Recording - October 2021 - 26

Closer to
GWAR
Do you lay in the samples by
hand or use a program for that?
RCM: I use Steven Slate Trigger.
Is the bass direct, amped or both?
RCM: I envisioned that I would be going with
a combination of direct and cabinet sound, but
it wasn't getting us what we wanted. So almost
all of that record was various combinations of
the direct out from a Fender 300 bass head and
a Radial DI. Then I ran that through an Electrodyne
two-band equalizer and an Empirical Labs
Distressor. That's pretty much the sound you
hear on the record, along with some corrective
EQ in the mix and occasionally the Noveltech
Character plugin from Plugin Alliance.
I love the bass growl, distortion
and rubber-band tone of
'Viking Death Machine'.
RCM: I'm glad you dig that one, that is The
Berserker Blöthar (Michael Bishop). He is currently
the singer but used to be the original
bassist inhabited by Beefcake the Mighty, and
he is the guy who's playing all of the bass
parts on the upcoming record.
On The Blood of Gods, three different people
play bass. GWAR was a five-piece then, and
four of the five guys could play bass, so it would
be whichever one had the right feel for a song.
Do you use the classic multi-mic
setup for tracking guitar, like a
dynamic with a ribbon or room mic?
RCM: Way less complicated than that. 95%
of the guitars on that album are a single Shure
SM57 on a Marshall 4x12 cabinet.
Wow! How many guitar
layers are on each song?
RCM: Most of the time, it's two guitars. I
wanted people to connect with the musicians
of GWAR, and when you layer things up a lot,
it starts to round off the edges of the guitarist's
phrasing and playing. Most of the songs have
hard-panned guitars. What we did do was
swap heads a lot. Brent Purgason, aka Pustulus
Maximus, modifies amps. So, we probably
went through half a dozen modified Marshall
JCM 800 amps and a Peavey 5150. And on
about 5% of the record, we used a Fractal system
for special effects stuff.
26 RECORDING October 2021
One of the big things that initially freaked the guitar players out was, I
scaled back the amp gain from what they're used to. It's a pretty simple
idea-when you have cleaner guitars, you get more attack, punch and pick
articulation, especially on really fast 16th notes, versus smearing it out.
If you listen to older metal records, the guitars are generally a little cleaner
and have impact and drive. A lot of modern metal has really high-gain
guitars that are just mushy, and they create the drive instead with prominent
kick and snare samples.
Do you do a lot of post-processing of tracks
or get the sound on the way in?
RCM: I brought in a little remote rack when we did the overdubs at the
band's studio. I had the Distressor, an A Designs EM-PEQ, and the Electrodyne
511 for tweaking at the source. Every overdub was cut through my
A Designs Pacifica units.
It's a metal album, and I'm gonna guess and say
the lead vocals were done with a Shure SM7.
RCM: You're absolutely right... on one song. [laughter]. Actually, the main
vocals were done with my Perlman TM-1 tube condenser. We wanted something
to capture the full range of what Blöthar does because he's an insanely
diverse singer. For Pustulus Maximus on 'Crushed by the Cross', his voice is
kind of belty intense screaming, and on that, we did use an SM7.
So, you did the mix at your studio, Veneto West,
just north of Los Angeles. Pro Tools?
RCM: Yes. I mix with a hybrid setup using one-of-a-kind Apogee converters.
They're basically the 16X series, but they are one-offs called the
Ravens-kind of like Apogee concept cars.
What do you monitor on?
RCM: Yamaha NS-10 and a custom pair of mains from FAR [Fundamental
Acoustic Research] from Belgium. They are tri-amped with ribbon
tweeters and dual 15-inch woofers per side. My monitor controller is a
Cranesong Avocet, and I use the built-in D/A for monitoring.
Do you have a strong preference for analog or digital?
RCM: I use what's best for the job. Hardware can impart a little bit of mojo. If
I need to do really broad manipulation, analog hardware is more forgiving for
that. I do a lot of mixing for people, and if they send me stuff that went to tape
or they ran it through old analog gear, much of that mojo is already there, so I'm
just kind of balancing that out and sculpting out problems. Other things come
in recorded through cheap mic preamps lacking character, so I'll send it out to
analog gear. At the end of the day, all I care about is that I made a record that
my clients are super happy with. Thankfully, we're getting plugins that are closer
and sometimes exceeding their hardware counterparts in the last few years.
Recording - October 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2021
