U87 & sm7b pair :)

(note main vox was a seperate session )

Band Recording

For the recording it was all tracked live, with a scratch vocal being fed through the headphones for the musicians. It was quite a quick process :) was quite happy with the drums as a raw sound.

Vocal Recording
For most of the vocals it was hard to get a perfect take for each verse/chorus etc. So instead i punched in line by line. It was a little long winded but meant for a better vocal take. The sm7b was used for some of the louder vocals with the u87 taking most of the work.


Mixing
for a basic cover band i didn't spend an awful amount of time mixing. As it was played in live i felt the mixing should sound live. A did a few thing which i had never really tried before however. For a start i put the tom mics through a bus. This was then gated with a fairly high threshold. Adding a suitable release time, the tom mics would only be audible when the tom toms where hit, tightening up the mix.

I did some crafty editing with the vocals, as one of the punched in takes had clipped (should have realised. I took the same line for a different chorus and pasted it in place. Sadly as the band was not in click track it was out of time. Slowing the tempo of the sample put it back in place and is the result is indistinguishable.

The results







The band where

Ami mitchell - vocals

Dave Ranner - Bass & vox

Gareth - Guitar & vox

Tim Porch - drums & vox

Personal Tastes Volume 1

Personal Tastes Volume 1

Most of my blog posts have been about some of the work i have done, but i would like to share some of others peoples work that i like not because of the music but because of the production.

New Frontier - Donald Faygen

My course leader last year introduced me to this last year. Its used by audio engineers all over to test speakers and front of house systems. Its now a personal favorite of mind but is sited by Many as the best sounding recording ever made.

  6:00 - Dream Theater

A friend of mine introduced to dream theater two years ago. I can remember so clearly hearing the sound of those octobans filling the room and descending into a technical master piece! Such a punchy tight drum sound really great in my opinion. The best thing about the album is the drums are live drums unlike the previous album where mike portnoy stated it was mostly triggered. Saying this turn it fairly loud on good monitors and you can hear how gated everything is :L. So here we have 6:00 and Pull me under (from the second album) make sure to listen for the differences. 

  Am I Evil - Metallica

I love the sound of the early metal how trashy and rough it sounds. In my opinion i prefer it to a lot of the post hardcore stuff that gets released. What i love the most is the guitars there is so many doubled tracked ryhtum parts here giving it such a thick sound, Adding in a bass player that makes his bass sound like a guitar. The drums sound a bit tinny in the cymbal departement, but the rest is just brutal. 

  Welcome to the jungle - Guns n roses

A Massive fan of this band and the album. But if a track stands out its this beut. Punchy drums, dirty guitars, a deep bass and hole lot of axl rose. I love the production from start to finish on this album it cuts away the crap of a lot of the 80s metal/glam rock and returns to the classic rock roots with some bang up to date studio work. top notch

  November - Guns n roses

Sadly guns n roses slipped from there early sound for the use your illusion albums. The production here has been polished within a inch of its life. Its worth mention for just how sonically good it sounds and the epic instrumentation. A few interesting points mind, the strings are actually from a keyboard :L.

  Slave to the rhythm - Grace jones

Worth pointing out because of the drums, really great sound to em. Check out the bridge for them on there own and just listen to how massive they sound!

Thriller - Micheal Jackson

Though it needs a better link this songs sounds surprising thin when listened to on good reference monitors. Not slating the guys who worked on the album its just intresting.

All Along the watch tower - Jimmi hendrix

Listening it may not seem special in terms of production. But what makes it special that all those overdubs and strange effects panned from left to right where done by hand live. no pro tools or automation this was the 60s. Whats even better is this was done on a 4 track :O. Many takes later we have all along the watch tower.

  Fallen Angles - Black Veil Brides

Sticking with the metal i recently discovered this while watching scuzz. For modern metal it doesn't seemed to have suffered much of the brutal production but still sounds meaty. I like the punchy drums though i believe there triggered/doubled. What i like the most is how the guitars just sound live and real and are left with that under produced kinda feel.

thats it folks! Please check out these on good speakers and use better sources if you can.

Some Of My Covers

Song Of My Covers

Ok So i was on you tube this morning and remembered some of the videos i had made doing covers and various things. So here they are two guitar cover videos. Both where recorded using guitar rig 4 through a behringer fca2002 interface.

The frist song is YYZ by Rush, note the black object on the top of the fretboard is a phone camera :L

And the second song is panama by Van Halen :L (few mistakes im afraid )

Becky Farr

Becky Farr

Its fair to say this was by far the biggest project i had undertaken so far, little did i realise this at the start. It took around 6 sessions in the mounts of may and june, with me ending up finishing the mixes on my birthday!

I met Becky on gumtree after finding an advert looking for a producer. It was a bold move but i asked if i could fit the bill and provide my services for free. She was more then interested to work with me. It was clear from the moment go that the music was not in my style of work and i would need to adapt my skills to fit. 

She arrived with handfull of ideas and pages of lyrics notated against the strangest form of sheet music i had ever seen. We recorded the basic demos in the first session with just a piano and vocal mic to capture the scratch track. It was clear that we were going to have to arrange the rest of the instrumentation from the basic piano chords. 

(2 x akg c414 spaced pair, + one on the bottom of the sound board, (ie buy her feet) sadly no recordings available for this )

The Arrangements

The One You Chose

The first song we worked on was a piece written for her brothers first dance at his wedding. So slow, drawn out, love song, ballad. (you get the idea). Being a big fan of strings (o yes the strings :) ) they where dotted around the the standard ballad song structure, with a bass guitar to reinforce the piano. Playing around with the midi keyboard i added some classical guitar to end of the song to tie it up. It was easily finished and scratched tracked in that session. 

One Half Of Me

The next song was more upbeat with a more alternative pop sound. The song was rather hard to arrange with many ideas being thrown around. Once again we used strings & bass, But added some basic drum loops and i played in some guitar parts. The song was not fully arranged to the recording sessions where the guitar parts switched from electric to acoustic.

Canvas

This was the second song to be arranged completely, and we spent much time trying out different instruments and sounds. There was a great deal of experimentation with synthesisers and other ambient sounds which didn't really fit. At the time i remember listening to Michael Jackson's earth song  and hearing how the clean guitar and horn arrangements benefited such a epic song.  I tried adding some basic horn arrangements which worked wonders and made the song really stand out. 

Free

This song is rather odd. It was left to the last minute and wasent really worked on til we had recorded the other 3 songs. Never the less it was a clear creative process to add the instrumentation. The Tremolo guitar heard on the track was actually an accident but sounded so creepy it was left in the mix. The massive reverb used on the drums just added to the ambient feel on the song.

The Recording

The main element to recoding was the piano and it was 1 of only 3 acoustic instruments on the Ep. A baby grand Yamaha piano was used for the recordings in the universities center of performing arts. For the recording i used a pair of Akg c414s in a spaced arrangement 2 feet from the piano. (Note i do have a picture of this but need to locate it :S ) Being an old squash court the room was quite lively. Sadly there was quite a lot of pedal noise located in the recording. In the future im going to try using pencil condensors very close to the sound board. The piano recording was rather quite due to the interfaces i had to use (some lambada one) It seemed to have very little pre amp gain and could not boost the signal to even -20db. (nothing compression cant sort ;) 

The vocals gave me a fair bit of trouble due to tonal nature of the singers voice. I tried using a total of 4 microphones in various postions to experiment. On the recording the mic used was a Neumman U87 with some reinforcement from a Shure SM7B. I adopted a mic technique i use all the time now. I stick the u87 in Omni and turn the capsule to 60 degrees. So that the mic is just as sensitive but the blast from the singer is spread along the diaphragm. I also tried using a earthworks Er30 placed head on and a c414 over the shoulder of the singer. The earthworks worked surprisingly well but lacked tonal character being flat response microphones and also where fairly sibilance free. The c414 over the shoulder dident have enough direct sound in the mix and would probably  have worked better in a lively room.

(picture to follow)

Nothing too special on the acoustic guitar, pointed a akg c414 in figure of 8 at the 12th fret and hoped for the best. It worked but sounded quite trebly. The reason for the figure of 8 was my breathing would be directed at the microphones dead spot.

Mixing

Being vastly logic instruments and samples there was very little nasty`s too sort out. The vocals took a fair while to prefect and needed an fair amount of compression and EQ. Theres is some automated reverb in Free between pre chorus and chorus.

Conclusion

Overall working with Becky was a great experience. Being a classically trained grade 8 pianist i felt her arrangements added that special element to the songs that many pop singer songwriters miss. I also wish i had used more of beckys voice as she could pull of harmonies well and i always like the sound of vocal polyphony.