Diary of an album recording - mammoth post

Cirrus

Christmas, New Year and families aren't condusive to album recording, it turns out.

That said I spent pretty much 3 full days last week editing drums for 20 tracks - mostly slip-editing, which is probably my least favourite chore. Some didn't need much, a couple I really had to go to town on! I was hoping I wouldn't have to bother, but some things were starting to annoy me about the performances so needs must!

Then yesterday I recorded some acoustic instruments at home - my practice studio where I do all the loud stuff has carpeted walls and really sounds a bit dull for acoustic guitar, whereas my back room at home with painted walls, bookshelves etc sounds a lot more alive; particulary for my little Taylor 6-string, which being a parlour guitar seems to thrive in smaller rooms.

I was going to ask lady Cirrus to take a picture, but she wasn't being very cooperative - something about being banished from the back room for an entire day apparently. So I did a selfie, Chrismas jumper and all. Still amazes me how difficult it is to properly demonstrate a mic's position in a photo - this one looks like it's basically resting on the guitar, but it's really not. It's an AT4050, set at just above chest height, maybe 30cm in front of my shoulder in my usual slouched playing position, pretty much directly in line with and pointed straight at the bridge of the instrument. With bigger, boomier guitars I'd probably start with the mic outin front of the 12th fret, but with this little player's guitar having the mic over the body and on the bass side gets a balance I prefer.



There was also some 12-string (ok, 11 string... I broke one of the B strings almost immediately!) action, and TBH I was kind of lazy there in that when I strummed a bit to start with I liked the sound fine, so I didn't bother moving the mic. But again, the 12 string is quite a bright and jangly instrument whereas with some full size acoustics there are annoying body resonances and woofy soundhole artifacts that mics are really sensitive to.

Then, finally, I recorded this little beauty for a couple of tracks;



Inherited by a friend, this thing is a bastard to tune, especially when your songs are recorded a semitone down from standard. (And the strings are likely older than me! But, it's got such a cool sound! Especially with a plectrum, I was getting an almost zipper like raked strum over chord changes. Stuck through an almost oscillating Delay plugin I managed to get the sound a bit away from 1900's folk, too. >- It's a pretty quiet instrument so I had the gain turned up pretty high at the mic preamp; at the end of one song I noticed I could hear the kitchen clock ticking under the final sustained chord. Decided to go with it since the song's kinda about time.

An interesting aside about the Autoharp - I started off playing it on my lap, but then by chance I held it up while strumming and noticed how much more open and resonant it sounded when the underside panel was free to resonate. So, I sat it on its little rubber feet on the desk so it'd be able to. I've no idea how they were supposed to be played!

Snap

what a great thread mate. Thanks for doing this, its really interesting. nice one

Snap

autoharps - aren't they supposed to be played held across your chest?

Look up PJ Harvey playing The Words That Maketh Murder, she plays one on it.

Cirrus

20 songs is taking even longer to record than I thought it'd take, and I knew it'd take ages. This is probably a good demonstration of why rock stars don't all have boring day jobs - it makes the important stuff take much longer!  |)

As of today I've done guitar+bass for 6 songs, bass for a further 8, then there's 6 which are still just drums.

I don't know if everyone is the same as me in this, but when I've got a project like this on the go nothing else really matters and I feel like time is always slipping away from me. I started writing these songs in August, drum recording was the start of December and it's already the middle of January. It just flies past. When I saw there was snow on the ground this morning and heard there might be more to come, my first thought was a hope that I would still be able to get to the studio after work today. It kinda consumes you. I spent Monday night at home to spend time with my other half, and I had to kinda check myself every now and then to not just get in the car to go and make music.

Cirrus

Guitar Recording

A mistake I've made more than once when faced with lots of upcoming guitar sessions is to try to reinvent the wheel. I'll mike up all the amps I can get my hands on with all my mics, rip my pedalboard to pieces, and start experimenting like I've never used a guitar rig before, looking for tones. I'll start recording a song and end up with Strat+ac30 doing a verse, Les paul+Marshall doing a chorus, Soloing with a cranked Orange, bringing in Mesa riffage at the end...

...and producing a total clusterfuck with no character because of a failure to commit to a sound

It works for others, but it doesn't work for me. I feel kinda the same about it as I do about mixing speaker types in cabs - some people love it and I've heard it sound fantastic, but when I try it I feel like I'm just not committing, trying to defer a decision about which speaker I want to sound like. For my music, I try to avoid the scattergun approach, pick a specific sound and give the instrument a definite character for the song.

To that end, with each song I'm picking one main setup - one guitar, one amp, one pedal for solo boosts/ extra character in sections, and only deviating from that if there's a good musical or production reason to do so. For example, if one part of the song really wants to explode into something suddenly huge sounding, yeah I might track a different guitar/ amp combo to do a L/R panned double that sounds wider than just the same tone panned L/R would. Or maybe there's a verse where I want the guitar tone to do exactly what my AC30 can do, but most of the song wants more amp distortion... so it's not dogmatic really, it's just that I'm trying to put some thought into it.

In practice, I'm mostly using my Mesa 2x12 combo miked like this;

I like this setup. The SM57 is a standard for high volume guitar miking for a good reason, and the AT4050 is a good companion mic to it because it's got much smoother upper mids, a bit of a lower midrange boost, picks up the high end more transparently than the '57 and is a bit punchier down below which is nice with a 2x12.

They're positioned so the capsules are as close together as I can get them, roughly 10cm off the grill cloth (I tried them as close as they could get to the speaker and thought there was slightly too much bass, plus these G12-65s with their big dustcaps seem to appreciate a little distance to stop the mic from focussing on one narrow part of the cone and get a better blend of harmonics.) Both capsules are pretty much in line with where the dustcap meets the cone. I made sure both mics were in phase by donning headphones, cranking the amp up so it hissed, inverting the phase of one of the mics then monitoring them both nice and loud so I could really hear the phase cancellation. Then by gently rocking one of the mics forward and backward, you can listen for the position that gives the greatest cancellation - as you move the mic you can hear the comb filtering move in the hiss just like someone's stuck a phaser on it!

They're plugged into my FMR RNP then being blended together at my Soundcraft desk in pretty much a 50/50 mix before going into one input of my soundcard to be recorded onto one mono track. Otherwise, every project file would have like 20 tracks of guitar and even just choosing relative balances would be a pain. Better to commit now and not worry about it ever again, in my mind! Plus it makes me actually listen and evaluate the tones there and then, keeps me in the moment.

I've also got my AC30 miked up similarly, though I also like a single Oktava 012 on it, but honestly I'm not using it as much as I thought I would. I think the Stiletto has great cleans once the volume's turned up and it just seems to be suiting the sound in my head for lots of the tracks. The AC30's mostly just covering the chimey, middy edge-of-clean sound that nothing else quite does the same, and as a pedal platform with my Rat for distorted doubles and the occasional solo that has to sit among particularly busy sections, where the lack of low end and pushed midrange comes in really handy!

As I'm tracking guitar I'm also building basic mixes - panning, level, a bit of EQ if I feel it wants it, maybe compression if I want to pin a big riff in place, delay/reverb send - so that I can judge parts and tones with some perspective, work out what sections need more and when enough is enough.

PolarityMan

Cirrus said:

I don't know if everyone is the same as me in this, but when I've got a project like this on the go nothing else really matters and I feel like time is always slipping away from me. 

I start off like that but once things slip past about 6 weeks as a band we tend to get more excited about writing new stuff, and tend to get bored with the older material which we will typically only have got round to recording about 2 years after writing.

I sometimes think I have some kind of musical ADD.

PolarityMan

Cirrus said:

Guitar Recording

A mistake I've made more than once when faced with lots of upcoming guitar sessions is to try to reinvent the wheel. I'll mike up all the amps I can get my hands on with all my mics, rip my pedalboard to pieces, and start experimenting like I've never used a guitar rig before, looking for tones. I'll start recording a song and end up with Strat+ac30 doing a verse, Les paul+Marshall doing a chorus, Soloing with a cranked Orange, bringing in Mesa riffage at the end...

An interesting observation, we've suffered from this in a slightly different way before in that we recorded guitars over several sessions in a number of different locations and as a result ended up with different sounds that way.

This time to mitigate the chance of that happening my plan is to produce a tone map up front, and instead of going through and recording all of the guitar for one song, then starting on another song, instead capture all the same tones across all the songs at once.

ie/ Do all the core rhythm distortion tones in one sitting then do a day doing cleans in a  second sitting etc, all the "special" tones like solos, weird effected bits and such like in another session and so on.

guitarfishbay

I don't actually care if all the tones 100% match as long as sections flow and songs feel like they're from the same album. But I think getting things to flow when there are changes within a song is difficult because a change to guitar tone might need a compensation in any of the other instruments/vocals. I've stuffed it up before due to crap listening environment (bass changes were poorly controlled). I think you have to be confident, in your monitoring environment as well as skill to keep the quality consistent throughout.

Cirrus

PolarityMan;934327" said:

This time to mitigate the chance of that happening my plan is to produce a tone map up front, and instead of going through and recording all of the guitar for one song, then starting on another song, instead capture all the same tones across all the songs at once.

ie/ Do all the core rhythm distortion tones in one sitting then do a day doing cleans in a  second sitting etc, all the "special" tones like solos, weird effected bits and such like in another session and so on.

Good point! I've actually done that before, and it's a great idea for time efficiency if you know roughly in advance what guitar tracks you want in each song. I'm doing it differently this time mainly because I want to get into the headspace of each song in the hope of finding new inspiration. So there's still a bit of writing/discovery going on I guess and it's helping to have the time to switch between different sounds and listen to how the track is developing.

guitarfishbay;934356" said:

I don't actually care if all the tones 100% match as long as sections flow and songs feel like they're from the same album. But I think getting things to flow when there are changes within a song is difficult because a change to guitar tone might need a compensation in any of the other instruments/vocals. I've stuffed it up before due to crap listening environment (bass changes were poorly controlled). I think you have to be confident, in your monitoring environment as well as skill to keep the quality consistent throughout.

I had one song over the weekend that took fucking AGES, exactly because the guitar tone changed so much - going from scooped fuzzy riffs to chorused clean ones into middy loud amp distorted chords, and it was a real struggle to make it all hang together and tell a story from start to finish.

Cirrus

Oh my god, more than a year later and this is still happening. Someone shoot me.

guitarfishbay

Same here. Drums and guitar done for 11.5 songs. Though I had months off last year which meant it took weeks if not more than a month to even get semi decent on guitar again. But who else is going to do it?

wave100

Good post guys. Look forward to hearing the end result!

Cirrus

Posted a track here; it's mostly mixed, likely to make some small tweaks as the other tracks come together to get an overall album sound. Feel like I've slightly overcompressed the vocal, for example. I'd like to update this thread with posts about the vocal recording, and the mixing process, but I'm struggling to think of what to write beyond "I tried everything for ages until it wasn't terrible any more" 

http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/comment/1376511#Comment_1376511

Cirrus

18 months later update... 

The Saga of the non-professional musician.

As of my last post 18 months ago, I had the 12 track album ready to go. I never released it because my band was kind of starting to fail so I was trying to inject life back into that. Then I started practicing some of these 12 songs with drummer and bassist from my band, and lost a lot of confidence because I couldn't actually sing them and play the guitar parts live, just didn't have the physical stamina since it's all right at the top of my range.

So last summer, I re-recorded 7 of the songs in lower keys - between 1 tone and a third lower - and this time got my band's drummer to lay down the beats in a commercial studio over two days. That was really good fun.

Those 7 tracks were ready to go at the beginning of this year, meanwhile my band was in its death-throws, which made things politically quite fraught. I still wanted the drummer and bassist to help with this project. And we had three months of practices, but eventually the drummer admitted he just doesn't have time for it any more meaning this project came to a grinding halt and my band of 10 years came to an end.

However.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I feverishly recorded and mixed yet another album of new stuff between March and the end of June - made the final mix tweaks about a month ago. And it's better than the album I was writing about in this thread. It's more me, it's played and produced better, I've been really pushing my singing and feeling much more confident about that.

So now, with my drummer packing it in and my band falling apart I'm in a funny place.

I've got no rehearsal/ recording space (we moved out last weekend), no band mates. I've got an album that I want to release, probably the most proud I am of anything I've ever done musically. And then this curious mis-mash of a project from over the last three years; 12 tracks that were ready to go in Feb 2017, then 7 of those re-recorded and ready to go in Jan of this year.

Last week I realised that thematically, they can be split quite neatly in two.

6 of the original 12 tell the story of a migrant forced from their country by war, travelling across the med to Europe, then many years later returning to their home country and trying to come to terms with their past - the family they lost etc.

5 of the 7 I re-recorded look at the varying attitudes to migration that we have in the west.

So, fuck it.  Next Friday, the first 6 tracks are going up on Spotify, iTunes, Bandcamp etc. They're the original 2-year old mixes and bits make me cringe, but I spent months of solid work on that project and I might as well put it out into the world. As much as I think I could do the production better today, I'm also proud of the songs, the lyrics, the feeling that I put into it.


So, here it is. Oh, and I talked to someone at Nasa to make sure I could use this picture of the Northern Sahara taken from the ISS;

duotone

Brilliant!

As an old boss said to me "The man that made no mistakes, made Fuck All". Good on you for getting it out there.

Am looking forward to giving them a blast next weekend!

andy_k

great story, looking forward to hearing the final product, 
cheers
andy k

pmg

Glad you’re getting a resolution to this and have chose to release.  I’ve recently completed a two year album project with my band so I understand how it an feel to get to the finished product.  Look forward to hearing.

Cirrus

It's done.

https://horizoneer.bandcamp.com

duotone

Saw this thread last night and have just listened to the this link this morning.

Really enjoyed it. Way too good to be left on a hardrive somewhere and not 'out there'

Cirrus

Thanks @duotone!