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Posts By Josh Watson

0 Me. On Me. By Me. With added foreword by ANGUS YOUNG!!!

09/02/2011
Josh Watson
· Blog

This blog is absolutely rubbish, and the post below in particular on the subject of guitars completely misses the mark. I don’t know what else I can say about this waste, this travesty, this injustice.

– Angus Young, Feb 2011
_________________________________________________

What is my all time favourite movie moment?

It isn’t the pivotal scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the bone thrown into the air cuts seamlessly into the spacecraft. Nor is it the beach assault from Apocalypse Now. Nor even is it Captain Kirk shouting “KAAAAAAHHHHHNNNNN!!!!!!!!” across the vacuum of space. No, nothing that epic. For me, it’s when Mr Bean gets up to do an improvised speech about the painting “Whistler’s Mother” in Mr Bean: the Movie. For some reason the idea of talking about guitars makes me think of that scene.

“Hello, I’m guitarist Josh…

…apparently…

And my job is to make noises by hitting the guitar.

What can I say about guitars? Well for one thing, they’re very loud. Which is good. Because if they weren’t, then hardly anyone would be able to hear them.”

Guitar has become ingrained in culture as an icon, artefact, and status symbol to those who care. It’s hard to work out what to say about it. Everyone has their own ideas ranging from the noise a guitar is supposed to make, to the faces you should pull when you do a solo. Here’s my favourite guitar. It’s a Gibson Explorer from 2007 I believe. Nothing that special, I changed the stock pickups for slightly smoother and smoky sounding ones.

I think my outlook is a little different from some other guitarists. The guitar is seen as the instrument – the thing you either coax beauty out of or wrestle with, depending on your outlook and style. I don’t think of the guitar as my instrument. My instrument is the amplifier.

The guitar amp is even more important than the Electric Guitar. Without the amp, there is no “Electric” anyway. I said last week that the bass guitar sounds recognisable no matter what you plug it into. The same can’t be said of the guitar. Its natural tone is thin, twangy, honky… it’s just bad. It’s the amplifier and speakers you plug it into that make it sound full, thick, aggressive and alive. Don’t get me wrong, a good guitar is better to play, but given the choice between a shit guitar with a great amp, and a great guitar with a shit amp, I’d chose the shit guitar every time. Some players are famous for their relationship with one guitar, their “signature” model. I have a relationship with my amp. It’s the one constant in all my sounds.

This is my Vox AC30. It’s a new model (2007) that I’ve made some alterations to so that it responds to my playing the way I want. It’s got a chiming clean sound with a rich tone. On its own it is a little brash sounding but that’s because it’s designed to sound good in a mix with bass and drums – the brashness ends up sounding clear and forward. Famous AC30 users include the Beatles, the Edge, Brian May, and Peter Buck, but it’s been on so many records I couldn’t list them. It’s not a very cool amp – it looks more like a piece of furniture from the 1950’s, because that’s when it was designed. Often, bands will pretend to play through a wall of screaming marshalls, but behind them the sound will actually be coming from one unassuming AC30. It’s believed the quintessential guitar riff from Smoke on the Water was recorded with an AC30.

When you turn it up magic happens, as with most decent guitar amps – it’s what makes them so important to me. It distorts the sound, runs out of power and squashes the tones so even the quietest note you play seems to jump out of the speaker. The high end fizzy sounds smooth out, the bass seems to tuck in like a jet plane’s undercarriage, and the amp sings. Maybe it’s screaming because it’s being pushed so hard, but it’s my favourite sound, and the way it responds and changes the feel of my playing influences how I play. It’s a symbiotic relationship and as I’m writing about it I’m thinking to myself I fucking love this amp. It’s like the relationship between a loyal dog and his owner. Except I think I’m the dog.

This is the amp in all of our recordings. Recording a guitar amp is a strange process because what sounds good in the room doesn’t seem to come across easily on record. Without touching the amp’s controls at all, just by moving the microphone on the speaker, you can go from a sound that’s muffled and dull to one that’s completely harsh and ear piercing. Somewhere in between is the sound you’re looking for. It’s a testament to how bad guitars naturally sound that they need to be plugged into amps that completely distort and mangle them to give us something usable. And the most commonly used mic to record guitars throughout the world is the Shure SM57 – there’s two in the picture below. It’s not a transparent high quality mic. It completely colours the tone of any sound you record it with. You can get them new for £60, which when you compare that to one of the industry standard vocal mics (at £1200 for the basic model) is nothing at all.

Those who have seen me live will think yeah ok, he talks about his amp, but what about his fucking stupid rack of effects? Don’t they play some part in it? Those who have helped me lift said rack will probably get angry at this point. What’s the point in it? Aren’t they important?

Yes, they are. I love effects. I love the variety of sounds you can create – the ambient washes of noise, the sense of depth you can make. But they, just like the guitar I’m playing, all feed into the amp. I guess it’s all one big instrument.

It’s a lonely life recording the guitars because I’m there by myself, wearing two hats at once – the performer’s hat, and the engineer’s hat. I find I’m good at doing both things at once because I’ve done that as long as I’ve been playing guitar. Where I suffer is that I lose perspective. By which I mean, I might get a great tone and play well on a song, but it’ll be the wrong tone for the song and then I need to go and do it all again. That happens regularly. If we had a producer he’d probably keep me right but he’d have to get his hat back from under the performer’s and engineer’s hats on my head.

It is fun though. Guitar recording lets you get creative, and I like to treat the basic drum and bass tracks as a blank canvass. I never just play the part I play live. I always record different sections, layer different tones and doubles, experiment with effects, and above all else, I improvise. I don’t do that much live, but in the studio with time to spare I absolutely love to let loose and just see what accidentally comes off my fingers. And because I’m the one mixing it, I can really do what I like. No one but me will decide whether it makes it to the final mix, or even if anyone but me will ever hear the results.

You can see why I lose perspective.

0 Bass is the place, bass is the place, bass is the play-ay-ace, bass is the place.

01/02/2011
Josh Watson
· Blog

Is that it then? Next song?”

“No, we’ve only done two takes so far… I noticed it wasn’t quite meshing in the middle 8”

“…oh.”

Alex does not like recording. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it’s happening to him. Alex turns up, sets up his rig exactly as if it’s a gig, and gets confused that no one applauds him after each take. I feel for him. He’s just not excited by it. Don’t get me wrong, the songs excite him, the performances excite him, the finished mixes excite him, and the idea that we’re going to release them on an unsuspecting world excites him. But the in between stages hold no allure for Alex. I play him half finished mixes, saying things like “listen to the drums here! Can you feel that compression!?” and he to date has only ever had the following suggestion:

“I think the bass part in (insert song section) is (too loud/ too quiet/ not powerful enough).”

I think there’s one in every band, I have to believe it’s not just us. He doesn’t listen to the whole mix. If he did, he’d find out there’s a guitarist in the band too. He only knows if the bass is too loud, or the bass is too quiet. Alex doesn’t want to embark down the road towards understanding what makes a production good, he keeps his head down and hopes his playing isn’t going to ruin everything. He is the ugly hidden face of recording a band. In his world, there would be no recording and everyone would be compelled by law to attend massive concerts in which he, the bass player, was the star of the show and amplified so loud that it caused anyone within 10 miles to be sick, and anyone within 300 yards of the stage to get what doctors would call “gooey eyeball caused by liquefaction of innards”.

I might have digressed a bit here. You get the idea.

The bass and vocals are probably the constants in this bunch of recordings – as is the case on many records, I think. We change the drum mics, tuning and at times the drums themselves around depending on the mood of the songs. Like many guitarists, I change my tones depending on the part I’m playing. I’ll talk about that next week. In a mix, guitars are multitracked, drums and percussion get lots of different tracks, panning, treatments… but bass? There’s one bass track per song. I think it’s the unifying thread that runs through our songs and makes the recordings work together. Musically, it’s the bridge between rhythm and melody, the anchor pin, the keystone that holds the whole band together.

Some people think that a bass guitar is like a bigger, deeper electric guitar but it’s not, it’s completely different. Electric guitars sound absolutely dreadful – if you can, try plugging a guitar into a hi-fi or a PA system. They sound thin, clicky, choked, lifeless… just bad. You need to plug them into something else that distorts terribly (namely a guitar amp) to make them useable at all. Bass, not so. Plug a bass guitar into anything at all and it comes across pretty much like the sound we all know and recognise as “bass guitar”. Sure, different amps and recording styles can colour what you hear, but they can’t fundamentally change what is being played on the instrument. Unlike a guitar, where some fantastic sounds can come from terrible performances (this fact has saved my bacon many times).

Whether or not it sounds good, therefore, is literally in the hands of the bass player. How consistently they play each note. Which bit of the string they pluck. Whether they mute a note before playing the next. It all counts. Like Mez, Alex can deliver the goods when he needs to. We recorded the bass parts over a couple of days, mostly using Alex’s trusty Ampeg stack.

It’s a general rule when recording bass guitar that people take a direct recording of the bass to process later. That is, the electrical signal is split straight into the recorder as well as going through the bass amp. That’s a safe thing to do, because it gives you an uncoloured recording of the bass which you can mess around with later. I didn’t do that, because I like Alex’s bass amp. It’s the sound I want everyone to hear. He plays an Ampeg stack which is about as tall as a person. I like the Ampeg because it adds authority to the tone, and filters the sound in a nice way that sits well in a mix – the high end of a bass can be clacky and clicky in a bad way, the Ampeg makes it aggressive, twangy and defined. The bass can be boomy, the Ampeg makes it growl and rumble without overpowering the mix.

At one stage, we did split the signal. But not to go straight into the recorder: We split the signal between the Ampeg stack and one of my AC30 guitar amps, for a blend of clear bass and fuzzy distorted goodness. That was fun, and quite loud.

I’ve not told you about the bass guitar being used, yet. It’s made of Cocobolo wood, which is so strong and dense that when they make these basses, they have to make them at the end of a production run because it destroys the tools used to shape it. That makes it very resonant – even if you play it unplugged, it seems to sing to you, otherworldly harmonics wafting out of the body. And that’s good.

Alex was genuinely worried having heard the drum tracks that he was going to ruin what we’d done so far, but he did no such thing. He played the tracks with precision and punch, just like he always does. Maybe in his head, the recording session was a gig after all, his audience just displaced a little in space and time.

0 Dance like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums

24/01/2011
Josh Watson
· Blog

Phantom tracks recorded. The next step: drum takes. Mez is a very good drummer, and he always rises to the occasion. Drum sounds and performances however are some of the hardest things to get right – second only to the lead vocal, I think. The drum kit has massive dynamics and tones, from whisper quiet to so loud that you flinch.

Firstly, the drum kit has to sound good, otherwise there’s no point recording it. That involves replacing heads, looking for rattles and squeaks, and endless tuning. Honestly, unless you’ve done it I’m not sure you can imagine. I remember when I thought tuning a guitar was hard work. But a single drum head has between 6 and 10 lugs to adjust, each of them needing to be just right to even make that head be in tune with itself. Then you’ve got to make the relative tuning between the top and bottom head right. Then you’ve got to get the relative tuning between the different drums right. Oh, and if you turn any lug, it adjusts the tuning both at the adjacent lugs and the lug opposite. Oh, and if you hit the drum, it’ll go out of tune. Oh, and if the temperature changes or the pressure or the humidity changes or you move the drum or look at it critically, it’ll go out of tune.

Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

But between me and Mez, we did it. We took extra care on the snare drum. I think of the snare drum as the nose of the mix – a terrible nose on an otherwise beautiful face is bad news. It’s right there in the middle, it sticks out, you can’t ignore it. It’s amazing how the sound of the snare completely defines the sound of a mix – it’s the single hardest thing to get right. Get it wrong and the recording is instantly cast down into the fiery hell of shit demos. Forever.

You can’t afford to get the snare sound wrong. Too deep, and you become an 80’s revival band. To reverberant and you’re trying to be Pearl Jam – it’s all anyone will compare you to. Too dry and you’re Fleetwood Mac. You must get it fucking right. Mez has a really nice wooden snare. It’s got a bright crack to it that cuts through well, but also has satisfying body and a hint of snare wire crispiness. But on some songs we used a more mellow snare rented from the studio upstairs.

Drums sounding as we wanted, we tamed the sound of the room a bit. Our room has similar dimensions to a big shoe box turned onto its long side. Close, parallel walls are bad news for drum sounds because the drum hits echo off each wall, bouncing back and forward in a ping pong effect. You might have heard it if you’ve ever clapped your hands in an empty room that’s being redecorated; it’s a boingy, flappy reverb that sounds like it’s been lifted from the effects track of The Animaniacs. It smears the sound of the drums and makes them sound cheap. To combat that, I did a thing that I’d heard about, but never done before. I made something.

8 sound absorbing panels – pictured here making a sort of guitar amp rabbit hutch, but which got their first use being placed around the drums, especially either side along the nearest two walls. We hung two duvets from the roof to stop sound bouncing back down too. And it really worked. The drums sounded much more focussed and clear. And when we put microphones round the kit, we could hear the difference.

There are two extremes when it comes to miking up a drum kit. You can put one “big picture” mic up. Or you can use 20 or more, focussed on every tiny detail. We can record 10 things at once with our gear, so we used our 10 mics. Simple. The basic drum sound came from two overhead mics, giving a bright, lively sound and a stereo spread when panned left and right. Then we used mics placed very close to each individual drum to add depth and punch to the sound. The snare got two mics because as I said, it’s important. So did the bass drum: one put right inside the drum through a hole in the front head to get lots of click and attack, and another about 4 feet back at floor level to get a nice bassy thump. Blended together, you get a nice bassy thump, click and attack. Predictably. It doesn’t sound that natural, but it sounds big and clear in a mix so it’s all good.

How long did it take? About 4 days to record 10 drum parts. We took our time, went for pub lunches – the whole point of recording in our own place is so that we don’t have to rush. We adjusted the drum sounds between songs and let the sessions flow – sometimes fast and aggressive, churning out take after take, sometimes relaxed with plenty of time to chat between playing.

Mez was fantastic. The man can play the drums, a fact I’m prone to forget when we’re all knackered at 10pm on a Thursday after a hard week at work. Yep, we’re all babies. Hard working, hard rocking babies. The kind of babies you wouldn’t like to mess with. Baby killers. Or rather, Killer Babies.

Killer babies with killer drum tracks. I was pleased.

Next stop: Bass.