Without knowing I was doing it, I reminded Ron of a song he meant to record that kind of got lost in the shuffle, and he decided it would make a perfect closing track.
Last week he came over so we could get down the bed tracks. Recording the guitar was quick and easy, as usual. Recording the lead vocal was another story.
I’ve talked before about how my Pearlman TM-1 has become a magic bullet when it comes to tracking vocals. At this point there must be somewhere near twenty different singers I’ve put in front of it, with vocal ranges and timbres that are all over the map, and it’s never once been the wrong choice. Even when I’ve auditioned a different mic for fun, I always come back to the TM-1. It’s the mic I’ve used to record Ron’s voice and all the vocal harmonies I’ve added from day one.
This night, for the first time, it didn’t work.
The song we were recording might feature the most dynamic vocal performance of any song Ron’s written. He starts out right at the bottom of his vocal range, just above a whisper, and then in a matter of seconds he’s belting it out with a lot of force at the very top of his range.
I’ve never had any trouble smoothing out this sort of thing before. Usually mic placement and a bit of compression will do the trick. This time the difference in volume between the quiet parts and the loud parts was astronomical, and there was no way to get the two to coexist in a way that sounded natural. I tried putting the mic in omni to cancel out the proximity effect. That helped a little, but not enough.
At times like these I’m glad I invested in so many different microphones over the years, whether I needed them at the time or not.
My first thought was to try switching to a dynamic mic. Maybe the relative lack of sensitivity there would have a narrowing effect. The SM7B that decided to be a dickface when Jess was here was in a kinder mood this time around and worked without any issues. The volume discrepancy wasn’t as bad, but way too much of the detail in Ron’s voice was getting lost.
When that didn’t cut it, I figured the Pearlman TM-250 I’ve come to love on violin, cello, and certain acoustic guitar tracks was worth a shot. I don’t know what’s going on in this mic’s guts, but somehow it smoothed things out to the point that the fader-riding I was expecting to have to do even in a best-case scenario was no longer necessary. It was nuts. A little kiss of compression and it sounded just right. The dynamics were still there, but now they lived in a comfortable, sane range.
It’s fun having to problem-solve like this on the fly sometimes. Almost makes me feel like I’ll be a real recording engineer someday, Pinocchio-style.
Oh yeah — at long last, I found someone selling a pair of Sennheiser HD 265 headphones on eBay for a not-stupid price. Score! This is an expense I can justify, because these are my utility headphones. Used pairs in any sort of decent condition are almost impossible to come by now that they’ve been discontinued for so long, and if anything ever happened to my grizzled old pair, I’d be in a bit of a bind. I feel better having a backup pair around.
They’re in near-mint condition. There are only one or two little scuffs. Next to the pair I’ve been using for pretty much everything for twenty years now, they almost look like a different species.
That’s just messed up.
The physical degradation of my long-suffering pair of HD 265s has been such a gradual process, I didn’t notice the sound was changing along with the appearance. As the headband has lost most of its shape and the faux-leather ear pads have exploded, allowing the cloth and foam inside to escape, it’s turned these cans into something closer to a closed/open hybrid. The ear pads, or what’s left of them, sit on the ear more than they wrap around it. All of these factors have combined to create — for me, at least — the ideal headphones.
No wonder I didn’t understand why most of the old reviews I read online had people complaining about how bass-heavy these headphones were. The ones I’ve been using scarcely sound like themselves anymore. They’re much more open and balanced, with a great, deep soundstage.
Who knew something could evolve into a better version of itself while falling apart?
Putting on a pair that might as well have come straight out of the box was a strange experience. I’d forgotten how well these things isolate sound with a headband that hasn’t lost most of its grab. And holy hell, there is a lot of bass when the ear pads cup your ears the way they’re supposed to. Too much for my taste.
It’s going to take a while to break these guys in, but I’m confident someday they can look as dilapidated and sound as good as their brethren.
I just can’t do it. I can’t finish putting my long-gestating pedal board together.
I put a lot of thought into the final pedal I was adding to the group. I had room for one more. I came close to pulling the trigger on a Walrus Audio Julia and then an Earthquaker Devices Transmisser. The Julia is a really pretty-sounding chorus/vibrato pedal, but the Count to Five can get me some similar sounds, the POD (which I only use for effects now, and never for its amp-modelling) can fill in most of the rest, and I can’t see myself wanting to use chorus all that often. The Transmisser only does one thing, and while it does it in a way that sounds like nothing else, after falling in love with it I realized I wouldn’t be able to use it too often without it becoming something of a cliché.
If I was going to get anything, it was going to have to be a pedal that was a real wildcard — something unique and versatile.
I knew I’d found what I was looking for when I saw this.
The Shallow Water isn’t quite chorus or vibrato, though it can create sounds that live in both of those worlds. It calls itself a K-Field Modulator. There are two things that set it apart from your average modulation pedal.
The first thing is the low pass filter, which is incredibly sensitive to dynamics and can go from “subtle”, to “dark and mysterious”, to “the universe is swallowing up my sound source and only faint suggestions of its soul remain”. When the LPF isn’t engaged and you’ve got a full wet mix, you get some noise, but I kind of like that. Sometimes you want things to get a little lo-fi. It can add character.
The second thing is the modulation itself. It’s random. There’s something about modulation that can’t be predicted. It has a strange emotional quality. And it engages the brain in a different way. You’re listening for a pattern, but there isn’t one.
This thing is deep as hell. It can do lush chorus sounds. It can also make your guitar or synth sound like it’s violently drowning in a small pool of water. Its name is very apt. It’s going to take me a while to learn all the ins and outs and harness everything it can do, but I think we’re going to be friends.
So I bought this pedal, the final one, I put money on the credit card to buy the power supply and patch cords I needed to complete my pedal board, and then I hesitated. And then I hesitated some more. And then I noticed a month had gone by since I was supposed to order the stuff, and I still hadn’t ordered it.
What it comes down to is this: I can’t justify spending more than three hundred dollars on an isolated power supply and a few feet of Mogami cable. I just can’t. To me, that’s outrageous, and borderline offensive. Three hundred dollars can buy an awful lot of food. It can pay a few bills. It can buy a fancy dinner for a medium-large group of reformed miscreants. It can buy a lot of recordable CDs, ink cartridges, jewel cases, and other practical supplies. It can change someone’s life in a small but pivotal way.
Besides, I think the Wurlitzer looks pretty nifty with some of my pedals sitting on top of it.
So I’ll live with the mess it creates on the floor when I feel a need to have a few pedals running at once, and I’ll clean it up when I’m done. It’s not like I play live, ever. Putting my board together would make things a little more convenient, sure. But convenience isn’t worth that amount of money to me. Not right now. Not in this situation.
Sorry, Captain Convenience. I’ll have to drink from your cup some other time.
I did make good on something else I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. I finallyhad enough mixer space — if only for a moment — and enough motivation to make it happen. I’m talking about taking the raw camcorder footage of SEED OF HATE being recorded back in November of 2001 and editing it into something more digestible.
It was more of a pain in the ass than it should have been.
If I wanted to have better quality audio to punch up some of the recording segments, there was only one way to make that happen. I was going to have to go back and remix most of the songs without the vocal tracks. There’s a lot more footage of us getting the music down without Jay than there is of him and Tyson summoning the best screams they had to offer the following day, and what the camcorder’s built-in microphone captured in most of those instances is either drum-heavy to the almost total exclusion of all other musical elements, or it’s little more than headphone bleed (which made syncing up the proper recordings with the camera’s audio a task and a half).
The album was recorded in a single song file on my mixer, separated by track markers, and backed up on two CDs. Those CDs are now sixteen and a half years old. With these multiple-CD backup jobs, all it takes is one disc crapping out on me and the whole thing is lost forever. I found that out the hard way when I tried to remix some of the late-period GWD albums about eight years back.
I braced myself for the worst. Both discs dumped their aging guts back onto the mixer without a hitch. Score one for Maxell.
Making instrumental mixes was pretty straightforward. I had no notes to rely on, so I used my ears to dial in mixes that were as close to the originals as I could get them. That seemed to be the smart way to go. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on music this heavy, and treating it with my current sensibilities would probably be a recipe for sonic weirdness. I did bring up Tyson’s guitar a little to highlight how creative his work on the fretboard was. Other than that, I tried to keep things sounding about the same as they sounded in 2001.
I made a few interesting discoveries along the way.
When we were recording this stuff, I took the time to type in a name for each track, using the super-tedious “select one letter at a time to make words” option the mixer provides. Things like “L Guitar”, “R Guitar”, and “Bass” show up on the LCD screen when specific tracks are selected. It’s pretty surreal. I don’t remember ever doing that for anything else I recorded back then. I don’t even remember doing it this time. I sure as sugar cookies don’t do it now.
There were even more mics on the drums than I remembered — six. We mic’d up the kick, snare, floor tom, rack toms, set up a general mono overhead to capture the cymbals, and had more of an ambient room mic set up to grab some extra air. How much ambience it added is debatable, since all the mics were SM57s and 58s, but this is the tightest and most conventional drum sound you’ll find on anything I’ve ever recorded. I’m not likely to use that many microphones on a drum kit again.
And I got to solve a small mystery. All the false starts, count-ins, and between-song moments of banter were erased at Tyson’s request, but one brief bit of dialogue survived at the end of the last song. The mics we were using were so directional, and so far away from most of the people talking, I could never make out a thing being said. Now, after cranking the volume on the mixer, I can rest knowing the song I called “Your Friendly Neighourhood Waterbed” in the absence of a proper title ends with Tyson saying, “Yeah! That’s the best we’ve ever played that!” and Brandon muttering, “Not really.”
“That all sounds pretty hassle-free,” you’re thinking. And you’re right. What got me swearing at the sky was the editing process.
I spent chunks of a few days chopping out superfluous crap until I had an eighty-minute assembly I was happy with. It feels like a pretty honest picture of the recording process and the surrounding shenanigans. Really, all I got rid of were things no one needs to see, like Gord filming a light fixture for ten minutes (I exaggerate, but not by much), and a few moments where the burned-in camera effects got kind of maddening.
For example, when we were recording the vocal tracks, Gord hit the “fade to white” button, causing the audio and video to disappear…only to have it come back three seconds later. Then he did it again three or four more times. It broke up the natural rhythm the footage should have had and made synchronizing the audio from the CD impossible. I made a few cuts, lived with whatever choppiness was created, and that problem was solved.
There were moments when I wanted to go back in time and tell Gord to stop using every built-in effect the camera had to offer and just point the thing at what was happening and film it. Close to half of this footage was marred with a negative image or “ghost” effect that looks cool for about ten seconds and then gets old fast. I was able to reverse this by inverting the image a second time, effectively cancelling out the effect. I left a bit of it intact in a few places, but believe me when I tell you most of the scenes I removed it from are much better off without it.
The other effects range from the sometimes-effective “double image” to an infuriating and distracting rapid zooming in and out that I can only imagine was designed to simulate motion sickness. There’s nothing I can do to counteract any of those. I can only hope you find them charming or amusing. They drive me nuts.
Gross overuse of effects aside, I have to say Gord did a decent job capturing what was going on. The one serious exception, and some footage I wish I could have included, is a bit where Tyson talks me through one of the songs while we listen to a rough instrumental mix. He points out different moments, highlighting the abilities of the other musicians in the band, talks about how hearing the music recorded in a more professional way gives him a deeper appreciation for it, and delivers a fascinating monologue that makes it clear just how much thought went into crafting these songs.
The whole time this is happening, the camera is pointed at the wall. It’s nowhere near either one of us. I wanted to weep when I saw it. Maybe I should have included it anyway, but five minutes of looking at a wall is pretty hard to take no matter how good the soundtrack is.
I wish I had the ability to create a little animated short to replace the nothingness captured by the camera. But I’m not an animator. At least there are a lot of other fun moments in there, and you get to watch a bunch of teenagers alternate between goofing off and doing some serious recording. And there are a few moments of supreme lunacy from a skinny, beardless version of yours truly. I don’t remember saying any of those demented things I said, but the camera doesn’t lie.
Gord’s spur-of-the-moment decision to record over some of the footage from the second day is a mixed blessing. You lose Tyson trying to talk me into improvising a vocal track on the most melodic Fetal Pulp song, along with most of the sound effects he added in lieu of vocals. There was more of Jay in there too. But what Gord filmed on top of that is some of the only surviving GWD footage, even if it’s just me and Tyson running through a tongue-in-cheek medley of some of our “hits”.
(I’m saving that GWD footage for something else. It wouldn’t have made much sense to include it here, even if it was the way our second day of recording ended.)
I recorded a little voiceover track to act as an introduction and a coda to the main course. I’m not sure I’ll be doing that again — it feels more natural talking to a camera when I’m doing this sort of thing — but it was fun to try something different. I think it works well enough, offering a little bit of context and allowing me to make use of a few pieces of music that will probably show up on THE ANGLE OF BEST DISTANCE someday.
Even the rendering process wasn’t the disaster it could have been. The crusty old laptop I use for video editing purposes has experienced something of a rebirth since that nice fella at PC Outfitters blew a mountain of dust from the casing that holds the fans. It’s still slower than mud, but it’s got a new swagger in its step. A slow swagger.
This was a real test. An hour and twenty minutes is the largest chunk of video I’ve ever asked Sony Vegas to process. I think the meatiest thing I’d done before this was one packed video progress report that touched down around the fifty minute mark, and that was back when the laptop in question was still in its prime.
It took six hours, but the video rendered without the computer once overheating or shutting down. Not so long ago, expecting it to survive for a tenth of that time was pushing it. This gives me hope that when my semi-documentary about YEAR OF THE SLEEPWALK is done, it too will render without the world coming to an end.
The trouble came after the video was finished rendering. I noticed the sound went out of sync around the halfway point. There was no explanation for it. I’ve never had this happen before with any video I’ve edited. Vegas was at least helpful enough to tell me how far things were out of sync, but it wouldn’t tell me the cause. Why I was able to see how much things had shifted was a mystery in itself.
There was only one fix. I painstakingly uncoupled the audio from every single clip past the forty-five-minute mark and inched it forward until everything was synchronized again. I rendered just the second half of the video. Then I discovered the last few minutes were still out of sync, so I fixed those bits and rendered that part. I was left with three separate video files I needed to trim and stitch together.
I assumed I could do this with the ever-handy MMPEG Streamclip without suffering any quality loss through additional compression. I was wrong. The program doesn’t recognize WMV files. The only thing I was able to find that seemed like it might help me was something called Machete. Only the “lite” version was free, but it had all the capabilities I needed. It wasn’t Mac-compatible, though. I had to download it on the sluggish Acer laptop reserved for video editing.
Machete let me trim and join clips to my heart’s content. It left a second or two of ugly blank space where each edit was made, but I was okay with that…until I tried to save the file and learned it was going to take even longer to do that than it took to process the full-length video in Vegas.
You failed me, Machete.
I was left with no choice but to start from scratch and render the whole video file all over again. That meant another five and a half hours of waiting, and then another four or five hours to upload the thing to Vimeo.
There’s one little wonky editing mistake near the end where Tyson’s smile appears to break the space-time continuum. With all the audio I had to move around, I missed snipping out a tiny piece of footage that repeated itself. After all that frustration, I don’t care enough to go back and fix it. Maybe some other time.
Watching this makes me wish all over again that I could go back in time and buy a video camera of my own long before I started thinking it might be a good idea to get one. I missed out on documenting a whole lot of cool music-related things. At least there were weekends like this one when someone else had the foresight to grab a camera and let it roll. But what I wouldn’t give for some Papa Ghostface recording footage from 1999, or any number of other things…
Viewer discretion is advised: there’s a whole lot of swearing in this video, some onscreen drug use (just a bit of pot being smoked, but still), and while I’m pretty sure Brandon only pretends to expose himself a little past the fifty five minute mark, I’m not taking any chances with the powers that be at Vimeo. This one gets a “mature” rating.
Dressing to Undress 