Confabulated Edison. Super-über-rough.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/Con_Ed_reallyrough_7_31.mp3

Waves MPX Master Tape and SSL G Channel on every track, even if they're not being moved out of the default setting. This actually does quite a bit, just turning the things on.

Placeholder vocals from Yours Truly and Mr. Chris. A bit of treatment courtesy of Waves CLA 1176 and API 550B and the stock reverbs and delays in Logic. And Soundtoys Echoboy on my vocal in the mellow parts. Three tracks of each of us total. Just fooling around with ideas. I may not keep a single one of these. Shure SM7B and KSM27. Soundcraft Ghost, ART DMPA respectively for pres.

All guitars on the left are Chris --> PRS Artist Series CE24 --> Diezel Herbert/Mills 4x12 with vintage Celestion G1280s --> 57 & KSM27 --> DMPA.

All the other guitars are me with the OCD/AC30/Blue, same mics and pres. The heavy riff part is my new Tele, the cleans and trem picking are the Strat on the neck pickup.

EDIT: delay and 'verb on the guitars are TC G-Major 2 for Mr. Chris and Eventide and EHX Cathedral for me. No other guitar effects on this. I may double the intro riff (not on this clip) with the Geiger Counter straight into the board. Aside from that, anything else that sounds like it might be a guitar that shows up on the final mix is one of us on a particular patch on the Kurzweil and is not actually a guitar, it's just a violent sounding NIN-eqsue synth.

All distorted guitars are getting hit with Decapitator on the Chandler EMI Channel setting in parallel. I tried to roughly approximate the character I got on the studio scratch tracks. They're kinda murky and my playing on them is terrible. I doubt any of them will make it to the record. Clean guitars are raw tones. No effects save for the delays and 'verbs off our amps. No compression, no EQ.

Bass is Ken on the Carvin fretless 5 --> Sansamp Bass Driver + Divided By 13 TBA200 and Divided By 13 bass 4x12 (fucked if I know what speakers are in that thing) --> RE20. The Sansamp is split off before the amp straight into the SSL. No compression or EQ save for what was printed in tracking.

I started dicking with some EQ and compression the drums here, just to seat things in the mix better. All off the Waves SSL channels.

Noise loop is a broken A string mashed against a pickup and a bitcrusher. Drum machines are Logic Ultrabeat. Both my and Chris's synths are missing from this as are my percussion overdubs- thus why I cut the first part of the song. Same deal with the backing vocals; the scream going into the heavy part I keep meaning to harmonize into 3 or 4 parts and really need to stop by the studio after work and do so.

Still all 21 tracks of real drums. Incedentally, all the panning is L/C/R on everything.

This is really rough, as I said, and mostly naked tracks, or at least tracks in their underthings. I feel it's not a bad start. I also think the homebrew tracks are holding up well against the big studio stuff. Having that drum room and a million tracks to work from makes all the difference in the world.

super swell. I love that I can hear everything so well. Nothing stepping on anything else. Wonderful. Moar plox.

That separation you mention is something I've been struggling at forevar, It's not just a frequency thing, it's a perceived spatial thing. Unfortunately it appears that sound has a buy-in cost, to a point. More will occur. I was working on a track last night that's a totally different flavor of odd. And our most popular live song is in the works, and that's an anomaly in that we never even demo-ed the thing once.

An addendum to the OP: all the lead vocals on the mellower parts were done with a Neumann M149. A little compression (well, a fuckload of compression) and EQ and it's instant glossy vocal. Alas, I have no intention of adding one of these to the collection anytime soon as it's worth roughly more than my life.

Which is the song with Chris screaming the whole thing? I remember being particularly fond of that live recording..

Graphite. The industrial track with the super-fuzzed out bitcrusher guitars. We re-did that too; the vocals are pretty mean sounding compared to the original studio take. Straight-up yelling into an SM7, like a bare hint of melody.

Good, I like the sound of his yelling.

We were joking he sounds like Trent Reznor 'cause they're both from Cleveland. We're toying with the idea of gang vocals on that in the choruses in addition to my backups. The "quit living like a slave!" line coming in I think would sound super awesome like that. The gang vox alternating against the megaphone thing would sound pretty snazzy, methinks.

I'm doing a test at the moment where I'm bouncing down all the tracks with Master Tape on them and then dumping them back in to fool with drum sounds. 40-odd instances of Master Tape at 88.2 plus Decapitator on the guitars does use some CPU. Seeing as the files at 24/88.2 are 4x as large, if the plugins work out the same way, that's the equivalent of over 120 instances of Master Tape before anything else is even applied. Add Decapitator in there, which is a Hungry Hungry Hippo, over eight tracks of guitar and shit starts adding up. The best part is I can still play it back though.

Gang vocals are required, bro. Also; tortured, distorted screaming in the background?

That's my backups on the chorus. On the original mix, I actually took a vocal track I did stumbling home from a goth bar at like 3 AM where I decided to hit up the studio all shitfaced and cut my backups with a handheld Beta 58. They made it to the record the first time, so there's obviously something there. Actually, that's not the only thing that featured drunken handheld mic yelling backups. Sometimes it suits the song. As a contrast, the light, very world-weary sounding vocals on the clean parts here.

Re: printing Master Tape and Decapitator- took a whole fucklot of strain off my computer. Now 40 channels of Faux-SSL + buss compressor doesn't even register on the meters. I guess there's something to be said for tape and input channel modeling plugs that make one go "goddamn!" but they are not friendly toward one's CPU. IMO, game-changers for mixing ITB though.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/CON_ED_drumEQtest_8_1.mp3

Tried doing a rough mix of the drums. No EQ or compression on anything else still save for the master bus comp. Balanced guitar levels a bit, took out the vocals for now.

Those drums sound great! So that's how that room sounds? Damn! I'm having a hard time believing it, especially the kick

Thanks! Pretty much, yeah, that's how it sounds. The raw drum tracks from part of this are posted up in another thread if you want to hear the room mics... all 7 of 'em.

There is a drum machine track under the kick, but most of it's actually just the inside kick mic. Most of the lows are actually filtered out of the room mics, too; I highpassed some of 'em pretty hard.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/CON_ED_8_2_rough.mp3

Another late-night rough mix. I think I've opened the thing up quite a bit. The kick and snare have space against the bass and guitars. Brought in a synth track, raised the drum programming and noise loop, threw the not-final-vocals on there as a reference. Still ignoring the intro.

The hardest thing is gonna be making that drum machine part fit. I think I'm gonna have to bounce all the sounds to separate tracks. All hail digital for that, despite the mass quantities of hardware emulation I'm using.

fuckinggoddamnilovethis

This is sounding amazing.

Graphite vocal test.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/GRAPHITE_vocal_test_8_11.mp3

Might go back and choose a couple lines from different takes; I'm going for aggression here and some of them aren't mean enough. Shure SM7B --> Soundcraft Ghost. Decapitator, Waves 1176 followed by LA-2A as a limiter. API 550B EQ. The double is run through an overdrive and a delay. More for performance than tone. Need to track the backups still; doing that Friday night. Gang vocals on the choruses? Perhaps.

No 'verb on the drums; that's all room.

Bass I think it the Fender Jazz? Divided By 13 amp/RE20 and Sansamp DI. Guitars are Tele --> digital fuzzes (Geiger Counter and Digitech Synth Wah) --> AC30. Keys are Prophet 08. A lot of the little filigree I left out of the test mix here.

I think my continued refusal to replace real drums that are supposed to sound like real drums with samples and programming is paying off? Also, I think I managed to pull off a- for me, at least- significant amount of edits here without destroying the feel of a real drummer pounding the hell out of their kit. He wants me to tighten the stuff up, this is about as far as I'll go. IMO, it still sounds live and powerful. I didn't dick with the fills, the one-foot doubles, still pushes the beat in parts. I mean, the effect he's going for is that of an actual human drummer imitating a drum machine. I don't think this would be inappropriate for, say, old Ministry or Thrill Kill Kult or the NIN stuff with live drums or something of that nature.

Song needs a visual:

You look kind of like the lead guitarist from The Ventures with the Tele all up in your nipples, man.

Maybe I am the lead guitarist for The Ventures.

But yeah, I did have it up higher than normal.

Garda are hooligans, oi! http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13184331/GRAPHITE_gangvox_test.mp3

Nine tracks of myself and the rhythm section yelling. Some we did around one mic, some we put though the PA with a room mic, and some we put a 58 into the PA up next to the Shure condenser we were yelling into. Some tracks got mondo 'verbage, and I used Flux Stereo Tool to ride up and widen the reverb tails via automation. That was an experiment.

I like my teles how I like myself.




































High.