Now that “Abigail” is done, I thought I’d write up some notes on how it was recorded and mixed, in chrono­log­i­cal order.  This should be inter­est­ing to the two audio engi­neer­ing nerds in my social cir­cle and is prob­a­bly going to get pretty long, but fuck it.

(PS, yeah, it turned out to be really long, dis­or­ga­nized and not at all edited or proof-read.  This is engi­neer prose, with which you will become famil­iar should you start lurk­ing on pro audio forums.)

PRE-PROD

Pre-production con­sisted of the band sit­ting around dur­ing a break at prac­tice, slug­ging the cus­tom­ary Budweiser tall­boys and pirate liquor, fig­ur­ing we should play a show soon.  Which led inevitably to the idea of doing a demo; we knew we were ready to kill an audi­ence, but we had to con­vince pro­mot­ers of that.  From there it was a mat­ter of choos­ing the songs and devis­ing a plan.  I was the de-facto pro­ducer on this gig, so the plan was mine for the making.

THE PLAN

I was sure of a few things:  we’d record in the base­ment of our apart­ment (where we prac­tice), we’d use equip­ment we already owned, and we’d stay as close to our live sound as pos­si­ble (i.e. no extra parts via over­dub­bing).  With the excep­tion of the last fac­tor, this is how I’ve done all of my record­ing:  in a shitty, bad-sounding space, with inex­pen­sive but carefully-chosen equipment.

I debated record­ing us as a full band and over­dub­bing Stolas’s vocals later, but the space was too small, and the band too loud, for that to be practical.  It would have ended up as unin­tel­li­gi­ble mush.  Had we been record­ing much smaller gui­tar amps we could have got­ten away with it, but the beasts that Zosimus and I play through demand accu­rate near- and far-micing.  (More on the beasts later.)

I decided that we’d layer tracks one at a time, and had a rough idea of the order:  drums, lead gui­tar, rhythm gui­tar, bass, vocals.  The ratio­nale for record­ing lead before rhythm is that a lot of my lead parts are com­pletely solo – no one else is play­ing, and I set the tempo of the part, and often the rest of the song.

I also wanted to stick with my usual phi­los­o­phy, cribbed from much more suc­cess­ful and tal­ented engi­neers than I: make it sound as good as pos­si­ble now, when­ever now is.  No fix­ing it in the mix or in the mas­ter.  This is uncon­tro­ver­sial but bears repeat­ing.  You hear me, The Thungs?

DRUMS

Through some kind of black magic, Xristophage acquired a Sonor drum kit at a laugh­able price exactly when he needed it.  It’s a small kit, which suits us, oddly;  prop­erly tuned, it’s nice and crisp, and sounds more black metal than power metal, prop­erly empha­siz­ing Xristophage’s com­pletely fucked-up style of drumming.

(There’s another kind of black magic at work in the base­ment:  it used to be an iron worker’s work­shop and one night while mess­ing with some new designs he had a heart attack and died.  Where we prac­tice.  This is not a lie.)

We recorded through Zosimus’s PreSonus 8-channel inter­face into my MacBook Pro, run­ning Logic Express.  We’d used this for the Seize Them! record, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect:  not as pretty-sounding as my Aardvark, but def­i­nitely up to the task.

I like the drum sound on the record because I did some weird stuff with mic selec­tion and place­ment and it worked out well.  Recording drums is by far the trick­i­est part of record­ing in a bad-sounding room and I think this one went well.  Here’s the mic list:

Kick:  AKG D112 (luv u 4eva baby)

Snare:  Shure SM81 (a fuck­ing weird choice, I’ll explain later)

Rack Toms:  one SM57 each

Hat:  SM57

Overhead left:  Behringer Omni

Overhead right:  there was none, ha!

Floor Tom and right cym­bals (aka not an over­head):  Rode NT1-A

Standard choices:  AKG on the kick, 57s on the toms and hat.  No surprises.

For snare, I’ve always fol­lowed the two-57s-one-over-one-under-flip-polarity gospel with great results.  This time, since a bunch of my SM57s had dis­ap­peared, this wasn’t an option;  I selected the SM81, a small-diaphragm con­denser, think­ing it would get all crispy on me.  It did.

I’ve used a matched pair of Behringer omni­di­rec­tional ref­er­ence mics as over­heads before and always really liked them (espe­cially since they were like $20 each).  Somehow I man­aged to lose one of them (only to find it a few days later), so I impro­vised:  the Rode NT1-A, a large-diaphragm con­denser often used for vocal or acoustic gui­tar, posi­tioned pretty close so as to pick up some prox­im­ity effect on the tom (mean­ing extra bass – the “croony” fea­ture of large-diaphragms), and some­what off-axis from the cym­bals.  That way I’d get a solid tom with plenty of pres­ence, and the cym­bals wouldn’t bring out the nasty top-end pres­ence that the NT1-A is noto­ri­ous for.

This was a stroke of genius on my part and it worked really well, con­sid­er­ing the envi­ron­ment.  That’s not hyper­bole.  I rule because of that decision.

Xristophage recorded two takes of each song.  Generally speak­ing the first one was absolutely fine, but X wouldn’t be sat­is­fied for no rea­son he could artic­u­late, and then we’d do it again and it would be that micro­scopic bit bet­ter, sat­is­fy­ing what­ever lies in X’s dark heart.

His head­phones kept fly­ing off so we strapped them to his head using a bright-orange sur­gi­cal mate­r­ial gen­er­ally used for treat­ing burn victims.

Schneidaar, Zosimus and I played scratch tracks to give Xristophage some ref­er­ence while he was play­ing.  Because I am a total fuck­ing idiot, I did not print these tracks to tape, mak­ing my life extremely dif­fi­cult later (but not any­one else’s).

LEAD GUITAR

Deep breath.

Man, this sucked so, so fuck­ing hard.  Every Flaming Tusk song fea­tures yours truly, Don Blood, play­ing through­out the entire song with no breaks, often as Xristophage pro­vides accents to solo lead parts.  And I didn’t print the scratch tracks, mean­ing that for any part where it was just me play­ing, I had to try to reverse-time my parts so I would come in exactly on time with X.  Some of these parts are 10-15 sec­onds long, which may not seem like much, but remem­ber that to come in on time I’m talk­ing microseconds.

I got lucky, or maybe I’m good, because that process could have gone much worse, but it still hurt like hell.  Plus I was record­ing alone so I didn’t even have any­one to hit the but­tons for me:  play the part, fuck up, do some shit on the com­puter, play the part, fuck up.

I’ve recorded a shit-ton of myself play­ing gui­tar but never any­thing near this break­neck.  This was the first time I was actu­ally ner­vous to lay down gui­tar tracks, and I set­tled into it, but it was still a beat­ing.  At the end of the win­ning take of “I Nap In Blood,” I was in that beau­ti­ful record­ing state, where you’re doing every­thing exactly right, but only because there’s an inner voice going “don’tfuckupdon’tfuckupdon’tfuckup.”

I almost vom­ited after that one.

Anyway, nerd stuff.  I play a cherry-red Fender Stratocaster, basi­cally the least metal gui­tar pos­si­ble, set on the bridge pickup, through an Orange Thunderverb 200 with an Orange 4×12 cab­i­net (loaded with Celestions).  I close-mic’ed a 57 on a speaker picked at ran­dom.  For my far mic, I used the pride of my col­lec­tion:  an Audio Technica 4060 tube mic.  I wanted to take a lit­tle bit of the siz­zle out of the Orange but have the flex­i­bil­ity to put it back in later, and to empha­size the bass on the JUDJUDJUD parts.

After two evenings of record­ing I comped my parts (i.e. took two or three takes and selected the best parts of all of them).  This began a won­der­ful trend on the EP:  almost no comp­ing.  X’s and Stolas’s parts weren’t comped at all, Zos’s parts only once or twice, Schneidaar had maybe four edits.  I was the comp king, with about ten edits across the four songs – mostly due to the reverse-timing problem.

BASS

Because Zosimus has a some­what unpre­dictable sched­ule, we ended up record­ing Schneidaar next.  He plays an Ibanez Verdine White Signature right-handed bass but plays it lefty.  Yeah, that’s right.  Whenever we play he’s men­tally invert­ing every­thing.  It’s really dis­gust­ing and impres­sive, espe­cially when you con­sider that he plays a lefty bass in his other band.  Damn.

We ran the bass through my Pod XT, for which I had down­loaded the Bass Pod Upgrade 9000 or what­ever it’s called.  It’s just a set of patches for the Pod that recre­ate clas­sic bass amps instead of gui­tar amps.  There was no way I was going to mic his bass amp;  it was either the Pod or direct-in.  We got a pretty solid sound out of the Pod, and I resisted the impulse to make him sound like the dude from The Smiths.

Schneidaar knocked his parts out in an evening (a short one, even) while we drank beer.  If mem­ory serves he did two takes of two songs and one take of the other two.

Now would be a good time to men­tion the I Nap In Blood Club.  We’re all mem­bers, because each one of us slammed out a win­ning take of I Nap In Blood, in its entirety, on the first try.  Which is really sick when you think about it, espe­cially as we’re not god­like stu­dio guys or anything.

RHYTHM GUITAR Zosimus plays a Gibson SG (some­body has to play the badass metal gui­tar).  He runs it into a Hiwatt head – before he got it I told him it was really the only amp that could make me jeal­ous after the Orange – and some crazy franken­cab­i­net 4×12 made by an insane man some­where.  He has two types of speak­ers – can’t remem­ber which – two up and two down.  One pair is a shade brighter than the other which gave us some options.

Our sigil is painted on the tolex of his cab­i­net in dried-blood red.

I close-mic’ed one of the brighter speak­ers with a 57, because in gen­eral the SG+Hiwatt gives him more bottom-end than even he really needs and I wanted to take the edge off.  Especially since we’ve all tuned our gui­tars down 2.5 steps.  For the far mic I used the same AT4060 I used on my amp and for the same reasons.

Zos knocked his parts out really, really fuck­ing fast, beat­ing Schneidaar, even.  All bran­gin’ with the JUDJUDJUD really hard and not fuck­ing up.  It was a pleasure.

VOCAL

This was Stolas’s first time record­ing, ever.  I’m pretty psy­ched to have been the one to shove a micro­phone up his ass.  It was truly a new expe­ri­ence, too, because he’s used to shov­ing a micro­phone down his throat.

Okay, it wasn’t his ass:  it was the AT4060 again, my go-to vocal mic.  We used an actual pop fil­ter (the thing that keeps you from mak­ing nasty plo­sive sounds and spit­ting flecks of corn chip into the mic), because Zosimus had one, and not my years-old nylon-stocking-over-a-coat-hanger home­made ver­sion.  It’s a really croony mic, and looks the part, what with the shock mount and all.  Stolas told me he wanted to swing it down to the floor a la Bobby Darin; I told him if he did that I’d punch him in the mouth.

After a quick les­son in back­ing off the mic when you want to get loud, Stolas was off to the races.  I ran him through my RNP and RNC – the Really Nice Preamp and Really Nice Compressor.  If you do any bud­get home record­ing, buy these.  They’re rea­son­ably cheap and fuck­ing indispensable.

We double-tracked his vocal to give it some extra body.  He did great with this, except on a few minor occa­sions.  I had the option of recre­at­ing the double-tracking by tak­ing one take and time-shifting it slightly, but I actu­ally liked the mis­takes as they were – fuck­ing creepy.

THE MIX

Mixing this record was really easy.  This is the beauty of the “make it sound good now” approach, and the fact that we were going for a straight­for­ward sound any­way.  (I did fuck around with gat­ing all of X’s drums and it sounded retarded.)  I did almost zero EQ; equal­iza­tion was done by bal­anc­ing the mics, since we had more than one mic on every instru­ment except bass and vocal, and the mics were placed well.  (The old listen-with-one-ear trick is still king for plac­ing mics.)

I added a touch (seri­ously, a touch) of com­pres­sion to each gui­tar so they would sit in the mix.  The bass was lim­ited all to fuck as is SOP.  The drums got a healthy dose of com­pres­sion, and a bit of EQ on the kick and snare, in both cases to de-emphasize bleed and bring out the nat­ural instruments.

Spatially, the setup was pretty straight­for­ward – drums panned accord­ing to drummer’s posi­tion (as opposed to audience’s posi­tion) on all tracks but one.  Bass slightly off from cen­ter, gui­tars hard left and hard right (though the lead is posi­tioned a touch toward the cen­ter, rel­a­tively speaking).

For the vocal, I panned each track 1/8th left and right, gated them, and added a touch of black-metal reverb.

Once I had the mics bal­anced, I cre­ated sub-mixes for all the instru­ments for ease of fader-pulling.

I did a bit of gain-riding (and every­one laughed every time I said “gain-riding”) to bring up the solo in “Ichor” and bring out a few vocal parts that had got­ten lost.

I went through about four rounds of ref­er­ence mixes, lis­ten­ing on dif­fer­ent sys­tems until I had some­thing that trans­lated rea­son­ably well.  The rest of the band, espe­cially Zosimus and Schneidaar, pro­vided vital feed­back through­out the process, espe­cially when things sounded really out of whack, which they often did.  I mixed on head­phones, which sucks, and makes broad ref­er­ence lis­ten­ing absolutely nec­es­sary.  Comes with the territory.

AFTERWARDS

I really wanted to mas­ter this record, but my mas­ter­ing setup was pretty much destroyed when I moved from PC to Mac ear­lier this year.  X has a friend, James Cargill, who did a great job mas­ter­ing the record for us.  The painful piece was lis­ten­ing to the first mas­ter with the band and reverse-engineering what he did:  what plu­g­ins and in what order.  He’d explained his process to X, who con­firmed all my guesses.  After tak­ing the record from nonex­is­tence to final mixes, not tak­ing the last few steps kind of hurt, but at least we found a guy who did as well as I would have – prob­a­bly better.

The demo became an EP after we heard James’s mas­ters – I just couldn’t call it a demo any­more.  It’s a solid, home-recorded EP, made under crappy con­di­tions but with out­sized returns.

So that’s the extremely long and some­what dis­or­ga­nized story.  If you actu­ally read this whole thing, you have pas­sion and emo­tional prob­lems, which are the hall­marks of engi­neer­ing tal­ent and poten­tial, so keep record­ing, or start doing it.  Music never lets you down.