With the "East Of Eleven" cd finished other than the cover art, I thought I'd let folks know how we recorded it in the hopes that it will help others record their own projects. Just like the mastering, it was totally DIY and done with a crude, cheap and simple but reasonably effective setup. I realize the recordings don't have the pristine sound of a Pink Floyd album but our method may be of interest to those of you who are working on your own recordings. This post isn't about high tech gear, it's about trying to capture a live performance and then build on it.
Tracking the core tracks (drums, bass, electric guitar and a scratch vocal) was done in an old, gutted camper trailer that's owned by Steve McGill, the bass player. At one end he had a rather crappy set of drums with 4 mics, kick drum, snare and 2 overheads to catch the cymbals, toms and the overall sound of the kit. Some blankets and insulation were used to help isolate the sound but the kit was never completely seperated from us. We could always see and hear each other. Here's a picture of the trailer.
The bass guitar was plugged into an older tube bass amp but Steve McGill put the speaker cabinet inside one of the cupboards that had not been removed from the the trailer. One medium quality mic was placed in front of the speaker, then blankets etc were packed around the speaker/mic assembly and the cupboard door was closed. Some nights we did DI the bass but the speaker/mic combo seemed to work best. We put Steve McGill, the bass player roughly halfway between the ends of the trailer. He also ran the recording machine.
I was placed at the other end of the trailer from the drums with 1 vocal mic and my electric guitar. The guitar was then plugged into my amp (Marshall tube) but instead of using a standard speaker cabinet, we plugged the amp head into 1 single crappy speaker that was placed inside a cardboard box. We put 1 mic on the speaker and surrounded the speaker/mic with blankets inside the box. That poor speaker was begging for it's life but I'm sure this contributed to the "chainsaw cutting steel roofing" guitar sound that's on a lot of the songs! Hahaha
Everything was fed to a mid quality Korg portable digital recording machine that was capable of recording 8 tracks simultaneously at 24 bit, 44.1 khz. At this point everything was isolated enough to get usable tracks but we needed a way to clearly hear each other while we played. Steve McGill picked up old home stereos with headphone jacks at second hand shops. We fed signals from the recorder to the home stereos so we each now had seperate headphone amps within our reach with our own volume controls. Crude but cheap and effective.
Next we jammed every Tuesday night and recorded everything. It took a while for everyone to learn the songs so we ditched a lot of the early takes but they were still useful for figuring out what was working and what wasn't. After a few months, things started coming together so as we got good takes of each song, we'd save the individual instrument tracks on cd's that I would bring home for further work. At home in my small basement studio I loaded all of the tracks from the cd's onto my computer. I'm using Cubase SX 1 and everything loaded up just fine. After working on some of the songs I realized that the best way to get good jams with minimal mistakes was to jam lots in the middle of the songs. In Cubase, it's quite easy to cut out the train wrecks and keep the cool parts. I did record new vocal tracks with a better mic/preamp just to get a better sound and I also added acoustic guitar and mandolin where needed. On some songs I redid the electric guitar or added a second guitar but most of the electric guitar is the original tracks. Again, the extra long jams gave me lots to work with. Those spur of the moment, magical bits were all there. I just cut out the crap and ditched it. Our crude isolation during tracking allowed me to fix the odd little mistake by copying a piece from somewhere else in the song and pasting it over the mistake. I didn't have to do this very often but it gave me the ability to save an inspired take with a small mistake, instead of overdubbing. I often find the overdub process can kill the spark of a real, live performance. By the way, there was no auto-tune used.
The other editing trick that I found useful was for the drum tracks. The toms just weren't loud enough in the overhead mics so I copied the individual tom hits or sometimes entire rolls from the overheads track and pasted them onto a new track with silence inbetween. This gave me a track with just the tom hits. I could now boost the lower frequencies of those tom hits to help bring them forward in the mix.
So there you have it. A cheap, simple setup that worked for us. I hope this post will help others get a reasonably good recording as well. If you have lots of cash, you'll probably be better off in a big studio but if not, try it!
I would like to thank Steve McGill (bass) and Jason Cookson (drums) for being great guys, great musicians and for helping me put this cd together.
From left to right, Jason Cookson, Steve Ambroise, Steve McGill after a night of jamming and consuming a few beverages and treats.
