After a couple of weeks, Russell apparently got all his gear and computer set up back at his house. I stopped over after he had been trying to get guitar sounds for a couple of days. He was having trouble with some nasty string noise and had played around with various amp/guitar/pedal combinations but was getting frustrated. He had picked up an Audio Technica ATM10, an old electret condenser omni mic, and was trying to get some "ambient" sounds with it. I helped him walk through the signal path and we finally realized that one of his monitors was blown. The nasty, spikey string noise was actually what appeared to be blown tweeter in the right speaker. This sucked, because it had to be repaired, but was cool because we realized that the sounds that we were getting were indeed pretty cool.
Russell was trying to lay down his part for SS Montreal (apparently there is some possibility that it may be used for a movie and needs to be done by August). The set up was a Peavey Delta Blues amp close-miced from the front with the Sennheiser 421 (angled outward, away from the center of the speaker, with the EQ ring all the way to 'M') and miced from behind with the ATM10 (about five feet back and three feet high, angled slightly down. Phase problems were minimal. Russell tracked the main part quickly using his Jazzmaster and then doubled it with the same setup using his Tele. Reverb and delay (timed to the drum track) were printed to "tape."
A couple of days later he but down an ambient e-bow part (recorded with only the close 421) and an ugly, glitchy noise loop created using a sick little unit known as the Alesis Bitrman. He did a quick mix using the Tele track only to double the solo section and a comped e-bow track and sent it out to me and the band. It has a lush, yet spooky, sound that I'm really digging.
July 9.
Chris came over to lay down some saxophone on SS Montreal. I put his Roland keyboard amp in Russell's workshop and he fed the cables through a newly drilled hole in the wall. I miced the amp right up on the grill with the ATM10 omni. Back in the main tracking/control room, Russell had set up the Sennheiser 421 about three feet back from Chris and his horn, angling down slightly towards the bell. I thought it was going to be a nightmare getting a headphone mix going, but with only a few adjustments, Chris gave us the thumbs up. The first few takes were tentative and stiff and no one was really to excited. Russell tried to encourage Chris to improvise a little more and things began to loosen up. Kevin showed up around 9:30p, put on his producers cap and started pushing Chris a bit harder. We started recording section by section and eventually had enough material to piece together a reasonable take. The sound was pretty cool though. Chris had some sort of crazy vocoder effect running through his amp and when we mixed in the room mic, it sounded sorta like an accordian. Weird to be sure, but it seemed to be working for the song.
July 14-15.
Russell spent three or four hours comping together the sax track. The next night I stopped by to help out with a rough mix that Kevin could use to shop for this movie thing that might be happening. We messed with the panning a bit, putting the sax tracks to one side and the e-bow and glitch tracks to the other. We were a little unsure about how much of the sax to use, but after a little editing and experimentation, it started to come together. We realized that the room-mic sax doesn't really sound very good -- it's kinda honky and nasally. We cleaned it up a bit by eqing out some low mids, but we're going to have to work on it for future tracks. We also scooped some mids out of the bass guitar and ran it through the Blockfish compressor plugin. We also high-passed the main drum track to clean up some of the bass bleed and the rhythm section sounded pretty alright. The drums probablly still needs a bit of compression to tame a couple of errant kick blasts, but it was getting late and we called a decent rough mix.
SS Montreal Rough Mix
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