Also, due to its size and girth, Soundclick couldn't handle it, so now i have a Soundcloud. Still just 128kbps though, because i wasn't expecting to be able to do more. Just as well, my upload speeds are fucking brutal. Still, for the future, it will be nice to be able to put better quality files up.

Anyhoo, like twenty minutes of stream of consciousness drums from yesterday morning. Then i went back over it last night in one take and popped some bass down with more than a little sketch:

My New Soundcloud Page and Some Slopsounds For Its Inauguration.

It is just like a dozen or so bits cut out of like forty minutes of sounds.

I feel like the drums actually are sounding kind of decent these days. (though a little less so at 128kbps, whatev.)

I really need to work on playing the same beat two or three times correctly though when i sit down to do this sort of thing though; there are places where it is really fucking difficult to follow it on bass, because the beat changes too much from one bar to the next. Heehee.

I really enjoy the way everything in this sounds. Awesome bass tone, good drum sounds. Your snare and tom sounds I particularly like. Nice ping-y ride as well. Would sound dope as fuck I am sure with vocals and guitars, as I enjoy these kinds of bass and drum sounds (it is making me think of more dark, weird Fugazi).

The 11:25-12:00 bit is especially nifty.

ALSO: The 17:42 bass riff is really cool as well.

Yarr, i would actually jigger with the bass sound a bit from what it is on this. It has a little scuzz on it, but not exactly in the way i like it to be generally. I didn't really spend any time setting up a sound on the way in, so i had to fuddle with some EQ after the fact, and it isn't ideal.

And my ride, well, i love it, and it frustrates me. It does have a really nice bell sound, but gawdamn, it doesn't like to do much outside of that. Very much more suited to metal sorts of playing than a nice flexible jazz/rock ride would be for what i try to do with it. But the bell is rad, fo sho. And if i use the thing as a crash, it basically blocks out anything else, which is nice in a Fuck You All sort of way.

The snare, i also have a love/hate with. It sounds great to me in the room, but records way softer and smoother than i'd like generally. Here i caved in and am using an additional snare mic on it. But the extra mic is kind of shelved weird, so it is mostly just the lower mids and up for the crackfeel i don't feel i am getting from the overhead.

Otherwise, the everything else is like the last thing i poasted, just one Radioshack PZM in the kick and one MXL2001 overhead. In the overhead, i cut the lowlow subbass, but actually very slightly boost the lows/lowmids that i want for the snare fundamental and a little more boom in the toms.

A couple of the things i hear guitars on, but some of them, i almost think i would leave as justbass. Or like, if guitars, they would be soooperminimal and obliquely skronky.

Also the beat that is under the 17:40->End thing is one that i have been fucking fighting with for like, years. If i think of it in the same way that i think of it when i play it on the drums, i cannot play along with it at all. But, as i figured out yesterday, if i ignore what i know the beat IS, and just play whatever, using whatever else as the "one" of it, it is wayyy easier to play with. I have no idea how the bass fits in there, compared to how i play the drum parts, honestly. I will have to figure it out at some point in order to do a cleaner version though.

I like the bass just the way it is. For a DI with a Timmy it's pretty righteous considering. Sounds like a nice mix between fat and cutt-y to me.

I imagine the snare sounds a little different in the room, but I dig the general character of it. Sounds like a pretty taut head with quick response, but quite ring-y. That is generally the type of snare sound I like. My piccolo is like that, but not nearly as ring-y.

You should definitely figure it out and make something of it, as it sounds song-worthy to me.

Yeah, for the snare, the way it is on this is finally pretty close to how it sounds to me when i play. I was trying to get away with just the one overhead to capture it, but it is just a lot easier to stick the third mic in there, especially considering, that what the snare sounds like at my ears while i am smashing it, is probably not even close to what it sounds like in the room at all, anyhow.

For the bass, if i fixed it i think you would agree it was better. As is, it is pretty much the same ballpark as what i aim for anyhow, so it isn't like broken, but i can definitely make that sound ballsier if i was a bit more careful setting it up at the input.

I need to sit down and take notes to really analyze this more than just "cool; tasty riffs/beats bro"! More details when I'm not working on stuff- this is very ADD.

I like the snare sound. For lack of a better word, "open". (I tend to like Chris's snare sounds in general.)

The first section, it sounds like there's something odd going on with the snare flams where one hit sounds like it's louder on the left hand side.

Chris, I get what you're saying about the ride. It has a lot of PING! and doesn't sound like it has much wash comparatively; very attack-y.

And that's some fine uglybass. Does the Timmy cut the lows á la an 808? (The toob's creamer, not the drum machine. )

Timmy will cut them lowends if you want it to. Paul C originally designed it to work basically as a flatboost, plus light dirt. The more bass you run on it, the more the low end clips the opamps.

So actually, one of the things that i did "wrong" here was that i was running a bit too much bass with the timmy, so basically, a different part of the signal was clipping than what i would normal like in a bass, which would be mostly clipping in the midrange. That way the bass sounds angry(i.e. the way all bass should sound ) but it retains clarity because the bottom end is more controlled and not being let wander haphazardly into distortiontown. The trick with the Timmy for bass, for how i like my specific bass to sound, is to find the spot where it is letting enough low end through that it isn't neutering the thing's boom, but where it also isn't blasting too much low end and mushing it out.

It is a bit different than how i would use it for guitar. With a bass, i run less gain, more bass, less high end(but still a fair bit of it). For guitar i practically set it like a treble booster. It isn't all peaky like a treble booster though. Part of what i love about it is that it can do pretty much exactly what i want with the EQ. Bright as fuck, but not 'that type' of bright as fuck.

Oh, also with the flam sounding like one side is louder, i suppose that could be the reverb, because it is most certainly not coming from the overhead, and i have all three mic just dead center. I considered panning a bit, but i didn't like how it thinned out things.

But yeah, i am playing with a new reverb vst called Ambience or something, and i believe that it outputs a stereo product? Which would actually make it the only thing that is stereo about any of this, the rest being a totally 1957-friendly mono.

The specific patch is a relatively short/subtle thing that IIRC, i twiddled with to make the reflect a little brighter. I actually really like how it sounds, at least on this kit in this basement. It, oddly for a reverb, actually makes the drums clearer when it is engaged. I guess because the brightish repeat accentuates the attack, and is just long enough to stay clear of the original that it doesn't get soupy on either end, i.e. it doesn't make the attack imprecise, and it quickly gets the fuck out the way before it clouds up the next thing coming.

Those are some great drum sounds. I liked the kick a whole lot. PZM you say? Where in the drum and what else is in there, if anything? And what heads?

PZM is a doap sort of mic. It is omnidirectional, so it picks up a shittonne more bleed than yer typical kick mic, but i pretty much don't mind everything bleeding into everything else anyhow, to fill out various bits of the sound a little. Because it is omni though, placement in the drums is kind of a matter of just tossing it in there. I have a couple layers of folded towel in there so that it doesn't just pick up mechanical bumping noise, but other than that, the kick is mostly unstuffed. It is a big fluffy towel folded maybe four times that i laid flat in the bottom of the kick, and just pushed into the head very slightly, almost more so it doesn't ring sympathetically when introduced to loud bass or floortom bashing than anything else.

The head is a Evans EQ4, a pretty simple no-frills sort of thing. It has some canvas-y kick pad on it in effort to extend its lifespan as much as i can because i am too broke to replace a kick head any time soon. I hate the kickpad though, it really fucks up the clickattack. Which is why i am using the hard rubber backsides of Tama Iron Cobra Jr. beaters.

Oh, and i don't run a front head at all these days. I yanked it when i was using the CAD mic so i would have more flexibility for moving it around, and i find that i don't really miss it, even though i don't need it off if i am using the PZM(and actually as i think of it, even though it would probably reduce some of the cymbal bleed to the PZM...)

The rest of the heads on everything are also Evans, whatever the cheapo pack with the kickhead came with. I think it is like G2 toms and maybe a G1 snare?

Oh, also, i kind of halfass messed with the very first bit of the drumthing:

Now With Guitars.

Just looped that section of drumbass. I started more or less as i intended, but then became distracted and sidetracked, and the whole thing got away from me a bit, to the point you will hear it there.

I like the first guitar part, and i think that is about it. I think i might aim to add parts to extend it it in the same sort of style as that first part, so it isn't just the same part over and over again. Then. Some sort of change. I don't know at all at the moment.

Also, i started it normally, but had to finish recording and mixing via headphones, so i have no idea how fucked up it might sound.

Lastly, i think i brutalized it with perhaps excessive master buss compression. I won't be able to tell until tomorrow when my ears aren't toast.

Inneresting. The PZM's a totally different animal than a normal kick-flavoured mic. How are you EQing it and what's the bleed like?

Also, what's making the tremolo noise in the guitar'd clip?

The descending bit at 1:12 or so =

I am probably doing too much to it honestly. It actually sounds pretty okay straight up. Kind of preemptively just cut out some space for future guitars i guess.

But it looks like this:



I have started to just scribble around in ReaFIR in that "precise" drawing mode, until interesting things occur. And that is what i wound up with.

Other than that, it is that George Yohng W1 Limiter(the Waves L1 workalike that... actually works for me, unlike i found L1 to? ), just taking off 4dB for what probably amounts more to boredom than any particularly excellent reason, as it probably doesn't need it.

The trem was a pretty ghetto bodge. I somehow don't have a single tremolo VST, i was surprised to learn. I have some trance gate shit, but it was the wrong sort of vibe.

So in the end, i just plopped the Simulanalog Twin Reverb model on the tail end of the chain and just fucked with the tremolo. I didn't even touch any of the other controls to see if i would have liked something else better.

Actually, the chain for the trem guitar is screwy. It is:

1. Long Hall sort of reverb.
2. Then it is two separate ReaFIRs like this, first the left then the right:

3. Then a W1 Limiter at -1dB threshold for idon'tevenknowwhy. (i don't remember putting it there. )
4. Then the Simulanalog Twin for the trem.

The reverb combines with the EQs in a weird way that almost sounds like it is just accentuating the ringing tone of whatever room the reverb is of. Kind of a peaky odd distorty effect, that is only there when the reverb is engaged. Basically like a Science experiment.

I just figured out why the W1 is there, those EQs are crazyboosting.

I wouldn't have expected such a steep drop that soon, but hey- it works, y'know? The kick drum and bass guitar are practically begging for counterintuitive stuff like that to make them play nice much of the time.

The one Waves limiter I don't take issue with is the L316, the multi-band thing with the bigass display window. That sounds alright to me. The others, not so much.

One place I do like a digital brickwall limiter (as opposed to hardware emulations, like limit mode on the Waves LA2A/3A deals or Softube's Valley People Dynamite model; these behave a bit differently) is pounding the hell out of individual mix elements, especially in parallel. 'S just the thing on some reluctant toms that like to do their thing and quickly run away back into the mix. I picture it as reaching down into the track and pulling up a handful of sustain. It's a scuzzy sound on its own, but it's cool to sneak in there.

Oh, and i forgot about the question of PZM kickmic bleed.

It is worse than your typical hypercardioid dynamic sort of deal, but in the overall scheme of things, it gets the kick much more loudly than anything else. It is for example, less bleed than i typically get on tom mics. Mainly by virtue of the fact that it is further away from the cymbals, and for much of its pickup field, has a half inch of curvy plywood blocking it.

It does get a bit of snare in it, especially when i EQ it to bring out some of the attack that i lose by using my head-prolonging kickpad dealie. In most cases, the snare could actually conceivably be gated out i guess, but i have been on an antigate kick of late.