Project Update

In the first weeks of this project, I have gotten quite a bit done. I began with drum

programming. Most of that is done other than very specific fills that are difficult to replicate on a step system. In the coming weeks when it comes time for mixing, I plan to export my drums as separate tracks to then run through Trigger in protools. This will give them a much more authentic sound that'll what I can get through MIDI drums.

I did hold my first recording session during this time as well where I got one song fully tracked. Whatsername is the first one I decided to track. Everything went incredibly smooth for this session. Me and my tracking engineer arrived at Studio F on Capital campus at around 9am and got to work. We ended up with 6 distortion guitar tracks, one acoustic track, one bass track, 4 vocal tracks, and multiple other miscellaneous guitar fill tracks for solos and lead lines. 

For all of the guitar tracks, I used a guitar with humbucker pickups run through a modeler amp. This gets a sound pretty authentic to the original record. We recorded the amp on the distortion tracks using a 57 running through Daking preamp. I love the way Dakings sound on guitar so this was a no trainer for me. 

For the clean and lead parts, we used a spaced pair of 151s around 5 feet from the amp. I wanted some natural room verb for these parts and that worked really well for it.

For the acoustic guitar, I don't want it taking up too much space in the mix. For the techniques I plan to use for mixing with so many distorted guitar tracks, it can get really muddy. The acoustic brings some clarity back to the mix in a subtle way. We used a single 414 aimed at the 12th fret running through a Shadow Hills preamp to get some clackyness in.

Vocals were pretty easy, just an EVRE20 running through a Vintech pre. The vocals of this genre get pretty aggressive so I wanted a dynamic mic and a pre that can match the aggressiveness.

Bass was the simplest thing we did, just taking DI from a P Bass into a Focustrite pre. We don't need anything too fancy for this, we just need to make one big guitar.

We did get to a little of the second song in this session, but we still need to finish it off. We will most likely just be using the exact same recording techniques for this other song as the structure and composition is very similar.

As for other things that I want to try for this mix, a technique that was used in some other pop-punk projects (like Enema of the State by Blink-182) is to layer a B3 Hammond organ underneath the guitar playing the same power chords to really fatten up the guitar. You can really hear it pop out a bit on the outro section on What's My Age Again? by Blink-182.

Due to some setbacks from a week of hell travel on our way back from NAMM, as well as catching the flu from the airport , I am a little behind on my next recording session, but I should be back on schedule very soon.