Starting an album recording project tomorrow

[JTI]

Had a play around with one of the tracks last night on my little desktop speakers. Obviously rough round the edges, no bass to fill out the ratty strat sound and there are things like overly loud verse hi hats that'd require automation to fix but kinda shows the mono drums, stereo room ambience etc and what some compression does to the space.

This has a "belongs in a Tarantino soundtrack" vibe. Dig it!

 

[Cirrus]

This has a "belongs in a Tarantino soundtrack" vibe. Dig it!

The singer's gonna be over the moon with that - it's exactly what we were going for.

 

[Moondog Wily]

Had a play around with one of the tracks last night on my little desktop speakers. Obviously rough round the edges, no bass to fill out the ratty strat sound and there are things like overly loud verse hi hats that'd require automation to fix but kinda shows the mono drums, stereo room ambience etc and what some compression does to the space.

Sounds like a fun project! Looking forward to hearing more!!

 

[Cirrus]

Second recording long weekend.

I deigned to allow some drums to be in stereo for certain tracks. There was more of the same (as described above) and also some fun bits - recording a live fuzz jam with guitars and drums going mad in the room together, a full band live recording with acoustic panel amp dens to control spill. We got the ghosts of dead '60s US AM radio evangelists coming through an old lap steel. Not what we expected in Birmingham, UK, 2023. Other than that, none of the kind of technical gremlins that plagued us two weeks ago.


The live recording was my favourite one. We had 4 mics on drums (one of the snare mics pictured isn't plugged in) in a "Recorderman" style. Bass cab was close to the drums but facing away, as that at least made the spill less wishy washy than having it over on the other side of the room. Lap steel into my little DIY tweed, and singer played a bass six into his Supro.

Lap steel into delay is just so much fun. I have no idea how to play the f*cking thing. we did like 8 takes and I just picked the one we screwed up least on. Isolation was good enough that we were able to do half a dozen little punch ins and I slid a couple of bass notes around to fix a part where he was late to come back in.

We've got 16 songs started now so I think we need to draw a line under opening up any new ideas for now.

 

[Cirrus]

Well, I let this one die didn't I?

It all went slow for a long time. The singer had some personal stuff to work through that made things go slowly for a while - it felt like he was avoiding vocal recording. Plus, a mental defence mechanism I have; I pretend that it'll take about as many hours to do the guitars and vocals as it takes to do the bass and drum tracks. Because then I can face starting the project - if I really thought about the endless evenings & weekend days stretching out ahead of me, recording, shepherding 4 sets of egos and dreams, writing, re-writing, second guessing, dreaming new things up, editing takes together, playing with sounds... it'd be too much and I'd never want to start a recording project.

The big roadblock we had to get over was an interpersonal one. I'm hyper focused and driven to get results when it comes to recording. I've found it's the only way to really get shit done. I want to get home at night and be able to list off the things that have been accomplished on the road to the finish line. That means I think well ahead of time about what the part is going to be and how it fits into the whole song. It's not that I don't go experimenting and trying new things, it's just that when it comes down to it my instinct is to trust the decisions we made and the things that came naturally to the songs over months or years of writing, rehearsing and playing them live. The singer is not like that. At the drop of a hat, apparently on a whim, he'll chuck out everything he did before and just be like "what if the melody did this?"

And he'll do it for everything. He's got a real irreverence for any part that's already been written, and much prefers the excitement of just trying stuff in the moment. During tracking, and I mean any tracking - bass, guitar, vocals (his own and anyone else's) he'll let you get like half a take in before suggesting something different. Something that changes everything.

There's a golden rule in producing. Never say no to any idea, give it a try. So you give it a try. And you're halfway through giving it a try when the next suggestion comes. So you try that. And he seems to not realise that you've not actually tracked a full take of the first idea yet. Then you realise the new idea rubs badly against the bassline, so that'll need to be changed. Or the guitar part that I egotistically am attached to, a part that I'm proud of, spent 3 hours recording the week before and had honed over a year or playing the song live, suddenly doesn't work any more. And then I realise 2 hours have gone by and I don't have a single workable take.

At that point, I admit I started to say no, to protect past effort and decisions, going back to the original part in order to have *something* and that caused tension. It's taken me many months to start to understand how to navigate it and how our different methods can coexist.

You know what the real twat thing about it all is? The singer is great. He is inspired, and he has a vision. And sometimes following his ideas gets us to a magical place we would have otherwise missed. It just makes it all take so much longer.

So... June and July, we did about 4 tracks worth of lead vocals, bass for every track, and guitars for 12 of them. August, We started down a rabbit hole of re-inventing a few of the tracks, re-balancing them away from the live band vibe in search of something grander & cinematic. I also got an old piece of rack gear for the guitar, and went down a personal rabbit hole of looking for some unique, characterful guitar tones - the kind of stuff that's, like bad for lovers of tone but good for the song. September-December we pretty much stopped altogether other than the odd session here and there because a bunch of gigs came up that we focused on.

Then over Christmas I had a crossroads moment. My dear mate, an Italian songwriter & Guitarist who I've been making music with since 2015, said he wants to do a new album this year. I can't do two projects at once - I've got a full time job and a daughter who deserves a dad that's around and able to give her the family time for evenings playing games and weekends of fun adventures in the car.

I took stock of what we had, and what we'd need to do to get it to the finish line. With my time over the holidays I took a bunch of tracks and went to town adding orchestration, textures, abstractions that pushed them towards sounding like a record, and told the band "here's the list of things still to do. We need to get them done and the songs mixed by mid March because after that, I'm going to be working on a record with my Italian friend."

It'd be fair to say it's focussed minds. Over the last 3 weeks we've got another 7 vocals down, endless backing vocals, successfully re-framed 2 songs, re-tracked some bass... I'm hopeful, and if it carries on this way I think we'll have something a bit magic.

 

[Moondog Wily]

Well, I let this one die didn't I?

It all went slow for a long time. The singer had some personal stuff to work through that made things go slowly for a while - it felt like he was avoiding vocal recording. Plus, a mental defence mechanism I have; I pretend that it'll take about as many hours to do the guitars and vocals as it takes to do the bass and drum tracks. Because then I can face starting the project - if I really thought about the endless evenings & weekend days stretching out ahead of me, recording, shepherding 4 sets of egos and dreams, writing, re-writing, second guessing, dreaming new things up, editing takes together, playing with sounds... it'd be too much and I'd never want to start a recording project.

The big roadblock we had to get over was an interpersonal one. I'm hyper focused and driven to get results when it comes to recording. I've found it's the only way to really get shit done. I want to get home at night and be able to list of the things that have been accomplished on the road to the finish line. That means I think well ahead of time about what the part is going to be and how it fits into the whole song. It's not that I don't go experimenting and trying new things, it's just that when it comes down to it my instinct is to trust the decisions we made and the things that came naturally to the songs over months or years of writing, rehearsing and playing them live. The singer is not like that. At the drop of a hat, apparently on a whim, he'll chuck out everything he did before and just be like "what if the melody did this?"

And he'll do it for everything. He's got a real irreverence for any part that's already been written, and much prefers the excitement of just trying stuff in the moment. During tracking, and I mean any tracking - bass, guitar, vocals (his own and anyone else's) he'll let you get like half a take in before suggesting something different. Something that changes everything.

There's a golden rule in producing. Never say no to any idea, give it a try. So you give it a try. And you're halfway through giving it a try when the next suggestion comes. So you try that. And he seems to not realise that you've not actually tracked a full take of the first idea yet. Then you realise the new idea rubs badly against the bassline, so that'll need to be changed. Or the guitar part that I egotistically am attached to, a part that I'm proud of, spent 3 hours recording the week before and had honed over a year or playing the song live, suddenly doesn't work any more. And then I realise 2 hours have gone by and I don't have a single workable take.

At that point, I admit I started to say no, to protect past effort and decisions, going back to the original part in order to have *somethign* and that caused tension. It's taken me many months to start to understand how to navigate it and how our different methods can coexist.

You know what the real twat thing about it all is? The singer is great. He is inspired, and he has a vision. And sometimes following his ideas gets us to a magical place we would have otherwise missed. It just makes it all take so much longer.

So... June and July, we did about 4 tracks worth of lead vocals, bass for every track, and guitars for 12 of them. August, We started down a rabbit hole of re-inventing a few of the tracks, re-balancing them away from the live band vibe in search of something grander & cinematic. I also got an old piece of rack gear for the guitar, and went down a personal rabbit hole of looking for some unique, characterful guitar tones - the kind of stuff that's, like bad for lovers of tone but good for the song. September-December we pretty much stopped altogether other than the odd session here and there because a bunch of gigs came up that we focused on.

Then over Christmas I had a crossroads moment. My dear mate, an Italian songwriter & Guitarist who I've been making music with since 2015, said he wants to do a new album this year. I can't do two projects at once - I've got a full time job and a daughter who deserves a dad that's around and able to give her the family time for evenings playing games and weekends of fun adventures in the car.

I took stock of what we had, and what we'd need to do to get it to the finish line. With my time over the holidays I took a bunch of tracks and went to town adding orchestration, textures, abstractions that pushed them towards sounding like a record, and told the band "here's the list of things still to do. We need to get them done and the songs mixed by mid March because after that, I'm going to be working on a record with my Italian friend."

It'd be fair to say it's focussed minds. Over the last 3 weeks we've got another 7 vocals down, endless backing vocals, successfully re-framed 2 songs, re-tracked some bass... I'm hopeful, and if it carries on this way I think we'll have something a bit magic.

Sounds like some rough sailin', but at least your sailin'! Good that you put a deadline out there, make them pony up!! Best of luck, I hope it turns out well enough to float your boat ;~))

 

[FuzzyAce]

Well, I let this one die didn't I?

It all went slow for a long time. The singer had some personal stuff to work through that made things go slowly for a while - it felt like he was avoiding vocal recording. Plus, a mental defence mechanism I have; I pretend that it'll take about as many hours to do the guitars and vocals as it takes to do the bass and drum tracks. Because then I can face starting the project - if I really thought about the endless evenings & weekend days stretching out ahead of me, recording, shepherding 4 sets of egos and dreams, writing, re-writing, second guessing, dreaming new things up, editing takes together, playing with sounds... it'd be too much and I'd never want to start a recording project.

The big roadblock we had to get over was an interpersonal one. I'm hyper focused and driven to get results when it comes to recording. I've found it's the only way to really get shit done. I want to get home at night and be able to list off the things that have been accomplished on the road to the finish line. That means I think well ahead of time about what the part is going to be and how it fits into the whole song. It's not that I don't go experimenting and trying new things, it's just that when it comes down to it my instinct is to trust the decisions we made and the things that came naturally to the songs over months or years of writing, rehearsing and playing them live. The singer is not like that. At the drop of a hat, apparently on a whim, he'll chuck out everything he did before and just be like "what if the melody did this?"

And he'll do it for everything. He's got a real irreverence for any part that's already been written, and much prefers the excitement of just trying stuff in the moment. During tracking, and I mean any tracking - bass, guitar, vocals (his own and anyone else's) he'll let you get like half a take in before suggesting something different. Something that changes everything.

There's a golden rule in producing. Never say no to any idea, give it a try. So you give it a try. And you're halfway through giving it a try when the next suggestion comes. So you try that. And he seems to not realise that you've not actually tracked a full take of the first idea yet. Then you realise the new idea rubs badly against the bassline, so that'll need to be changed. Or the guitar part that I egotistically am attached to, a part that I'm proud of, spent 3 hours recording the week before and had honed over a year or playing the song live, suddenly doesn't work any more. And then I realise 2 hours have gone by and I don't have a single workable take.

At that point, I admit I started to say no, to protect past effort and decisions, going back to the original part in order to have *something* and that caused tension. It's taken me many months to start to understand how to navigate it and how our different methods can coexist.

You know what the real twat thing about it all is? The singer is great. He is inspired, and he has a vision. And sometimes following his ideas gets us to a magical place we would have otherwise missed. It just makes it all take so much longer.

So... June and July, we did about 4 tracks worth of lead vocals, bass for every track, and guitars for 12 of them. August, We started down a rabbit hole of re-inventing a few of the tracks, re-balancing them away from the live band vibe in search of something grander & cinematic. I also got an old piece of rack gear for the guitar, and went down a personal rabbit hole of looking for some unique, characterful guitar tones - the kind of stuff that's, like bad for lovers of tone but good for the song. September-December we pretty much stopped altogether other than the odd session here and there because a bunch of gigs came up that we focused on.

Then over Christmas I had a crossroads moment. My dear mate, an Italian songwriter & Guitarist who I've been making music with since 2015, said he wants to do a new album this year. I can't do two projects at once - I've got a full time job and a daughter who deserves a dad that's around and able to give her the family time for evenings playing games and weekends of fun adventures in the car.

I took stock of what we had, and what we'd need to do to get it to the finish line. With my time over the holidays I took a bunch of tracks and went to town adding orchestration, textures, abstractions that pushed them towards sounding like a record, and told the band "here's the list of things still to do. We need to get them done and the songs mixed by mid March because after that, I'm going to be working on a record with my Italian friend."

It'd be fair to say it's focussed minds. Over the last 3 weeks we've got another 7 vocals down, endless backing vocals, successfully re-framed 2 songs, re-tracked some bass... I'm hopeful, and if it carries on this way I think we'll have something a bit magic.

I applaud your efforts keeping it all together. It's a tough balance act but you seem to be handling it well. Just based on rough clips I heard in your tweed amp thread, I'm excited to hear (and buy) the finished album.

 

[la szum]

Well, I let this one die didn't I?

It all went slow for a long time. The singer had some personal stuff to work through that made things go slowly for a while - it felt like he was avoiding vocal recording. Plus, a mental defence mechanism I have; I pretend that it'll take about as many hours to do the guitars and vocals as it takes to do the bass and drum tracks. Because then I can face starting the project - if I really thought about the endless evenings & weekend days stretching out ahead of me, recording, shepherding 4 sets of egos and dreams, writing, re-writing, second guessing, dreaming new things up, editing takes together, playing with sounds... it'd be too much and I'd never want to start a recording project.

The big roadblock we had to get over was an interpersonal one. I'm hyper focused and driven to get results when it comes to recording. I've found it's the only way to really get shit done. I want to get home at night and be able to list off the things that have been accomplished on the road to the finish line. That means I think well ahead of time about what the part is going to be and how it fits into the whole song. It's not that I don't go experimenting and trying new things, it's just that when it comes down to it my instinct is to trust the decisions we made and the things that came naturally to the songs over months or years of writing, rehearsing and playing them live. The singer is not like that. At the drop of a hat, apparently on a whim, he'll chuck out everything he did before and just be like "what if the melody did this?"

And he'll do it for everything. He's got a real irreverence for any part that's already been written, and much prefers the excitement of just trying stuff in the moment. During tracking, and I mean any tracking - bass, guitar, vocals (his own and anyone else's) he'll let you get like half a take in before suggesting something different. Something that changes everything.

There's a golden rule in producing. Never say no to any idea, give it a try. So you give it a try. And you're halfway through giving it a try when the next suggestion comes. So you try that. And he seems to not realise that you've not actually tracked a full take of the first idea yet. Then you realise the new idea rubs badly against the bassline, so that'll need to be changed. Or the guitar part that I egotistically am attached to, a part that I'm proud of, spent 3 hours recording the week before and had honed over a year or playing the song live, suddenly doesn't work any more. And then I realise 2 hours have gone by and I don't have a single workable take.

At that point, I admit I started to say no, to protect past effort and decisions, going back to the original part in order to have *something* and that caused tension. It's taken me many months to start to understand how to navigate it and how our different methods can coexist.

You know what the real twat thing about it all is? The singer is great. He is inspired, and he has a vision. And sometimes following his ideas gets us to a magical place we would have otherwise missed. It just makes it all take so much longer.

So... June and July, we did about 4 tracks worth of lead vocals, bass for every track, and guitars for 12 of them. August, We started down a rabbit hole of re-inventing a few of the tracks, re-balancing them away from the live band vibe in search of something grander & cinematic. I also got an old piece of rack gear for the guitar, and went down a personal rabbit hole of looking for some unique, characterful guitar tones - the kind of stuff that's, like bad for lovers of tone but good for the song. September-December we pretty much stopped altogether other than the odd session here and there because a bunch of gigs came up that we focused on.

Then over Christmas I had a crossroads moment. My dear mate, an Italian songwriter & Guitarist who I've been making music with since 2015, said he wants to do a new album this year. I can't do two projects at once - I've got a full time job and a daughter who deserves a dad that's around and able to give her the family time for evenings playing games and weekends of fun adventures in the car.

I took stock of what we had, and what we'd need to do to get it to the finish line. With my time over the holidays I took a bunch of tracks and went to town adding orchestration, textures, abstractions that pushed them towards sounding like a record, and told the band "here's the list of things still to do. We need to get them done and the songs mixed by mid March because after that, I'm going to be working on a record with my Italian friend."

It'd be fair to say it's focussed minds. Over the last 3 weeks we've got another 7 vocals down, endless backing vocals, successfully re-framed 2 songs, re-tracked some bass... I'm hopeful, and if it carries on this way I think we'll have something a bit magic.

Great update! Thanks for sharing. I can empathize with your interpersonal struggles. That's
like 90% of a band right there. Get that right and it seems everything else will flow better
afterwards.

Also seems to me that the deadline you imposed for getting it done really focused the band.

 

[DrewJD82]

These are great to read, @Cirrus! Hopefully in the future you may remember them before starting another project and use them to navigate that project differently, or the same!

I can heavily relate to both you and your singer. My favorite part of all this music stuff is hearing something in my head and making it a reality, the pursuit of that can go to lengths surely most people would find obnoxious, obsessive and/or compulsive or all of the above. Sometimes that thing is right on the tip of my tongue and I'm just not getting it, but there's a pretty big dopamine rush in the chase itself, never mind when you actually get it. And, as you said, sometimes those pursuits lead to great music, which I feel is a tangible result that is worthy of the pursuit - when it's my own time I'm spending.

When it comes to the music part, not the vocals, I'm extremely pragmatic about getting it tracked. I don't waste much time fucking with tones and usually by the time I'm tracking it, it's a couple days after I wrote it and played the scratch guitars so I'm already 'in shape' and blast right through it and have the end goal in mind. I barely make any changes, I actually try to record final takes as soon as possible to prevent demo-itis.

Maybe what I tell myself will help you navigate the singer in the future- when I'm working on a song and I don't capture something I wanted or intended to, I move on regardless. I'll catch it on the next one. If it's the thrill of the chase the singer is into, it would do him good to continuously make new paths to chase on because chasing on the same one makes it worn so much faster.

 

[Cirrus]

The most important piece of equipment in the studio; a pencil.

Singer's got great breath control and he can work a mic, closing in and backing off as needed. We haven't used a pop shield once, and plosives just haven't been an issue at all. For a bunch of the songs we've been using one of the U87 clones I built last year. I really like how it handles the sibilance range - the balance of the dynamic articulation between vowels and consonants up at like 7k, where it sounds clear and detailed without getting spitty. It also balances really well up into the breathy air over 10k, though it's a smooth mic and benefits from 2 or 3dB boosts up at like 15k to bring the air forward. The Pencil's just there as a backup to help deflect the worst of any plosives if they did happen. I've read it also reduces sibilance, but I've not noticed any particular difference in practice over the years.

We also got an Electrovoice RE11 last month. It's pretty cool, I like the RE series mics I've used, this one is no exception. Just a nice dynamic mic sound, bit of a midrange emphasis, more vintage sounding top end. It's not as flat as an RE20 but it's got some of the same gentle, refined air to it. Worked well the couple of times I've popped in on guitar cab, too.

And the rest done on an MD425. Another nice dynamic. Brighter, tighter, smooth through the mids (no big peaks like the SM58 for example), a little bit spitty at times but does really well for the few really busy tracks we've got going on for bringing out aggression.

When we're using the dynamic mics we're quite often tracking with the monitors on and no headphones, because a; I think it generally helps pitching and dynamic control and b; it's just nice to all be hearing the same thing and be able to just talk normally, rather than me wondering how loud the singer's headphones are, if he's hearing a good balance of music and his own voice, how much reverb does he want on his foldback etc etc etc. And often when tracking vocals I've found that over the course of a session, headphones can make a singer start singing louder than they otherwise would - there's a disconnect.

And as for spill from the speakers getting into the vocal mic, it's amazing how little it matters most of the time.

That said, there are always headphones around, and we do use them when we want, or when spill might be an issue. Sometimes the singer wants the intimacy or even the deliberate disconnect that headphones can provide.

 

[Cirrus]

All that said, we're mostly choosing mics based on what we fancy singing through that day. And in the case of the RE11, the singer was excited when it arrived because it's a cool older mic with some mojo, so we used it purely because I wanted to capture the excitement of a new toy. The singer's voice has a great tone and I think any of the mics would have worked for any song - they'd just require different EQ.

 

[Cirrus]

My 2 year old told mummy she wanted to hear daddy's guitars, so I made this video for her.