EQ Magazine - February 2009 - (Page 26)

THEATER PIECE knock back the natural reverb a bit. You see, we weren’t going for much of a “big” drum sound, as much as we were trying to capture a different reverb for the snare drum. A snare doesn’t sound like that in a normalsized room, and we ended up getting a much better “low-level” reverb sound that way. We also did a lot of overdubbing of the drum kit. If you listen carefully, about half the songs have double-tracked drums. H o w di d yo u i n c o rp or a te th e dru m ma c hi ne s ? Carey: Some of the songs had the drum machine playing through a bass amp situated in quite a big echo-y conservatory space. We’d mic the bass amp with the same three mics we used for the drum kit, and we’d set them at different points to capture different frequencies coming out of the speaker. Then, we’d filter each of the mic signals completely differently, so what you’d get back wouldn’t be a typical drum sound—more like a phantom kick, for instance—that would fill-in the entire frequency spectrum a little more. Another thing we’d do would be to connect the machine’s kick drum output to one amp, the snare out to another amp, and the hi-hat to another amp. We’d position those amps like a drum kit would be positioned, and then we’d mic the amps. We basically built this kind of “guitar amp drum kit” that sounded really cool and unusual. The bass is a prominent force throughout the album. It sounds as though it was amped, but did you use a direct box, as well? McCarthy: We actually used a Kalamazoo Model 1 guitar amp for a lot of the bass. Carey: We tried not to record the bass with a DI, just to reamp it later. Bob [Hardy, bassist] gets great low end with his Les Paul bass or Rickenbacker running through an Ampeg amp, so we were just looking for a thin sound with some bite to add on top of the lows. For that tone, the little Model 1 was miked with a Royer R-121, and routed to a Shadow Hills GAMA 8 mic preamp and a Universal Audio LA2A. That combination—a small amp facing a small mic—often made a much bigger sound than the Ampeg alone, and we frequently ended up using just the Model 1 track. What about guitars? McCarthy: They were recorded very loudly. Carey: The guitars were pretty consistent. Alex would usually play his custom Tele through either a Carr or a Selmer amp, and Nick’s Les Paul Jr. would be going through a Carr, as well. We’d have either a Royer R-121 or a Coles 4040 positioned tight on each of the amps, and then routed through either the Shadow Hills or the Flickinger preamps if we wanted to get a more grainy type of sound. T h e s yn th s a r e bo u n c in g a r o u nd all over the p l a c e — h o w d i d y o u t ra ck t ho s e ? Carey: The band has some amazing keyboards, and they are always the start of the sound. On “Ulysses,” the big synth riff that comes in at the beginning is a Russian Polivoks—a Soviet-era copy of a Minimoog that’s really mad sounding. The Polivoks was used quite a bit. We started off by amping most of the synths, but they sounded too organic, and too much like a guitar. I wanted them to sound as electronic as possible—a little out of place, even. So, in general, the synths were taken direct through a Culture Vulture to get that kind of distortion. We also did some very extreme parametric EQing with the UREI 545 to give the synths an intense midrange sound. Some parts have a boost around 6kHz with a really tight Q to accentuate the electronic-ness. After that, we’d either re-amp the sound in the hall for a big reverb, or fatten up the synth parts with delays such as the Blue Coconut Echoverb Tape Echo. McCarthy: Sometimes, we would connect the output of the synths to a filter, and someone would manually tweak the filter in real time as we were tracking. Or, we’d trigger a sample of the keyboard, and feed it back into the filters to add the desired tonal effect. These techniques turned out to be so much cooler than just using any generic synth preset. The whole idea was to get the right sound at the beginning of the signal chain. What about the acoustic piano parts? McCarthy: The piano recordings— like at the beginning of “Bite Hard”— were done with the piano in one room, miked from the back, and then we fed the signal to some guitar amps set up in another room. The recording would SLA M DUNK. Sound so good it’s slammin’. Our U37 USB studio condenser microphone produces a smooth extended frequency response and the famous CAD sound that kicks the others to the curb. Record studio quality sound directly to your computer. And if you guessed it’s affordable, you’ve guessed right. NAMM Booth 6226 Because an ear is a terrible thing to waste. CADMICS.COM 26 EQ FEBRUARY 2009 www.eqmag.com http://www.cadmics.com http://www.cadmics.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - February 2009

EQ Magazine - February 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Dave Cooley Low vs. Diamond Hank Williams III Travis Franz Ferdinand Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Apple Logic Pro 8 Cakewalk Sonar Near-Field Monitor Roundup Gadgets &�Goodies Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - February 2009

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