In the past three days I have hung out with Sean Reinert and Eyal Levi and have drank far too much beer in comparison to the almost nonexistent amount of food I have consumed. Weird.

Drinking on an empty stomach is definitely the way to go. Saves you from much expense and bloatedness.

I just got mine set up and god damn, it is becoming a fine axe! The Bill Lawrence Keystone pickups are great. Neck pickup is strat city, bridge has a nice hard twang, in betweens are great.

I'm using it now with my sister's cover band. She likes to sing and is starting such a band, so I joined in on guitar since I've always wanted to play nineties rock covers (and maybe get paid while I'm at it)... But there's a bit of work to be done, getting a drummer and getting everyone to know the songs. It's rough because we have this guy on guitar and vocals, and he wants to sing more than he should. My sister is a better singer and people would rather see a pretty girl sing, and a lot of the songs are more in her range. And his guitar playing is... lacking, to say the least. But he also seems to be the heart and soul, the glue, of this little collection of people, so I dunno about that situation really.

Yesterday kind of really fucking sucked for me. So there is this hamburger joint called Holy Chuck. They have a burger called The Holy Ghost. You have to sign a waiver to eat it, and the waiver warns of a risk of permanent injury or death. It's three beef patties with ghost pepper inside, each covered and dripping with ghost pepper extract, with roast ghost pepper crumbled on top. Extract. So this is hotter than actual ghost peppers. It cost forty bucks, and if you eat it in ten minutes without a drink you get a hundred dollars. So I tried it.This was a poor decision.The manager was watching me and timing me, a crowd was gathered. I had one bite and I was like, "this... this isn't food. This is poison." One more bite to confirm, and yes, all internal indicators were warning me to discontinue the activity. So I gave up.

Now let me tell you, I am no slouch with hot food. Sriracha is like ketchup to me, I eat the hottest shit all the time. But this isn't about how much pain I can take in my mouth, it was about how much abuse my internal organs are willing to allow. My stomach was starting to hurt, more and more. I started to get light headed. Next thing I know, I have passed out (gracefully) at the restaurant table. After slowly waking up I sit there, resting with my head on the table for fifteen minutes, feeling totally out of it. I eventually get up and my friends help me to the bathroom. I didn't know what I intended to do in there, so I sat on the toilet... and puked beside it. Puked and puked until I was dry heaving. Now my situation was starting to improve... it felt great to drink water, to dilute the contents of my stomach...

I went home and ate a tub of yogurt. I am embarrassed, but also amazed at the sheer toxicity of that hamburger. Two bites was all it took to ruin me. If I finished it I'd have probably gone to a hospital.

Dude that's so awesome. I heard about the drum show thing they were doing. Was it a good, informative experience? Was Sean fucking amazing?

Damn, Geoff. I loves me some hot-and-spicy, but I've been rather hesitant about this whole ghost pepper thing.

Speaking of spicyfoods, I made chili for the ladyfriend this evening. She's napping at the moment, so I don't know what her take on it is yet. I haven't made a chili since we've lived together, not for anyone other than myself anyhow, so I'm curious as I had to tone it down quite a bit from my usual thing. She has acid reflux so she can't do too spicy; it's pretty mild by my standards. And I know it's a damn sight less spicy than one of the sauces she uses when she has chicken finger whatnots. Admittedly, she cuts that with bleu cheese, but I've had it straight and it's reasonably spicy- and she buys the mild one. We'll see. Though the flavor profile is off without all my peppers. A work in progress. (Surely I can sneak some sweet jalapeño in there.) Cheese and sour cream should mellow it if it's too much, and to me it's pretty mellow, just a slight bit of spicy.

Bros, how does this mix sound to you?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/137 ... ix%202.mp3

It was def way gnar. And fuck yeah, learned a good bit! Eyal is definitely a badass when it comes to the modern metal production thing, def took quite a lot away from the class.

And yeah, doodbro is absolutely fucking insane on drums. I have never heard someone with obvious dynamics on the kick drums like that dude, it's retarded. Super nice guy as well.

Also! He told me that Focus was recorded without a metronome and live with very little punch in.

That actually doesn't surprise me. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of old-school metal was cut that way, especially the tempo-shifty stuff. (Death immediately springs to mind.)

Granted, the must-have-click-for-everything is a pretty modern way of working. Now, tons of older stuff was cut with a click, from The Beatles onward (there's metronome bleed in Beatles tracks...) and that also surprises some folks. But if there's no sequencer going, you don't need a click. Unless you want to chop stuff up to a grid that isn't the drum track. (For using loops/grooves of a real drummer in place of a grid, see The Shape Of Punk To Come.) But I digress.

Overall, good. A little compressorsmashy, and I think the bass could use a bit more clarity/definition. How the vocals sit, I don't know; that's more of a genre-specific thing, but they're pretty intelligible. Very guitar-forward, but for this, that works- I get the impression of a loud, live band with this, so the vibe is there. The compression- on the drums especially- does add aggression, but it gets a bit pumpy. I don't know whether I'd back it down- 'cause I like the aggression- so much as blend some of the dry drums back in. (Doesn't Reaper have a parallel mix function for all inserts?) For the bass, there are notes where it seems more prominent than others, where it feels like it's being overwhelmed by the guitars. Partly it's an EQ thing, partly maybe a compression thing, not necessarly in how hard it's getting hit with how many dB of GR, but with what.

Question: is there a compressor on the whole mix?

Unfortunately because of the quality of the bass playing, what's going on there the bass tone/volume is almost required. It becomes very fucking sloppy very fucking quick. With more plunkiness it becomes more audible what's going on with the timing of the playing and when brought up in the mix it's mildly unbearable, IMO. We have talked about the guitarist playing it instead but I don't think that's going to happen because of band politics.

And yes, it is def a little bit too smashy listening back. I was pretty fucking disillusioned near the end of mixing after editing tom fills and trying to figure out what the fuck to do about the bass playing. And the dudes requested lots of 'verb on the ol' voculars, by the way.

There's just a limiter on the master. I am thinking maybe instead of backing off the compression on the individual tracks I am going to try bringing down the smashiness of the limiter. The waveform of the master did look pretty fucking smashed, however I was thinking to myself that I usually master things too quiet anyway.

This, I do not know. Will have to investigate that. I always used a much more impractical and ghetto way of working parallel compression.

I just create a buss with a compressor on it, and send whatever needs compressin' to the smash buss. Generally with drums, I'll have a main drum buss the outputs of all the drum tracks are sent to, and a parallel buss. Most often, I don't send the whole drum buss there directly; I'll send the individual tracks there from the aux sends so I can manipulate the levels of the kit pieces feeding the compressor as necessary. Kick and snare generally get hit the hardest; the parallel buss soloed sounds pretty wonky, but bring it up behind the un-wrecked drums and it's cool. I've found I use less compression on the individual drums this way.

Kick, I tend to hit pretty hard as an envelope shaping thing. Even a perfectly good performance or a programmed track, I can clobber with 6 dB average gain reduction just for the sound of it. Top snare, it's a crapshoot; generally slow attack if I compress it at all lately. Bottom snare, yes, and beat on it. Toms, probably in parallel on the tracks themselves and sent to smash buss as necessary. Overheads, I'll smack 'em around to bring up cymbal sustain/wash and knock down the attack of snare hits. Generally very fast attack and release. 1176-type thing on the fastest attack setting is not unreasonable here. Usually I'll use the Softube FET compressor, which has a parallel mix function.

Re: bass, I think you can clean it up without making it plunky. Granted for this style I usually expect bright, clangy bass, but you can probably do the opposite here(!) and actually clear it up. Any murkiness in the bass is probably hiding in the usual spots here; if you need to do something stupid like run two EQs in series, go for it. Since you have the Waves API EQs, load up a 550B and see what 400hz on the low band (as peak and shelf; flip the switch and try it) gets you as a boost, and 700hz on the low-mid band. I'd try a cut somewhere between 150-300hz for clarity, and a boost at 100hz or below for the lows. Since the top end suxx, apparently, don't use it. If you need to chain EQs to do it, go for it. Also, if you wind up using two EQs, try one before and one after compression. (I do this sometimes, the first being a tone-shaping thing before the compressor and the second being a Pultec emulation after for what that does to the lows. If the tone is sitting well sans EQ, I'll just use the Pultec.) I've been liking Waves LA2A for compression on bass lately. It just seems to smooth things out. The API 2500 might be worth investigating here. This looks interesting, too, and it's free. They have a saturation plugin, too, which Mr. newholland reported was cool. I find I get a lotta mileage out of that sort of thing, especially on bass to fatten things but keep 'em clear.

Re: getting levels hotter, try mixing into a compressor on the master buss. It takes a bit of getting used to, and I vacillate between using one and not, but you can get a fair amount of beef this way. Note this will affect your drum sounds significantly, to the point you can't really just slap one on after the fact and expect shit to not change significantly. I'm in the camp that says if you want your mixes loud, mix them to be loud vs. clamping down with a limiter after the fact to raise the overall level. Just use the limiter to catch overs. It'll fuck up the sound less that way. Generally speaking this means using some pretty robust compression (possibly in parallel) and judicious EQ on many or even all of the mix elements to get yer volume or percieved volume going.

Compare the 2011 remaster of Thriller to the original. Yes, I'm referencing Michael Jackson when talking about a hardcore recording, but hear me out on this. Thriller was mixed by a guy who prefers to use little to no compression, and it's pretty damn dynamic and clear sounding. The remaster is squashed to all piss, like someone just pancaked it with Waves L3 or someshit. The drums are distorting, the ambience of the thing is gone, and the bass is all buggered up, to boot. It was never meant to sound like that, and short of remixing the thing (why would you want to anyhow?) you'll never get it that loud (in the sense of high RMS levels) without fucking it up, which is precisely what happened.

Death indeed. I have pored over those records for years and I'd say the only one that had a click was The Sound of Perseverence. Even 'The Atomic Clock' Hoglan's tracks have fluctuations here and there. I mean he's steady as fuck but he totally leans into certain changes...

It sounds better that way.

Oh, it is not the top end that suxx, it's the playing! It being buried like that is sort of a necessity. The actual tone in the room was dialed in for clanky, distorted grossness. It's just that when I use it like that in the mix it is very uncomfortable to listen to.

However, your bits of wisdom have been stored in my brain.

I get that it was the playing that sucked, hence not emphasizing the top end of the bass 'cause the attack and timing would be shown to be shitty.

Okay, now I understand what you were getting at! Not bringing up the top end at all, just de-mudifying the bottom.

I admittedly sort of glazed over your response in a trance, I am pretty easily distracted/confused these days. It is definitely time to start eating food semi-regularly again and maybe back it off a little bit on the substances.

So true. Being a bit older than the rest of you, I didn't record anything with a click track (that I remember) until about 1994, where actually we were using a drum machine during that session, not a click track. Now there may have been a few sessions that I was not privvy to whether there was a click track (I was doing a lot of session work in the 80's & 90's) but I do not recall any click track while tracking then. Even when we were using midi tracks for keys and drums we were using a sync track (on tape ) and letting the sequencer just capture never minding to set time and edit it proper like. Seems like a fucked up way to do it looking back, but the sequencer was just a way to add extra tracks without having to bounce tracks. You guys have heard some of these recordings, click tracks were just not used that much.

I remember a session that I played on and engineered in 1989-90 where the drums were recorded on a Commodore 64 using a program called Studio 64 through pads. The drummer hated it but our session were very late into the night and in a residential neighborhood so we couldn't mic up the drums (in California, with no basement to keep noise down) the drummer hit loud so often the snare pad would trigger a double hit. I had to go back in a manually take out the second hit on all the songs. That sucked. There were 17 songs.

So, my girlfriend got a large package from Colgate in the mail today. It's a Kindergarten Classroom Kit, full of toothbrushes and toothpaste and pamphlets for small children about cleaning one's teef. No, she is not an educator, or a dental professional. She gets free samples of stuff in the mail, but how she managed this one, neither of us know. Pictures may follow as we laughed our asses off opening it up.