Topic: Help recording guitars and real drums

Thanks thcilnn!

There were TONS of mistakes, I’ve learned a lot. Unfortunately I cannot remember all the equipment names, I was too busy! I’ll tell you the history.

I went the first day with my laptop, my nanoKontrol, two headphones (Sennheiser HD25 and AKG K701) and my Edirol UA4fx. The guy that did the bass and the main voice didn’t come … so I tell them that they must record the full song (for use as future reference) without the bass. But only the guy of drums and the man of the trumpets knew the song!! Another extra problem was that it was the only day we can do noise [long story with neighbours]. Another local group were recording in the next room too!! (unwanted noise)

So I started to record directly the drums, and when I gave the Sennheisers to the guy of drums he said: “what’s the fuck is that man?? a metronome??” He though that he was going to record without metronome even! But there was another extra problem, he didn’t know all the song and we only had few oportunities to record, when the other band weren’t playing. So, instead use metronome, he used the original mp3 song…

As I only have one input in my sound card (I haven’t the Fast Track Pro drivers neither) I used their voice machine, so I had to mics pluged on the voice machine and the voice machine plugged in my input. I used one mic for the kick drum (it was inside the bass drum), and I used the other in front of all the drums. I eq the mics with the voice machine (only 3 graphics bands, low, mid+frc, high) while I hear the input with my AKGs. One of the mics was a SM58, the other I don’t remember.

We record the drums several times, however I was noticing that the grid doesn’t fit with the drums, I though that a simple nudge would fix it… I though…

Later we record the trumpet (double layer) and when I was to copy/paste in the end of the song… OOOOOHHHHHHH IT DIDN’T FIT AT ALL. I discovered that the original song didn’t have constant tempo, the drums were always moving between 140-150BPM, without any logic. probabily the drums guy of the original song was drunk… or simply it was as my drums guy that doesn’t like the metronome.

As we haven’t more time I has to chop and timestretch multiple times the trumpet to fit it in the song. I also marked were I can find a tempo change, there was 50+ marks of tempo changes in all the song.

Few days later we record the bass and the guitar. First we record the bass plugged directly on my UA4fx, using direct monitoring. It was a breeze. Later we record the non-distorded guitar. The guy never had played a ska song, so he had to repeat the phrazes several times.

The distorded guitar was tricky. He needs to use distortion to “feel the song” while record. We cannot use his Marshall, because the neighbours, so I used D16 Redoptor and no direct monitoring (thanks to god the distorion blurs the attack of the sounds). I used the lower latency I can.

The last day we record all the voices. It was easy, I did the same that with guitars, without plug the mic inside the singers 😛 I used a reeverb to (from my UA4fx) so the singer would feel more confident about itself, and the reeverb would be monitored without latency and I wouldn’t be recorded.

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MIXING

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Drums: I EQed them. As I only have one track I had to be pretty cautious. I removed all sub frecuencies and I soften the kick drum low frecuencies too. I give an small and discrete boost in the mid frecs for do the snare drum snappy. Later I used here a multiband compressor, because the crash cymbal sound extremately loud. and I cannot EQ it without screw the hihats. I used Maximus with an inverse (!) curve for high frecuencies. And the other bands as usual. I use too a little reeverb (Toraverb).

Bass: I removed sub-frecuencies and I did an soft compression with one band of maximus.

Guitar: I never though that Podium pencil in audio editor were useful… I was just a toy for me. The guitar had a hundred of clicks and thanks to the pencil tool I fix the most of them, except those you’ve pointed. D16 Redoptor didn’t sound good, so I googled for a free amp plugin (Shred 1.06). The no-disto guitar had been filtered with IL Love Philter (Hipass with some reso), and both guitar were noisegate-ed too.

Main voice: Very heavy compression with Maximus again, and little EQ removing sub-bass and ultra-high frecuencies. And a noise gate.

Chorus: Same treatment that Main Voice except compression. Only one voice of chorus have compression, because it had lots of peaks. Their clips were mixed individually, because I want peaks between 0 and -6db for all of them. The voices were spread in the stereo field.

Trumpets: They suffered some substrative EQ in order to fit them in the mix. I wanted to position them in the back of the virtual room, to the left of the drums, so I added some mix reeverb (Toraverb again) and panned them individually to the left.

Master: I used Span to compare my spectrum with the original song, and I fixed the differences with a parametric EQ. Later I used Maximus again to compress and limit the song.

And that’s all! There where tons of extra problems, I had to google more that mix!

Best regards 😉

Thanks guys, I spend lots of time comparing songs and eqing, glad you enjoy the history 😉

If you want to do a little extra work….

No! No more punk-ska, now its time of techno/trance/dance again 😛 Anyway I’ve give the song already, it has been heared in local radio/pubs.

I was expecting it to be horrible

I had nightmares even, I was dreaming about kyran running after me with a big guitar screaming “I TOLD YOU YOU MUST RECORD FIRST ALL THE BAND WITH METRONOME IDI*T!!” 😀

Best regards