How time flies. It’s been ages since I updated this place; one reason being, I’ve been hellishly busy during the last few weeks. I was on holiday for most of January, and for the whole of February I took on the RPM Challenge again.
This year I didn’t think I’d be able to write ten songs – it was a bit of a stretch last year – so this time I went for the other target of 35 minutes of music. To make things more interesting I opted for just two tracks, with the intention of recording something that’s equivalent to two sides of 12″ vinyl.
The result was constants in travel, the title being a nod to the Temporary Residence series of records and also to reflect what had been going through my head while abroad. C’mon, if you’re going to record songs that are between fifteen and twenty minutes in length, you might as well take the self-indulgence and pretentiousness a bit further, right?
I fell down on the titles, so they’re just references to the ‘vinyl record’ concept being labelled simply as “side A” and “side B”.
If you’re not interested in the technical bits, you might want to skip the rest of this post.
The drum tracks were done in Cubase using Beat Designer. I find drum tracks difficult at the best of times – I’m a guitarist and bassist, not a drummer – but they turned out okay considering the time constraints.
The bass parts were done in the usual way: Fender Jazz Bass, RAT 2 distortion, Tech 21 Sansamp Bass Driver D.I. box, RV-5 reverb then straight into the mixer. I felt that my bass playing was starting to improve a bit by the end. That felt good.
The guitar tracks were a bit more of a challenge. They were all done on a Jazzmaster and a Mustang, but were detuned down one half step. For side A the bottom string was detuned further down, to C# (a.k.a. the “grunge tuning”) to make lowe-pitched power chords darker-sounding and easier to fret. I found it fun to do heavy rock-style music on two models of guitar that aren’t usually considered popular for that sort of sound. But it worked for me!
I’d solved the wah problems by part-exchanging my Vox V847 for one of those huge optical Morleys with the on/off switch fitted to the side of the pedal near where the heel of your foot goes. After adjusting the LED inside I found it to be a really nice-sounding wah that works better with distortion than the Vox did (I propped the front of the pedal up with a couple of DVD cases for comfort reasons).
As for the distorted amps…damn. That was a real pain. A Shure SM57 may be great with my Fender combo on cleans, but it adds an annoying harsh, almost nasal quality to the midrange with fuzz or overdriven sounds; I couldn’t get the mic to capture the sound that my ears heard from the amp. I tried playing around with mic placement for ages, but eventually hit on some close mic-ing (slightly further from the speaker grille than normal, closer to the edge of the cone, pointed slightly away from the centre instead of dead-on axis) and D.I. from the amps’ emulated heaphones out sockets.
I used two amps. My Mesa/Boogie F50′s headphone out signal is, I think, a preamp-out in all but name. It sounds fizzly and lifeless, which surprised me. Why does such a classy and great-sounding amp have such an awful emulated D.I.?! I had to use a an amp/cabinet emulation plugin in Cubase to make it sound more amp-like, getting rid of the fizzle and beefing up the bass response and lower mids.
The other amp is a Marshall DSL 401 that I’ve had for years. It’s never been revalved and I’m not even convinced it works properly! The emulated D.I. signal of that though is much closer to the ‘real life’ sound that’s produced by the power amp stage and speaker. I ran the signal from that, through the Sansamp bass D.I. box and into the mixer. With the ‘blend’ knob at zero the Sansamp’s ‘tube emulation’ circuit, with its drive and presence controls, are completely out of the signal path, which left just the volume, treble and bass controls to add some fatness and definition. It worked really well, and is one of those cool accidental discoveries that often happen when you’re pushed for time and trying to make the most out of what you have lying around.
I used amp distortion for the first time in a recording – I’ve been a pedal distortion and fuzz fan for a long time, but the valve overdrives of a Boogie or Marshall combo sound really good. Otherwise, I fell back onto my IC Muff clone, a Boss OD-3 (quite underrated, and surprisingly good for a mass-produced non-boutique pedal) and a cool fuzz made by Magnetic Audio called the White Atom. That sounds like a Fuzzface with a tone knob, but it also has a ‘texture’ control that reins the sound in to sound all strangled, gated and splatty at lower settings.
Overall then this was a fun project that didn’t give results that were as satisfying as I’d hoped, but I met the deadline and it’s given me some ideas that I can re-use later. I’d call it a success.