Extraterrestrial Highway

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.

I have a new toy – integrating Reason into my recording via Rewire. This has turned out useful even with tracks that weren’t recorded to a click… I can simply record live performances in Reason using Rewire to sync them to the audio recording.  Besides its other remarkable capabilities, Reason has a nice sampler – nice enough for me anyway – and some excellent soft synths.  I’ve been having a ball glopping Mellotron samples and synth bass all over tracks that were previously just guitars, vocals, and drums.

Current works in progress:

The Feng Shui Ninjas, Garbage Pizza.  We were working on a more ambitious full album, but fell behind schedule.  Now we’re making a sort of rarities album, consisting of old recordings from before Tami joined, music from the soundtrack for Dragons in the Basement (an as yet unreleased movie about the history of roleplaying games), and whatever we can get recorded/mixed between now and February.

Beth Kinderman and the Player Characters, unnamed EP.  We’re recording an EP of anime theme songs mixed with original material.  The covers will be “Call Me Call Me” (from Cowboy Bebop), “Rolling Star” (from Bleach, sung in Japanese), and “Duvet” (Serial Experiments Lain).  We’re also recording an acoustic version of Beth’s original “Heavy As Stone” (about Fullmetal Alchemist), and she’s promised us another original or two.  This should be released in February.  So far, we’ve only tracked “Call Me Call Me”, but we expect the album to go together easily, with lots of live recording.

Beth Kinderman and the Player Characters, Apocalypse Blues – Originally titled Blue Horizon after the opening track, our next full-length album is now named after a trilogy of songs about Battlestar Galactica.  At this point, the songs “Blue Horizon”, “Good Intentions”, “Heavy As Stone”, “Steady as She Goes”, “Keeper”, and “What the River Left Behind” are all at least partly tracked.  “Blue Horizon” is getting pretty close to done now – I’m going to Tiny Robots with Justin tomorrow to cut the drums.

Monitoring is the most important link of your audio mixing chain.  And knowing your monitors is more important than the quality of the monitoring.  A while back, I rearranged my studio, moving my monitors from the long wall to the short wall.  This completely transformed their sound!  The biggest change was that the bass seemed smaller – I moved the listening point from a boomy spot to a flat spot.  Beyond that, though, everything became clearer and more accurate. 

Recently, I aquired new monitors – a used set of Tannoy DMT-12 concentrics.  As used monitors, they’ve been problematic.  In particular, mine had a blown tweeter in one speaker, and it’s been an expensive pain to get a replacement.  But the sound!  Wonderful speakers, but very, very different from the Wharfedale Diamond 8.2 monitors I’ve been using the past few years.  The Wharfedales are accurate, but kind of harsh and fatiguing after a while.  Moreover, bass and dynamics are limited by their size and power.  The Tannoys, by contrast, have enormous dynamics.  I have them hooked up to an old Hafler DH-200 amp, and dynamic contrasts feel completely effortless and live.  They’re also much easier on the ear than the Wharfedales, but also bring out far more fine detail.  Expensive, but a good investment!

Meanwhile, I spend a lot of time “knowing” my headphones – Sennheiser HD280s.  I use them for my iPod/iPhone while commuting or working.  They’re more accurate, and protect my ears compared to any in-ear headphones.  I also use them for tracking, so it’s good to know them well.

I recently had the pleasure of tracking at Tiny Robots Studio in Columbia Heights, run by my friend Mark Keyser.  Although a low-budget affair, the studio has a couple of things I don’t have – a great, well-treated main room, and a nice collection of amps (including Marshall, Boogie, Vox, and Savage).  I can definitely get better guitar sounds there than I can get at home!  But alas, it’s time-consuming and potentially expensive to track in a nice studio like that.  You spend lots of your limited time trying to nail down performances, which cuts into setup time, and you get what you’re up to getting that day.

Still, a cranked-up Marshall through a real mic beats the snot out of Amplitube, at least in my world!

To get around this, I plan to try re-amping.  I can record my (electric) guitar tracks direct at home, using software amp sims to get the basic performance.  Then I can take those tracks and re-amp them at Tiny Robots (or any other studio), using their superior room and gear.  This gives me the best of both worlds.  I can work on nailing my performances and editing them nicely in the comfort of my home studio, and then spend my limited time at Tiny Robots tweaking amps and mic placement for the best sound, rather than trying to get a good performance in before I burn out.