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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.

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.

Phantoms

19/01/2011
Josh Watson
· Blog

Everyone and their dog can record these days. Anyone who tries to make a living recording music knows this, and fears it. Their clients don’t go to them anymore. Their mic collections, good sounding rooms, £50k mixing desks, mean nothing to the excited musician who is trying to record their acoustic guitar on a new £200 computer recording interface.

Part of me feels guilty for contributing to this problem. But the recording industry being what it is today, we can’t hold out much hope of getting a record label to pay for us to go to an incredible studio. They want us to walk into their offices with a finished product they can sell. We can’t afford excuses – “Oh, the drums don’t sound very good because we couldn’t afford new heads”, “Yes, the lead vocal is a bit sibilant, in an ideal world we’d have had the time to fix that…”.

To me though, the difference between a basement demo and a big budget studio production is a lot more than just the sound quality. I think people can get hung up on sound quality, the clarity, the beautiful tones, and use that as a judge of the music. Some fantastic records, huge hits, have glaring production flaws but they still sound brilliant. No, the difference between a good and bad record is the feel of the music. A good song recorded badly is a good song. A bad song recorded well just lets people know exactly how much the artist sucks. My favouriteproducer is Daniel Lanois, and he likes to say that a good performance equals a good mix. I didn’t know what he meant until the first time I tried to mix a bad performance. No matter what you do to it, you’re compromising, trying to hide flaws. But if everyone plays well, the mix is almost irrelevant. Even if something is too loud, it doesn’t matter – because it’s worth hearing.

So with our album, my main concern hasn’t been the quality of the recording, but the quality of the performances. If we all played together, it’d be easy – we could just keep playing until we get a take that feels good, and that’d be it. But we can’t do that.

Why can’t we do it? This is why:Our recording space isn’t big enough. It’s our practice studio, so we obviously can physically get in there and play music together. But all the noise making things are so close together, it’d be impossible to get a great recorded sound. People think of microphones with some reverence. But they’re just like crap ears really. Imagine what it would sound like to have 15 half deaf ears all over a small room an insanely loud rock band was playing in. Ok, that’s hard to imagine so I’ll help you: It’d sound awful. Guitar sounds spilling through the drum mikes, bass rumbling through EVERYTHING with as many different tones as there are mikes in the room, that’s just two of the terrible problems that would confront me when it came time to mix what we recorded.

And I don’t want that. Not even a little bit. Mainly because when we we’re recording we’d be all pumped and thinking it sounds great, then after months of mixing I’d present the other guys and you with a record that sounds like the musical equivalent of a Yorkshire pudding that didn’t rise. Or a Chocolate cake with 6 raw, rotten eggs in the middle.

No thanks.
Instead, we needed to record each part separately, but somehow perform as if we were playing together. It’s not such an easy task for musicians who aren’t very used to it. Imagine you’re a bassist, playing along to a drummer. You’re not just playing along with what you hear, you’re also playing along with what you see and feel. You can see the drummers arms swing through the air, so you can predict the exact point his sticks are going to hit each drum. You can see him bopping away on his stool – his legs move in time with the music, his head nods to the beat – so as well as hearing and seeing what he is playing, you can see how the music is making him feel, what the beat in his head is doing. You can feel the sound from the drums too – the kick drum makes the floor you’re standing on shake. And likewise, he can hear, feel and see your bass playing, and will adjust his performance to more closely match yours.

Now record that drummer, and play your bass along to the recording. You can’t see him anymore. You can’t feel his playing. And he isn’t reacting to you anymore. So your playing changes, and becomes less natural, less tight. That makes the recording feel worse, and illustrates the problem with recording bit by bit. So how did we get round that sticky wee issue?

I pondered the dilemma for weeks. I went trekking in distant mountains. I stood in the line for the self service checkouts in Tesco’s, and smashed a beer bottle at the feet of the couple that inevitably pushed in front of me. My manic stare cowed them into submission. I slunk off to my car, still pondering. Then I had what I thought was a great original idea, until I learned that loads of people do it.

We started recording takes of the whole band playing together, with not too much regard for how the recording actually sounded – it was just a “feel template” or as Alex immediately dubbed it, a “phantom” of the proper recording. Then once we’d got a good take of each song we wanted to record, we recorded Mez playing the drums over the top of it – so Mez was hearing and playing along to a recording of the band who had been listening to and reacting to Mez’s drums, which meant that even though he was playing along to a recording in his headphones, it was a recording that reacted to the way Mez plays drums.

Simple, maybe. Confused? Sorry.

But by recording a phantom performance and then overdubbing separate performances on top of that, we’ve been getting the feel of playing together, even though the actual keeper takes are recorded separately, with the various advantages that provides – cleaner sound, the ability to really concentrate on the fine details of each performance and having the whole room and all our gear just to get the best sound we can out of one instrument at a time.