Yeah, for realz. The inclination i had at first hearing Jesus Lizard and Shellac when i was a young'n was like: wow the recording setup must be pretty gnarly and punk rock for these abrasive sounds. Like Spot for the earlier Black Flag stuff or something.

But like, the more i know about how he works, it is like the recent Tape Op article opened: "He is just a really fucking good engineer", or however it went. And he just records abrasive sounds. That are really just abrasive, in person.

It is so common and easy to attach this crotchety abrasive noisemaker sort of mystique to Albini, but aside from his own at-times-abrasive handling of certain sorts of questions and implications, most of his his work is well-explained, and executed with good reason.

He goes on about rejecting certain glossrock stuff, but it is *only* certain glossrock stuff really. Specific elements of it. He doesn't use reverb unless the something sounds wrong without it, then he just uses enough to make it sound right. Which is like, a totally sensible course. Because most folks just start by putting it on everything, and right from the start, that starts shaping the sound into something else, something smoother, and less direct, and not naturally smoother either. All of the time spent looking for "natural" roomverb vsts, when really, most rooms and spaces have all of the roomsound you will ever need, in them already. You just have to make sure that you get it into a mic correctly. Which is one of the things that Albini clearly spends a lot of time and effort on working on and for, also.

And then the much publicized tape-over-protools agenda. It is kind of the same thing as the reverb. Unnecessary and unnatural elements removed, or rather, not allowed in, in the first place. There is nothing broken about making a band or performer run through a song from beginning to end without fucking up. Getting the bare minimum of consistency of performance out of a musician to allow this, is actually really not very much work. Going digital, can really just encourage performance laziness, and then it just moves the workload from the musician, to the engineer/editor. It is kind of a dumb switch up, and more often than not, if such a bandaid is going to be used with the aim of getting a natural sound, it is going to wind up, anyhow, being done in one take by hired guns after the "band" leaves, ala the major label system. Because editing is not natural. Frankly, neither is complete metronomic precision. We have just gotten used to the robotsounds. Humans aren't supposed to make those, IMO, though. That would be another unnecessary substitution of an unsuited tool in the place of an ideal tool.

After everything however, most of all, Albini's records sound good, because he follows the First Rule Of Recording Good Albums, correctly: record good bands, playing good music, and playing it well.

ALSO. Cameron, what are your thoughts on the earlier Don Cab stuff, like The Singles Breaking Up?

it works! if you're relatively careful with placement-- your brain can't tell the difference between the two. I actually do that all that time- but in reverse, with a stereo overhead, and a mono room mic. i'm sure if you pan the bejeebus outa stuff like 100% each direction-- it's a little more apparent.. but not really.

the bass tone on that record is truly outrageously oresome.

I know you meant to put this into the thread that bears your own name, so I shall answer in that thread.

Chris, to answer your question from the other thread: I have not listened to anything before Don Caballero 2.

And I think the reason the recorded bass tone is so righteous is because there was already something to be had at the source..

Ah! I don't usually miss a thread in this fashion.

Also, i don't seem to know how to move poasts without making new threads out of them?

You should check it out, the earlier stuff is a bit different flavor. More rockchunk chord action and less bleepbloop.

Oh shiz. Nor do I. I was not allowed superpowers, as everyone knew it would be disastrous.

It has been done. I will report my observations soon.

there a spot in the Moderator to split thread after a certain post, but I don't believe you can them move them into an existing thread. I have copied posts and re-authored them to the proper poaster, but only on my mom's board, I think that was an add-on, I will check, just for my own head

I should make a man hair forum and make you the leader........

Oh it can be done....

Chris - you can go into MCP and select the posts and hit merge along the top and it will give you this...

That could get really hairy, both literally and figuratively, really quick.


I honestly do not want/need them though, the ratio of moderators to members is absurd as is.

HOLY FUCK..... IT WORKED!!!!!

Now i know.

Having done the mid-side thing before in the traditional fashion with a figure-8 and duplicating + phase reversing the track, it's spiffy. Room micing in general is good times if you have the inputs for it. On guitars, too. A fave-o-rite of mine is throwing up a stereo pair on guitars and hard panning them so that one is acting as a 'verb on the side opposite where the close mic(s) on the guitar is/are panned.

And I'm hunting down this Don Caballero record to see what all the fuss is about here.

You have described my recording session tomorrow.

I am so pumped for it.

Pretty amazing.

Also superfantastic: