Recording - March 2010 - 53

Filterbloom and Degradator, Ohm Force’s Quad Frohmage, Camel Audio’s CamelPhat and a few freeware plug-ins like SoundHack Decimate and DestroyFX. As a matter of personal taste, I hate the Windows operating system, but I’ll occasionally fire up a Windows box to run Glitch and a few other free plugs. Depending on the sonic nature of some of this content I’ll eq it through my SSL AWS 900+ and bounce it back into Pro Tools. One at a time, I’d settle on a certain sound or quality a plug-in had and would then bounce the whole vocal performance to a new track in Pro Tools, committing the effects to audio. Comping the puzzle Now that I’m looking at a dozen or so tracks of audio, here’s where the good times really start to roll. I listen to each track individually and start extracting all the cool moments. Then as if I’m solving some mysterious musical puzzle, I start putting the pieces together on new tracks. Many times I’ll use 2 or 3 tracks for the same word or phrase, so I end up with certain parts that are made up of a few different variations of the same effected vocal. As expected, this stuff is time-consuming, but the end result always seems to be worth it. There are many times I’d rather go take a nap or pick staples out of the carpet than sift and edit all this data, but somehow I’ve managed to survive the process. Now that I’ve done all that work, the last thing I’ll do is start automating volume and pan on these various tracks, tweaking the relationship between all the effected vocals with the original Melodyned final. Simplified—help yourself The sad ending to this story is that when I finally got to mixdown for “Louder Than Words” it was obvious that the vocal was still extremely busy and was fighting the musical elements—which were kind of sparse for a Celldweller track already! I didn’t want to get sued for causing epileptic seizures and the like, so I gave in to my inner voice and made a simpler edit of the vocal. The good news is that the raw stems for both the original ‘heavily edited’ and the final ‘not as heavily edited’ vocal are available for free download at www.fixtremix.com. In fact, 300 MBs of raw stems from “Louder Than Words” are there for free download as part of the FiXT Remix Community. By the time you read this, the raw stems from “So Long Sentiment” off of Chapter 01 of my new album “Wish Upon A Blackstar” will also be available for anyone so inclined to take and break, or just to get a closer look at the production of another track. In 2000 Klayton started what has become a movement and a creative community—the “Celldweller Remix Competition”and “Take It & Break It“ series are now FiXT Remix (www.fixtremix.com) where you’ll find the songs Klayton is talking about, plus much more material to ”take and break”. RECORDING MARCH 2010

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Recording - March 2010

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