EQ Magazine - December 2008 - (Page 22)

FOR THE RECORD SAM ERICKSON grooves, James and guitarist Carl Broemel took their sweet time crafting the guitar tones on Evil Urges. “As a rule, I start with the gear that I am most used to—the amps and guitars I use while we’re on the road. When that doesn’t do the trick, I go hunting for sounds,” says Broemel, noting that, though his trusty 88 Black Les Paul Standard is on the lion’s share of the album’s tracks, he would regularly switch amongst a fleet of amps including a Vox AC30, an Orange Rockerverb 50 2x12 combo, a Carr Viceroy 2x12 combo, a Top Hat Ambassador, a Fender Pro Junior, and a ’70s Peavey Vegas [for a detailed list of what Broemel used on each track of Evil Urges, go to www.eqmag.com]. James kept his rig much more consistent, using one of his three Gibsons (a J-185 acoustic, an ES-335, and a Flying V), a Fender Stratocaster, or a Telecaster through a Premier 76, a Mesa Boogie Trem-O-Verb, or a Mesa Boogie Blue Angel. Similarly, Chiccarelli kept the guitarists’ signal paths simple: a Shure SM57 and a Royer R-121, each on axis to a speaker cone, and a Neumann U67 for the room (“to keep the guitars from sounding one-dimensional”). Each mic was then sent through the Neve 8088’s 31102 preamps and bused together to Urei 1176 limiters. “One guitar amp to one tape track,” Chiccarelli clarifies. Chiccarelli notes that for some of James and Broemel’s gnarlier guitar tracks, he would run a signal through a Demeter Tube DI to complement their amp sounds. “I’ll use the DI track when I need to add more definition to a guitar line, when I need more clarity for individual notes in a distorted chord. We’d also use the Demeter DI for the pedal steel tracks, then blend that signal in with what we got out of the amp to get a more balanced sound.” Broemel elaborates on the gear used in conjunction with his Carter 12-string pedal steel on crowd favorite “Look at You”: “I used a Source Audio Hot Hand Wah. My feet were busy controlling the steel, so I couldn’t use a standard wah, and I didn’t want to use an auto wah. The Hot Hand uses a tiny device that you wear on your finger and the motions of your finger Jim James cuts acoustic guitar tracks and vocals simultaneously. then control the sweep of the wah. It came in . . . handy [laughs].” Since the band was recording vocals live with the other instruments, achieving proper separation when James was cutting acoustic guitar tracks required some ingenious mic placement on Chiccarelli’s part. Says the producer, “Acoustic guitars were done while James was singing, so we had to make sure the leakage was minimal. In some cases I would put a lapel mic inside the acoustic guitar for total isolation. It also created a weirder sonic perspective, like your ears were inside the guitar.” More traditional miking techniques were also employed, utilizing some common unidirectional cardioid mics such as the Neumann KM84 and a Shure SM57. “I’ll put the SM57 on the body by the bridge and the KM84 up by the 12th fret,” Chiccarelli explains, adding that, when the sound produced using the SM57 is too boomy, he will “use an Electro-Voice RE15 on the body . . . it has a natural midrange-y sound to it.” Deviating from such tried-and-true miking techniques was of paramount importance when it came to “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Part 1.” “There’s an acoustic guitar part on that song that never sounded right,” Chiccarelli confesses. “It just sounded pasted on to a more electronic track. So we re-recorded the guitar track using an Altec Salt Shaker through a Pultec HLF3, which is a real drastic high and low pass filter. The sound was lo-fi and grainy—almost like it was an old sample of an ’80s 8-bit emulator. It instantly fit with all the other colors of the song.” In retrospect, Broemel adds that he’s glad the band avoided what would have been convenient at the time, such as automating plug-ins or using amp simulators, and, instead, integrated effects processing into their guitar performances. “Using computer plug-ins isn’t our first choice when getting a guitar sound,” the guitarist says. “I would say, in general, anything you can do with your eyes closed and your hands on the knobs is going to turn out better than what you would get while staring at a screen.” eyboardist Bo Koster is a firm believer that amped keyboard sounds ultimately blend in better with guitars in a mix, so he insisted that Chiccarelli keep at least a 60/40 ratio in favor of amp to direct signals. “The amp definitely adds more dimension to the sound as well as some extra harmonic distortion,” Chiccarelli says. “It’s not even that you have to put it through a Marshall—even a small amp does the trick.” Koster drew from a veritable smorgasbord of killer keyboards for the Evil Urges sessions, including a Fender Rhodes, a Wurlitzer electric piano, a Clavinet D6, and a Hammond B3. According to Chiccarelli, most of the K 22 EQ DECEMBER 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - December 2008

EQ Magazine - December 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In My Morning Jacket Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Cakewalk Sonar 8 Propellerhead Reason 4 Indie 500: Lunchbox Pres and Compressors 500 Series Preamps 500 Series Compressors Gadgets and Goodies Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - December 2008

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