I was just messing aboot with a pedal i just did some shizz to, and when i listened back to it, i thought, "hmm. this stuff is *almost* consistent enough to record drums to".

So, of course, rather than spend the time to re-record things tightly enough to be good for scratch tracks, i decided to use them as is.





Anyhow. There is some "normal" chris_d stuff, some heavier, blastbeatier stuff too.












First, something more typical for me to post:

A Thing With Quieter Guitars And Pretty Sloppy Drums.





Second, several different (some quite noisy) riff-ish things that i don't know what (as will be clearly audible) i want to do with for drums yet:

A Thing With Slower Noisy Guitars And Sloppy Drums




And third/lastly, me trying to play blastbeats, and probably needing to turn the headphones up a bit, because i kept misjudging changes:

A Thing With Faster Noisy Guitars And Terribly Sloppy Blastbeat Drums





Mainly for the heavier stuff, i am just trying to force myself to play at tempos that are very uncomfortable for me right now, the very fast, and the very slow. Actually, my fast blasting is surprisingly(to me) okay. It is actually the half-pace slowblasts that i am fucking up a lot.

Oh well, just some noises.

Oh, the guitar is one track, the telecaster. The pedal is a screwy modded Marshall Shredmaster copy, the amp is a glorious and super high quality SS Crate GX15R. I have done fairly little to the recordings, and mostly just edited out about 50 minutes of repetition and a bunch of stuff that is even more sketchy than what is in these clips.

Mr. Chris, how much compression are you compressing the drums with, pray tell? I'm curious.

Sound excessive?

I just have done a real quick go with the mix. Not too much EQ, random limiting and compression all over.

1. There is almost nothing on the snare. Just a really light peak limiter sort of thing for like when i accidentally hit the mic with a stick or something. It is two mics, top and bottom, about the same distance from their respective heads. The sound is pretty close to 50/50 each mic.

2. The kick is actually two cloned tracks. On one, there is nothing but EQ(a big mid scoop, for the CAD KBM412) and the same limiter as the snare, which is like: threshold at -0.8dB, ceiling at -0.3dB or so. Not doing much squashing, just there for freakishly aberrant loudnesses.

The other kick track is just for the "click" bit of the kick. It has an EQ that cuts out most of the low end, and also IIRC some superhighs too. On this click kick, the compression is nuts, i am definitely smashing like 10-12dB out (again with a limiter) so it is a super consistent attack sound. This track is just brought in enough so that there is some definition in the (er... very roughly) double kick parts.

Oh, and that is just on the heavier stuff. The quieter one only has the first kick track, and not the wildly compressed one.

3. Lets see. The overheads have maybe about 3dB being compressed with Blockfish.

4. The toms have a whole fuckpile of compression on them, and some goofy EQ so they make the boom sound i like for them. Due to what the EQ does to the mic bleed, i have them gated with Floorfish also, which i don't usually like to do.

5. Lastly on the drums, the one you are probably hearing the most, is i had an extra track available so i put the old radioshack PZM almost in the next room. I did not realize at the time that the single AA battery in the thing needed replacing, so the mic was a little crunchier than it usually is. I decided to run with it, so i am slamming the piss out of it with TL's Saturated Driver. The mic isn't super loud in the mix, compared, but its presence accounts for much of the crunchy compressed feel of the drum mix, particularly the hihat which is fuzzing out pretty well in a lot of spots.

6. The drum mix has a few random things, squashing the overall drummix about another 4-ish dB with a soft limiter onnit.

If there were any other instruments than the one guitar track, i would spend more time trying to clean it up, but as it is, these are just the basic settings that i have on saved FX chains from older recordings.

Definitely excessive.

I like the kick sound, actually. Compression has its place. And sometimes that place is awesome.

I found for the kick that the key really ended up being cloning the track and treating each 'clone' very differently, one lots of bass and less compression, one lots of upper mids and heavy limiting, kind of like simulating the use of two mics i guess. Body and attack.

It almost seems counter-intuitive, like it should be possible to alter the eq sufficiently on one track to do what i want, but i have really found it easier to just split it into the basic "sounds good on its own" kick, and the wildly mid-heavy "click kick" and mix them after the fact, depending on how it needs to sit with the rest of the mix.

Probably it is largely due to the big difference in compression between them. I could probably spend some time with a multiband compressor and figure something out for one track. Maybe later. For now, this is the quick/dirty/easy way i have found.

Sometimes that's what yields results, and the results are what's important in the end. As I mentioned, I rather like it actually. There's definitely some severe compression happening, but it's in a much smarter way than the current "brickwall the shit out of the mix" way. Stuff actually still punches; it's not neutered-sounding.

Haa... you are quite good at that straight blast stuff. And that's one foot?

I also like your single stroke rolls on the toms. And the tone you got out of the snare.

That compression is something else though.

Yeah, when i use two feet for the blasty my shit gets real ugly. For the fast stuff, it is way easier for me to just have at it on the onesies. I am thinking about going to a higher tension and a steeper angle on the pedals though, i lose a bit more kick volume in the blasts than i'd like.

And the compression, yeah, it is way OTT.

It is funny though, whenever i go back in and start from scratch, i keep on winding up in the same place with the squashingness. I really should sit down and just figure out a better solution to loudening my drum mixes one of these days.

But. I just love compression SO MUCH.

It is hard to let go.

Sweet fucking jesus.
Your snare sounds mean as a motherfucker.
Sweet blasting too, macabroni.