Recording Blog for LSD’s new song Nevermine.
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by DANN on 12-01-2010
Tagged Under : LSD, nevermine, preproduction, recording
I’ve sent out an early copy of one of our tunes to some buddies for their review.. and I wrote this kindof as a response to their questions about how we recorded ..
Here’s a screenshot of the mastering EQ curve I used..
EQ curve used for mastering the track
This app is Izotope Ozone 3.
As far as recording goes here’s some basics on what we did.
first off, secret weapon is this: http://www.audiodamage.com/downloads/product.php?pid=ADF002 and it’s free. And it does what it says it would. I used it on many things as you will see.
For this tune, I wasn’t looking for a sweet, happy mix.. this is a bitter and angry song and I wanted it bitter, up the middle and in your face. Also, I really tend to disagree about not using compression. Rock n roll is supposed to be loud so yeah, I use compression on most things, not alot all the time, but at least a bit..
DRUMS:
Recorded drums in our rehearsal space, drummer has internal mics in his kit so that’s kick, 3 toms and floor tom internal, 2 rode NT5s for overheads and a Rode NT2a (vocal mic) about 3 feet in front of the kick drum about 2 feet off the ground. He recorded through a presonus Firetube, way loud, with a touch of limiting on the way in.
all the drums were routed to an aux that had the above audiodamage plugin on it as well as a verb and then mixed back into the original signal out through the “drum” bus.
Kick has EQ and it’s own instance of the roughrider plugin on it, (so it’s compressed twice, well three times if you count mastering).
Snare has EQ, it’s own roughrider plugin on it, as well as a gated snare verb bus (gasp! I know.. but I dig the sound.. )
GUITARS:
There are MANY, MANY guitars on this track.
guitar tracks in nevemine
To start with, I recorded everything with a 57 right up on the bottom left speaker of my Marshall cab and then a MXL tube mic about three feet from the cab just off center to the right side. These go through a DBX 386 tube pre and A/D converter and then into Sonar.
The “kitty” is the Hello Kitty guitar that I used for the EMG 81 in the bridge. This is that typical heavy rock humbucker sound. I also used the strat for a dirtier “nasty” overdriven but not saturated tone that has some string noise and some ugly in it.
Jay (our rhythm guitar player) used his Mesa 1×12 combo with the same mic config, and his Gibson Sonnex through an evil sounding fuzz pedal for his parts. We also went for the straight up Nickelback Mesa “bedroom” tone for some of it which really fills out the guitar sound.
Sonar supports track “layers” so that you can have more than one track per track playing back at one time. This works really well for comping parts but is also really useful for doubling parts. I just re-record the same part to a different layer on the same track and play them back together for some, y’know, THICKNESS. 
The lead track was the parker through my JCM800, no tricks. just the 57, nothing inline.
BASS:
Yeah, our superninja temp bass player Lizzy Daymont recorded this at her house and emailed it to me, she said she just used her sansamp Bass DI. it’s one track, and I didn’t touch it.
VOX:
Yeah, this is where it gets rough.. We record her voice through a MXL mogami edition tube mic, through a DBX 386 tube pre and I have an ART Tube compressor sidechained into her channel. Usually because of the dynamic range of the vocal we’ll do separate chorus and verse tracks because our verses tend to be kinda quiet and the choruses, well, y’know, LOUD. She’ll do a guide track and then we’ll go back and do sometimes a phrase by phrase retake so we get the inflection, pitch and attitude right for the track. Then she’ll do a crapton of harmony ideas, she’ll pick one (or six) and then we’ll go back and re-record the harmonies so that she can match the original in terms of breathing and inflection. All this makes for many long hours editing the right take into the right place, but I have no illusions that the vocal is the most important part of the song. I also have her double EVERYTHING because that’s what’s done these days and I like the sound of a real double as opposed to an autotuned double.
Mixing:
mix buses
I then create a metric crapload of busses for mixing. I do these for simplification purposes. I can adjust the overall level of guitars, or vox, or drums, and get a better picture of the song overall with quick and easy adjustments. Anything with the word “squisher” on it has a roughrider on it and was used as an aux to mix in with the original signal to bring the overall level up.
Also, I used no automation at all. The whole thing is a static mix. This is one of the reasons I’d like to do this with a real mix engineer. Automation scares me.
Rock!
