Snow all up in this bitch My car/our country can't cope with snow. I got stuck behind a load of lorries up a long gradual incline, had to wait for a snow plough to come along so I could follow it up 50 minute commute took 2 hours and I still feel like I'm sliding around.

This winter has consisted of nothing but 65-75 degree (F) days with lots of sun and no bugs.


Legit.

That is a pain in the arse. (I am going to guess you don't have snow tires...) Here, we're used to the snow- I've been at work when we've accumulated a foot of snow during the day and still got home same as usual. I have family out of state where, like, they get three inches of snow and the whole city's shut down for the day. I am not exaggerating either.

I remember once when the band I was in rehearsed in Niagara Falls driving back in a complete white-out (and that was some drive to begin with as I lived south of the city proper at the time!) and stopping to get pizza on the way.

For what it's worth, there have only been a handful of days with any snow this winter here. I wore a lighter coat out today because it was actually warm-ish. It feels like late autumn here.

NEW SPARTACUSSSSSSSSSS

Yeah it's not really worth it for the 1-2 days of snow we have Although snow days are awesome I don't think I get paid for unauthorised days off work so I'm hoping it's cleared up by Tuesday, there's no way I'll be getting there for 7:45am if it's still like this.

It's always awesome when Reaper just randomly closes itself in the middle of a session. No "this program has stopped responding", no "tell Microsoft about this problem so they can make it significantly worse" dialog, just BOOM. Reaper's gone. Fantastic, most fun thing ever.



I seriously just broke off the little flap that covers up my DVDRW drive with a screwdriver. Fuck this shit, I'm giving the band their money back. I'm tired of fucking with the other studio's drum tracks recorded with a Behringer mic stuffed with toilet paper then covered with duct tape mic'ing drum heads made out of Tupperware. How the fuck that studio makes $80 an hour recording tracks that bad is beyond me. I'm going to give their recording engineer a call and read him the riot act. Twice. And if he gives me even a single witty retort I'll break his fucking jaw.


/rage.

I've only had that once with Reaper. I've since been a bit OCD about saving every time I adjust something

That is a giant pain in the balls. The computer at my studio does not like the Soundtoys plugins and occasionally decides to emit a horrid squealing noise in place of the tracks they're on, or just not play them back. I love it when the lead vocal drops out in the middle of something to be instantly replaced by hitting the mute button on my interface/tearing my headphones off and using a lot of bad words at snacktime, as it were.

Re: shit recordings, I've gathered there aren't that many places near you, so I suppose if you're the only game in town- not you, obviously; wherever they recorded at- and just really don't care you can totally phone it in and charge whatever. I'd love to make that per hour but I have too much dignity not to Yield Results doing so. The Turd Polish aspect is easily the worst part about recording/mixing. I take it you don't have anywhere to track the drums yourself?

I do, actually, but I'm a couple mics short for a proper setup for metal.

If I was ballsy, I could use my NT5 pair as overheads, SM57 on the top and bottom of the snare, and the MD421 on the kick, but the toms'd sound like moldy ballsack and I'd be lacking a proper room mic to destroy with Decapitator.


And there's 2 studios that I know of in West Virginia besides my little basement setup... one in Huntington and one in Charleston. The one here in Huntington is a pretty decent little country studio with some talented guys running the show, but they lack the gear to record a proper metal band and probably turned the guys down when they asked; I don't know. The one in Charleston is the one I got these tracks from. There's three guys that work there, one does the recording, one does the mixing and mastering, and the other takes on a managerial role.


I'm waiting on the frontman of the band to email me back. Hopefully he'll sympathize with me... this is the second project I've done for this band, and I did the first one for free.

What really baffles me is how they got the drums to sound that bad. Did they mic up the sides? The overheads sound like they were recorded with a pair of PA horns, no highs at all, just a bunch of 2k and pretty much nothing else. The snare sounds like it was recorded with one of those Yamaha drumshell mics. Thud. If the overheads weren't so bad, I'd just use Drumagog, I have a nice sample collection.


Re: the squealing noise; this PC does that with the Lexicon reverb bundle. Fucking fantastic sounding plugins, but they randomly drop out and squeal. It's not a feedback squeal... it's like that sound heavy pieces of metal make when they slide on each other. Nails on a chalkboard have nothing on that sound, and as loud as I mix I'm sure it's probably done more than it's fair share of damage to my hearing.

You can do it with the toms actually. (I NT5s, by the way. I have a pair meself, had 'em for years. Best value in the SDC world, IMO.) It's a placement thing. I have a few clips of my Occasional Metal Collaborator rocking a 4-mic setup on his kit and it sounds pretty badass. I have friends taking me out momentarily so I don't have time to track 'em down but I can forward 'em to you later. It's the Glyn Johns 3-mic thing + a close mic on the snare. The distance is slightly tampered with- I think he's using 36" vs. 40" and his snare mic is- well, we both pull it pretty far back. So it's not right up on the head. We've gone back a good foot at times- same with toms too. Plain old 57s are totally fine, close or far-close. I don't know how he pulled it off, but he did.

I could probably use underheads if the drummer's kit allows it. The biggest problem with that would be the floor toms. They're liable to get buried, and the drummer uses them a lot.


57s are great on snares... I know this from using them when I got paid to record and mix a band in the drummer's home studio. The midrange bump gives them a really awesome crack.

i am worn out on my current mixing project and am feeling a bit on the dejected side. never worked so hard on something to yield such mediocre results to my own ears.

sigh. it fucking SUCKS to realize you kinda blew it on a recording project and are just gonna deliver something you're not happy with- even after several months of tinkering with it.. particularly when your wife plays bass in that band.

Fuuuu.. i quit for today. theres plenty of reasons it sounds like it sounds.. but goddamn it. sometimes there's no magic. :|

Interesting, what are you down on with it? Or rather, what do you want differently?

it sounds just mushy all over. i know it was recorded alright-- but trying to make it scale up to sound like a rock band is just not sounding right. if i leave it current scale- its bassless and shitty sounding. if i scale it up so it sounds gratifying, it sounds mushy and faux ass. it just sounds like a midrange morass. but it IS a midrange morass. three girl singers, three little bitty amps with little bitty sounds.

guess i'm just tired of beating on it, and should let it be what it is.

Yeah, to me it sounds like maybe you have just been listening to it too much. When was the last time you gave it a couple weeks without hearing it?

As a person who has never been very happy with anything i have recorded or mixed(still hacking away at it though! ) i can say, that the closest i have come to it, is when i put something away for a couple of weeks or months, and then listen to it cold, having forgotten a few of the most minor(and difficult as it is to accept after a multihour/multiday/multimonth mixing battle, generally completely unimportant) details, and allowing myself just the slightest amount of pretending that someone else recorded/mixed the thing other than me.

fair nuf..

it just doesn't stand up to anything else-- and i'm REALLY frustrated with my current monitoring sitch. all i can say is FUCK mackie mr5s for their inadequate low end. i have no worldly idea how anybody could make music with sub 100hz bass on them, and it drives me mad that i haven't got a rock solid reference to check my mixes.

anybody want a set? going cheap.

I haven't spun the current iteration on the Adams yet, but, like, I hear a lot of bottom that wasn't there before and a clarity and separation to the thing I totally dig. Of course, you might be on to something with the monitoring like when we'd discussed the Garda stuff. (Where I agree- sorry I didn't get back to you earlier- the bass could come up a bit still, though I'm hearing it clearly enough.) Re: the bass on the Hens record, I dig what you did to it because it filled it out a lot. It seems solid to me?

But really, I think the record sounds fine. Like, there's bits where I know I would have done it differently, but as I'd mentioned prior that would be imposing my aesthetic. It seems on the glossier side than I'm used to hearing from you as well- and not in a bad way. Besides the low end, what's yer beef with the mix as a whole?

And Chris has a valid point re: stepping back from things. I had to back away from the Garda record for a good while. And I still haven't finished the stupid thing- hell, I realized there's keyboards and vocals muted in the version I sent you. (Promise is missing all the backup vocals and some of the keys, for one...)

Having heard a bunch of versions now- and the songs are there- I know why the guitar sound is what it is. You could treat the drums differently, but that is not your deal, and like you'd mentioned re: the drummer some of it probably wouldn't work. Everything sits in a clear defined place, and I think the bottom end is there, what bottom end the band has- and it's an honest assessment to say they don't have a lot, 'cause, er, they don't- and that's their sound.

An aside re: monitaurs- an acquaintance of mine has KRK VXTs. With the sub. I am not normally a KRK fan at all. He makes dance music. Goddamn, I have been in his studio (with a floating floor and the walls all done up nice as he owns a contracting business) and they sound good. Plenty of low end, and not muddy, which was always my complaint- yeah, they had the lows, but they were crap lows. The VXT series is good. Big and clear.

In your situation I would probably roll with the HS80Ms almost by default though? And have you thought about integrating a sub? I'm not a huge fan myself except with NS10s, and I know you don't want NS10s. But the sub might work/help? Might. Given your tastes I'd probably just go for something in a big box with an 8" woofer though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57W ... r_embedded

I have no fucking idea.
NSFW

Wow... that vid started innocently enough. And then, just wow.

My MP3 player works again... it simply needed the loving currents of a Windows computer's USB port.

I recorded a new band today. Well, no comments on the actual song and lyrics, but the singer sounded great! She has a good voice. That felt good.

Dance In The Vampire Bund <3