I read that as computer controlled Killing machine. Now THAT's moar like it!

That works too.

Them'r oss'rich's. Meatatarian folks say they's good eatin'.

I say we bring back the moa, because nothing exceeds like excess:





A distinguished gentleman :




Feets:

Pretty fantastically fucked up looking, like half of some other larger animal's bits that they couldn't find enough bones for so they just added a tiny skull they had lying around, stuck it to the rear legs via some third animal's spine, and called it a day.

Hey- if all you had kicking around was parts of a giraffe, some big-ass crocodile feet and rib cage, and an ostrich head, wouldn't you do the same?

You know i would.

For Chris and Dan: http://graneroperro.com/doncab/pictures/adon_pics.html

i've seen that! yeah-- so many fun mics.. and i really love the sound of that record to boot- particularly the bass and drum sounds.

i would love to know how all that biz got run at time of mixing though. very fun stuff!

Don Caballero records have some of the finest "big sticks" drums sounds around.

Also, Albini's mic collection is so fantastic. I would love a small pile of those side address SDC condensers he uses all over the place. Just strikes me as such a useful format to have.

I also simply feel that i would record very differently if i had those tools around and the input channels to feed them to. The focus would shift quite a bit, for the actual basic tracking process.

I know it says otherwise but the snare and tom mics look a damn lot like 57s at first glance. The way they are pointed on the toms looks kind of funny but I suppose those mics are side address. Well, I like looking at pics of kits in the studio a whole lot, especially atypical setups. I'd like to listen to that record now, I'm curious how the mono overhead and stereo mic sound together.

The Altec 175 is a funky little (tube) condenser mic:



I find that with a condenser on a snare, i do tend to aim it almost across the head more than at it. I find it gives a bit better attack, whereas aimed actually AT the head, it seems to soft and body-based to sound the way i like. Actually, it looks to me like he has that aimed more at the head on Damon Che's snare there.

The toms are definitely side address though:



Pricey little bastards, but very interesting to me.

The mono overhead+stereo mic seems to be a sort of mid-side arrangement. Without a stereo mic (or the spare inputs) to experiment with, i have never tried it, but i admit that i am curious to try it some time.

The entire mid-side concept is a mystery to me.

It is basically just a mono room mic, with two stereo ambient mics. And because of math and physics, when you put the stereo mics left/right and opposite phase, they, in conjunction with the mono to allow detailed fine tuning of how "wide" the stereo spread is, by raising or lowering their volume in relation to the mono mic. Even though, the mics are all basically in the same place.

I don't see the mid mic in Albini's setup there. If he is using the mono overhead for that, then it would be a bit different than "normal", though.

There was a pretty solid description someone poasted once that explained mid-side in general though. Maybe i can locate it...

Ah. Here i think it was this one:

http://www.uaudio.com/blog/mid-side-mic-recording/

That is indeed a great sounding record, and my favorite Don Cab as well. That bass tone.

A figure-8, with the track duplicated (or in the analog domain, multed to a second channel on the console) and the phase reversed works too- it might be the most common way to do mid-side. It's funny this comes up, because one of my collaborators texted me earlier asking to borrow my ribbon mic to do mid-side on his drums.

Re: Steve Albini's mic collection- I like that he has lots of classy-yet-oddball stuff. He makes some interesting mic choices. And it yields results. He's sorta known for his drum sounds a little...

And as an aside, as much as he says he doesn't produce and he's a documentarian sort of engineer, he does have something of a sonic signature. (If I didn't know better, I would have guessed he did the first Tomahawk record and that Swans record from a year-and-change ago, for example.)

He likes his quirky mics, for sure. But i have begun to really feel like a huge part of why his recordings bear his signature, are the crazy rooms he had built in Electrical.

I used to sort of rip on him for what he said versus what he clearly produced as results. But now, i actually kind of think that perhaps a very large part of why he considers himself to be a "what-the-band-sounds-like-in-the-room" kind of guy, is that his rooms themselves, actually pretty much sound like that.

I remember reading something where someone had gone in there to record with one of the other engineers, and basically, they just put up a room mic, and ran some drums through it and the "Albini snare" was right there. It is an interesting angle on perhaps why his stuff sounds, like his stuff.

I also find it interesting, how "not-very-albini" the drum sounds on the Don Cab stuff are though.

I think that in addition to his crazy rooms, perhaps a lot of people come to him looking for PJ Harvey/Nirvana/Shellac drumsounds. Kind of like how drummers try so hard for the old Bonham Levee Breaks kick on like fucking everything, whether or not it is a suitable solution for any given song.

Hmm... That makes sense. The drum thing is really the consistent defining sound, with the rest really sounding fairly unfucked-with. His take on things is interesting 'cause it's quite hi-fi without ever really sounding, y'know, like Steely Dan. It's sorta the opposite of what we'd usually think of as "polished" even though there's nothing really raw about it aside from what might be emanating from the band's amps or mouth-holes.