2008-01-31
Guerilla Recording
A little over a month ago I set my recording rig up in Quentin's living room and The 359s recorded a 4 song EP. We're planning a full blown album length album but we needed to get something out there to get shows and finance the album a little.
I was a little pessimistic going in. There was a lot of flutter echo and I was completely unfamiliar with the whole environment. After getting over a little spell of grumpiness I decided to just throw everything for a loop. I did nothing in a manner that I normally would ... except the kick drum. I still stuck an ATM25 in the hole.
The drums were set up near a corner. I had two MXL 990s in a "Glyn Johns" style: one over the snare pointing down and one by the floor tom looking across. At first I had just the overheads and the kick mic and I was pretty happy with the sound. I ended up adding an Oktava MK319 under the snare to catch a little more crack out of it.
I used Oktava MK012s on guitars. I kept them out about a foot, much further than normal. Quentin's 2x12 cabinet has two different speakers, one old Jensen and one Greenback (I think). The Jensen is really smooth and round sounding while the Celestion has quite a bit more bite. Depending on the song I would move his mic from speaker to speaker.
Jon played through his Deluxe Reverb. After trying my Hot Rod Deluxe and a few different settings we settled on the Deluxe Reverb, Again, with an MK012 about a foot out.
I didn't DI my bass. I rolled it over firing into a couch and stuck an SM57 right up on the grill. I've been really satisfied with my bass sound the last year or so and I got out of the recording exactly what I was expecting.
Quentin's living room has a loft above half of it. I stuck a Nady ribbon mic up in the loft, just peeking out over the edge but looking straight across the room above us. This mic was used as the closest thing to reverb on the instruments. I squashed it and cut some high and low.
All the songs are live on the instruments. No overdubs, no edits (except for muting, I find it easier to just cut the pieces out instead of writing a bunch of automation), just playing. They're a little rough, but we're a rough band.
By the time we got to vocals we were all getting pretty comfortable with the beer. That coupled with Jon's dislike of recording vocals made me decide to just blast the recording through the stereo and have him sing. We figured any bleed would blend right in with the aesthetic of the rest of the recording.
I will be doing this a lot more. Jon was more relaxed and it was a more enjoyable experience for the bystanders. We got through vocals in about forty-five minutes. I've had times where people have spent that much time on one song! After vocals we did a few pieces of tambourine and drank!
All of the critical monitoring was done on headphones. I have a pair of AKG D240s that I am pretty familiar with. We would also blast it through the stereo to feel a little more impact. I couldn't make any judgements on that since I had never heard it before. A couple days later when I pulled it up to mix I was shocked at how good it sounded. The mix was essentially a "faders up" approach but it was really coming through well on my monitors. I made the few cuts for mutes, cleaned up the beginning and end of each song, and did a few tweaks. Pretty minimal EQ and compression and added a touch of delay on the vocals. We had it mastered at Westend by Duane Trower and it came back a shined up version of what we sent, perfect!
Jud is just about done with the art and then we'll get a few pressed. The experience of this was so positive that we're going to keep trying this experiment. We're going to pick a few places, maybe even some studios, and do a few songs in a day and call them done. This should be an exciting year with a lot of music coming from us.
We should have some songs on our MySpace in a couple weeks (once we have some CDs in hand).
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