Extraterrestrial Highway

This song is the most complex and ambitious recording on the album. It was tracked over the course of several sessions, and was completely thrown out and started over more than once.

The classical guitar used on the main riff is Beth’s guitar she bought in Spain years ago. The rhythm acoustics are Dave and Beth together, using recording technique that Dave and Beth often employ. A stereo XY mic pair is used, with one pointing at Beth’s guitar and one pointing at Dave’s guitar, and the parts played together. This creates a nice, natural-sounding stereo spread and keeps the guitars out of the middle, and also gets a solid groove performance as the two play together. In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t do it this way again, because it takes too much space in the mix.

The basic rhythm tracks (drums, bass, fuzz power guitar) were done at Extraterrestrial Highway. Another, arguably better take had been done at Tiny Robots, but was dropped due to debate over the cymbal/cowbell balance. Dave took away Justin’s cowbell for this take, and overdubbed cowbell in later (a part Justin still thinks isn’t good enough). Ah, the joys of being producer!

The fuzzy guitar sound was Dave’s Telecaster into an Orange Sunshine fuzz, and then into the Boogie. The lead guitar was Dave’s Schecter Strat, with Lace Alumitone pickups, through a BBE Freq Boost into the Boogie cranked up hard. This part was actually much “shrunken” with eq afterward, because it was so huge and fat that it stepped on the vocals.

The “frozen” echoes were done via vst delay and flanging.

The distinctive snare drum sound was done by heavily distorting the snare.

Parts of this are the oldest recordings on the album. Beth and Nikki’s vocals, Dave’s fretless bass, and one of the acoustic guitar tracks were all done back in August of 2008, when the album was first started. Also, the bass line features the only pitch correction on the album!

The hardest part was the drums. The early tracking was done to a click, with plans to overdub drums later. Justin doesn’t like overdubbing drums and struggled to find the groove. Attempts at Tiny Robots failed, and the drums were finally done in a long session at Extraterrestrial Highway.

The electric guitar power chords were done by Dave into an amp sim (Waves GTR). The sound was inadequate, as were all the GTR-based tracks, but it worked. The bridge synth was from Reason. The clicking percussion is the sound of Nikki destroying Justin’s frog.

The weird opening sounds were two studio accidents worth saving. The “wookie” sound was a guitar neck grabbed to start playing, and the percussion was a drum loop from Reason going twice as fast as it should.

This is just sort of for my own records, noting the whys and wherefores of how Apocalypse Blues by Beth Kinderman & the Player Characters was recorded…

Blue Horizon – The basic drum and guitar tracks were recorded at Tiny Robot Studios, with Dave engineering while Beth and Justin played live. Beth played her black Telecaster into the studio’s Marshall JCM900 for the fuzzy rhythm, and their Mesa Trem-o-verb for the cleaner rhythm. The Marshall was miked with a Sennheiser 421, the Mesa with (probably) a SM57. Justin played the Sonor kit, with a D112 on the kick, a Beta 57 on the snare, and an AKG 414 and MXL 603 set up for mid-side overhead. The studio’s AEA ribbon was also used for a room mic.

The false start that opens the album was actually two or three takes before the keeper take. It was stitched into the recording later as a studio trick. The bass playing on the false start was overdubbed, too. The abrupt end after Beth’s “WOO!” at the end was because Dave stopped the recording.

Beyond the basic track, everything else was overdubbed at Extraterrestrial Highway. The spinning lead guitar over the bridge was done by Beth at some effort, as the keeper track was VERY fast compared to previous attempts. The tone was the Tele through Dave’s Rat pedal and probably his Boogie Mark I amp, and the spinning effects were done with multiple reamps through a Lexicon Vortex on different settings. Bass was a Yamaha Jazz bass copy recorded direct. Piano was Native Instruments samples, processed via the Echomania VST for panning delays.

I’m back to using rack gear, for now anyway.  I was inspired by recently seeing David Torn’s instructional video Painting with Guitar, which among other things detailed the configuration of his looping setup (he actually didn’t spend long on this sort of gear in the video, which is good, but the insights helped me anyway). The trick to his setup is to use a mixer with multiple fx sends, and routing the fx sends back into regular channels so they can be brought in and out.

I found a great mixer for this at a local Music Go Round – a Kawai MX-8R, a rackmount line mixer with eight inputs and two effects sends – one post-fader, one switchable pre- or post-fader.  I was particularly interested in the pre-fader option, but this mixer was broken!  The pre/post switch was broken and the fx send didn’t work at all.  It looked fixable, though, so they sold it to me for dirt cheap.  I was going to just hardwire it pre-fader, but when I got the switch out, it actually seemed fixable. Much fiddling with a pin later, I got the switch reassembled and working, and the pre-fader send working, huzzah!

Here’s how it’s currently routed… I take the output of my guitar signal chain from an Ibanez AD-202 analog delay (amazing sound!) into a mixer channel. From there, FX1 (post fader) goes to my old Deltalab Echotron for looping, and FX2 (pre fader) goes to a Lexicon MPX110 for giant spacey reverb. Both come back in on regular channels rather than the FX ins. The looper output can easily be muted, or go to the amp, or go to the reverb, or both. And the reverb’s output can be routed back into the looper.

Beyond this, I have more plans for the system. Since it’s in mono but the mixer is stereo, I can use panning to fake a third FX send. I want to get a Korg Kaoss Pad for that, and possibly some other effects as well, as a controllable secondary effects chain for the guitar. I’d also like to find a 1980s-vintage harmonizer like Ibanez or MXR to split the signal before the mixer into dry and harmonized.

It’s gonna be SICK.

In the meantime, I’m already finding it useful. With a combination of mixer manipulation, runaway analog delay, and fast switching, I’ve worked out very effective live-playable transitions for certain Player Characters songs.  And there’s a big WTF? factor when people hear it!

For my birthday, I got myself a nice new (old) toy… a MESA/Boogie Mark I amp, serial #749 (Nov 1976, chassis signed by Randall Smith himself), from the days before there was a “Mark I” designation.  It’s quite the little hellraiser, almost certainly the best-sounding guitar amp I’ve ever owned.  Alas, it broke down shortly after I got it (thankfully after its first gig).  It’s currently sitting at Savage Audio, waiting for repair – the staff there was quite excited to have it in and praised it as the best Boogie design. They figure it’s probably some minor resistor fried or such, from sitting too long unplayed.

But as a practical amp, it has one problem – it’s WAY too loud! (okay, two problems – it’s also very heavy) As good as it sounds now, I feel like the sound I’ve gotten from it so far is like a beautiful woman who has barely hiked her skirt above her knee. The really good stuff means it has to go much louder. So at some point soon, I need to invest in an attenuator, so I can really crank it! The top candidate for that is a THD Hot Plate, but we’ll see what comes along.

When I found the amp at Willie’s American Guitars, one of the older staffers there was well aquainted with and very fond of Mark I Boogies, and showed me some tricks. One of those was using a treble booster with it to get a more Marshall-like sound. I wanted to get one, but was already hitting budget hard. But a week or so ago, I found Musician’s Friend had the BBE Freq Boost for $30 as the “Stupid Deal of the Day”. I snapped one up. Haven’t gotten to try it with the Boogie yet, but it sounds great with Beth’s Velocette. The BBE pedal uses an op amp rather than the transistor design of the classic Rangemaster, but the behavior should be quite similar. Maybe someday I’ll invest in a boutique treble booster, but will it sound any better than the Freq Boost?  Will it be more robust and stageworthy?

But first, the attenuator. One thing I’m hoping is that I can find an attenuator that serves as a complete load box, so I can run the amp directly into effects, then back into a solid-state power amp for sane volume control. The speaker in the amp is a very nice old JBL K120, and I doubt I’ll do better than that. But the amp has no effects loop, and I’d rather have it just cranked up at the power tubes anyway. We’ll see if I can ge a workable sound this way.

Garbage Pizza and Songs About Robots and Death are finally completed and out the door.  Now we’re back to work on Apocalypse Blues. Beth and I are throwing out most of the work we’ve already done, which is frustrating but necessary. I was worrying recently that we only have three two and a half months to get the tracking done, and Beth reminded me that we managed to do All of My Heroes Are Villains in only one month.  I responded yes, but we didn’t know what we were doing then!

I’m in the last throes of recording/mixing for both the upcoming projects.  First, there’s the Feng Shui Ninjas’ first album, Garbage Pizza.  The second project is the anime-themed EP by Beth Kinderman and the Player Characters, now officially named Songs About Robots and Death. Remind me never to release two different albums at the same time!  Honestly, both are going pretty well and should get out the door just fine, but it’s stressful.

I’ve decided that once these are out the door, I’m not allowing myself to take on any other significant recording projects until after Apocalypse Blues is completed.  I might make an exception to start working on Al Amarja recordings (my dormant middle eastern music project).  But Apocalypse Blues is very important to me – I feel that it’s a statement piece for me as a producer, and for the Player Characters as a band.  Beth recently pointed out that the PCs have only played a half-dozen live electric shows so far.  It seems like more than that, because we’ve been working on this material as a band since March 2008 – nearly a year now. Too few people, even our fans, have heard the fully operational might of our music.  Honestly, I think we’re just now getting some of the material really going. 

Once Apocalypse Blues is done, I’m in discussions with a couple of other bands about recording/production, projects I’d really like to do.  But that’s for the second half of the year.

Whether or not to use a click track is a matter of some debate among recording musicians.  Some believe it is absolutely necessary in order to keep good time, edit, etc. Others believe that click tracks suck the life out of the music, the normal ebb and flow of rhythm and tempo. 

Personally, I go both ways – sometimes I use a click, sometimes I don’t.  It depends on the feel I’m trying to get, and what my other needs are.  If I really need to work against sequenced tracks or drum machines, of course I’ll use a click.  And if I intend to do lots of overdubbing and editing, a click is helpful.  But I also think there’s great value in a group of musicians just sitting down and tracking live, getting that natural flow.  I record a lot of acoustic or mostly-acoustic music, and tracking without a click also means no headphones – just musicians listening directly to each other.

If a click is necessary, I find a simple drum machine program can work far better than a plain click.  It can work around and emphasize the natural syncopations of the song, making it easier rather than harder to play.  I’d suggest using sounds with a soft attack, rather than hard sounds like woodblock and snare that get used for a click, because those sharp, hard sounds easily bleed into mics.  It’s really annoying to have to re-record a track because of click bleed!

For the first time ever, I resorted to Autotune to fix a pitch problem in the studio – a fretless bass line.  It’s not that the stuff I record is perfectly in tune!  It’s that I find being slightly out of tune, in a consistent way, can be key to a musician’s sound.  I play steel guitar, so I’m dealing with tuning issues all the time.  Fretless bass is almost worse, because those low notes can sound more off-key than they actually are.  And I’m accustomed to vocalists who are characteristically slightly flat.  Flat bothers me less than sharp, for some reason.

But this particular bassline – I was trying to play bass to harmonize with two vocalists and a lap steel – a tall order!  Rather than sounding rich, it sounded sloppy.  Autotune locked the bass in with the keyboards and guitar, and the whole thing sounds better.  I still think it’d be death for vocals, though.