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FOR MUSICIANS ONLYHurricane Sessions - Day OneFriday, November 14, 2008 -- Spent the morning packing, making sure I had everything, including new requests from Thursday night. The giant canvas bag, which is supposed to be for putting things on the roof of the car, but I used it for some light, bulky boxes of lights. And I was throwing things into it at the last minute, like a notebook, ADAT tapes and an extra extension cord. I did forget the snake, which I realized was missing just about when I got to Tucson. I didn't panic because they have enough cables to mic their own stuff, so if I was a few short, they would pick up my slack. As it turned out, we used almost exclusively all of my cabling, which would make the teardown a breeze instead of a test to figure out what was whose. Arrived at Carl's in the mid-afternoon, about 3 p.m., maybe a little later. Almost as soon as I pulled up, Carl and Cara were out and immediately started carrying things in, including the giant canvas bag. The worst of it was my studio-in-a-box, which consisted of the ADAT, a ProTools Digi001, a patch bay, EQ, Mac G3, 17" flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, 250 GB hard drive, and a bag of patch cables, connectors, etc. Carl and I hefted it in. A table whooshed in, my spot was assigned, drinks were served, food was offered. I took my time unpacking. I wanted to decompress a little from the drive. Besides, both Carl and Cara were bursting with ideas -- 'Can we do this, can we do that?' -- on a dozen subjects. They're like creative faucets, with ideas pouring out constantly. When I first recalled this, it seems like we started recording almost immediately when I walked in the door. In reality, it was several hours before we got around to it. It was the sudden rush of input that made the time streak past. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Carl started running a mic cable and setting a ceiling hook for the sweet AKG condenser mic that he's got, so I did a quick computer set-up. To avoid vibration, we put a hook in the ceiling, used a simple twist-tie to hold it in place while allowing quick adjustments for the height of each singer. Cara ran through a song called "Runner," which I had previously heard, but only as a stereo mix. We did one take, then Tim arrives, carrying a guitar. For a few minutes, this ramps the discussion back up to a frenzied pace again, but Tim looks around and says, "You got this set up already? Can I do a couple really quick?" And so he did. We were using the vocal mic and an acoustic guitar. We did Tim's first take at 9:25. First was "Come Back to Me," which we recorded two versions of. This was most likely because I wasn't quite ready the first time. After the second take, Tim says, "Ready for the next one?" "Don't you want to listen to that one back?" "No. I can't sing it any better than that. If you got it, we can move on." The next song was supposed to be something called "I'm Leaving, but ended up as a first take of "Fire Comes By Your Window." Tim needs a drink of water, but wants to do it again. In the meantime, Carl takes over, does an acoustic version of "I Want You To Be Mine," which will be recorded the next day as part of the full band recording." Tim does a cover of Ozzy Osbourne's "Changes,' followed by a second, much better take of "Fire Come By Your Window." Then, after a brief period of all three of them brainstorming simultaneously, which makes me feel like I'm in the middle of a whirlwind, Tim is outta there. "Gotta run. See you tomorrow." His last track started at 10:04, so he did 5 songs in less than 30 minutes, even taking a short break and letting Carl do a song in that time period as well. I had also made a template for the acoustic sessions (4 mono audio tracks, one aux input and a master fader), which let us average 5 minutes per song. And even at that, I felt like changing sessions for each song was holding them back. It's not that they were rushing through songs. They knew what they wanted to play, were well-rehearsed and nailed it the first time, every time. I could have let them keep going and done one 45-minute take, but it really only took about a minute between songs. Tracks were already assigned. All I was really doing was save the previous song, open the session for a new song, click on the record enable for the two tracks and it's ready to go. Cara and Carl got into gear, warming up with "Gold Dust Woman." This was followed by "Superman" and "Hero's Way." Carl did an acoustic-only version of "See the Fire," and that was it for the evening. I planned on going back to that last one and having them both do vocal tracks, but it wasn't going to happen that night. This may be one of the few things I failed to remember to come back to and finish, but that's okay because I'm sure that by the time I get through all the tracks, I'll have a punch list of things to correct. From a recording standpoint, this was a snap. Two tracks. For the most part, the vocal mic seemed to reject the guitar at 15 or 20 feet away. But there's still bleed on the tracks where the guitarist was the singer. Unavoidable, unless I had made them go back and sing along to the recorded guitar track instead of a live one to get complete isolation. This could still happen later. From a planning viewpoint, we're already ahead of the game. Nine songs recorded; seven of them originals. The acoustic versions are perfect for filing the PA (songwriting) copyrights when we figure out exactly what we want to release. Some of the takes may have spurious noise in the background, which will actually prove useful from an instructional point of view a little later, but overall, there is very little background noise or bleed. This brings me to a few minor points. First of all, Carl didn't really turn his house into a studio. He remodeled and, while it is more conducive to recording (especially these acoustic tracks) because it opened up the spaces, the drums weren't going to make an appearance there. A Yamaha electronic drum kit was at the ready, but it was never used. The point is that it was not a perfect environment, but we were all in the same place at the same time, which seems to be the hardest part of the whole process. The second point is that, if you can get everyone else to shut up for five minutes and you're using a halfway decent vocal mic, you can get a perfectly fine vocal track in just about any room. |
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At top right, you'll find a simple stereo mix of some of these acoustic takes. At this point, I've done only a few steps. Step One -- Make a backup of all the sessions. This allows you to do destructive editing, which keeps the number of files in the session down. If you somehow ruin the vocal track, for instance, you can bring it back in and start over.
Step Two is to take each track, and bring the levels up to somewhere in the -0.3 dB to -1 dB range. Since I forgot to name the tracks before we started recording, now is a good time to do that, too. Both of the tracks in our example are prime candidates for some compression, but we're just making reference mixes here. We're not going to spend a lot of time on them yet. I did, however, run Cara's vocals through the "vocal levelor" compression setting, at the default values, because her tracks needed it more than the male vocals. The gain was added after the compression.
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Then I backed off the guitar a little, which made it seem thin, so I used an EQ plug-in to boost the low end a little and fatten it out.
Bounce to disk for the mp3 file; 256k, at the highest quality setting.
Then I repeated the same procedure for every song. Having started with a template, used the same guitar for every track, plugged directly into the Digi001, I can go through each song and apply exactly the same settings to the same tracks. No EQ on the vocals. No amps, no effects boxes. Nothing has been seriously tweaked to sound better, other than the minor things outlined above.
Tracks 3 and 4 had been placed there for harmonies, but I don't think we used them on anything, at least not on Friday. |
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I
threw a little reverb on the vocals. Just a touch, because I'm
not going to automate at this point, either.