EQ Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 34) More Goodies!—Shadows looking for the reverb send. 30-foot ceilings, cinder-block walls, and a concrete floor. You can just imagine how reflective that room is! We had to cut down the room a bit using packing blankets in order to ensure we weren’t hearing the slap of the room in the microphone. You were still getting significant room bleed into the SM57, even though it was positioned just an inch from the speaker cone? Archambault: The mistake a lot of musicians make is forgetting that close miking doesn’t completely cancel the interaction of the room with the source sound. Avenged Sevenfold has these incredibly tight rhythm-guitar parts, and any amount of slap, echo, or natural reverb can compromise the sound. There aren’t many guitar players who can stack three or four rhythm overdubs, and still sound tight, but Syn is great at that. Obviously, we didn’t want the room to smear his performances. Synyster mentioned that he and Zacky would record one song at a time, rather than doing an assembly line of rhythm or lead tracks for every song on the album. Archambault: Yeah. Unfortunately, we had to take the assembly line approach for the drums, and run through all of The Rev’s drum tracks for the entire album, but we had the luxury of focusing on one song at a time for the guitars. Not many rock records get made that way. We’d typically finish all the guitars for a song in three or four days. This obviously allowed us to get the right tones for the right song, but another cool advantage was that it prevented Syn and Zacky from getting burnt out doing nothing but rhythm tracks for two weeks. This is especially important for Syn, who always leaves a lot of room in the studio for spontaneity. He’ll write a solo while he’s tracking, and, a couple of hours later, the other guys will run into the studio to check out what he did. That kind of stuff keeps the energy level way up throughout the whole process of making a record. I think the album required 72 hours of tracking time, but it never felt like a drag. Everything always sounded fresh, and that energy is really evident in the final sound of the album. What was the typical approach for the bass? Archambault: We would always track rhythm guitars before doing the bass tracks. I did this for two main reasons. First, if you record the bass before the guitars, you can get this great big bass sound that leaves no room for the guitars—and Avenged is definitely a guitar-driven band. This is not to say that the bass isn’t important to the band—it very much is—but I felt we had to find the sound of the rhythm guitars first, and then determine where the bass tone would live.The second reason has to do with intonation. The worst situation is when your bass tracks are slightly out of tune. Then, your rhythm guitars become nearly impossible to track. And, actually, a third reason is that Johnny sometimes follows Syn’s rhythmic accents, and doing the bass after the guitars allows him to better define what the bass line is doing. How many sources do you juggle for the bass tone? Archambault: I always record three sources for the bass. The first is a direct signal, and the second is an amp sound that’s pretty clean, but with a little grit. The third source is either a super-distorted signal through a guitar amp, or a patch on the Line 6 Bass POD. The bass amp was the main sound, but I liked having three sources to blend together. Being able to add a little bit of distortion, for example, can help glue the bass sound together. What was the bass amp? Archambault: There was a SVT classic—which Johnny has had for a long time—and a Gallien-Krueger 2001RB.That’s a great two-channel head that puts out an amazing distortion sound on channel B. We ran it through a Gallien-Krueger 410—which was the main bass sound—and a GallienKreuger 115 for the distorted-amp sound. How did you mic the cabs? Archambault: We put MD 421s on both cabinets. The mics were maybe two or three inches from the dead center of the speaker cone, and the preamps were Neve 1073s. The bass cabs were set up in a vocal booth, so I didn’t have the bigroom challenge that I had when tracking the guitars. I’m assuming that, unlike the guitar tracks, you ran the bass into all three sources simultaneously? Archambault: Yes. We used the Little Labs PCP to split Johnny’s bass signal to the bass amp, the guitar amp or Bass POD, and the direct line. All three signals were also routed to Empirical Labs Distressors set to about 6dB of gain reduction, a 4:1 ratio, and a really fast release with a very slow attack. This is usually a safe, yet aggressive compression that retains much of the high end of the bass tone. I also did something pretty cool with the DI signal. I ran it through a Little Labs IBP—which stands for “In Between Phase”—that allows you to dial in precise phase adjustments. I’d start by checking the phase relationship between the bass amp and direct signals before moving on to check the phase on all three sources. 34 EQ FEBRUARY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com
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