Mixing: Machine Head – Is There Anybody Out There

I’ve recently signed up to Nail the Mix; an educational service & community organised by big time producers Joey Sturgis, Eyal Levi & Joel Wanasek, BIG names in the commercial modern rock & metal world. Aside from the very informative podcasts they make & Facebook community that comes with it, the mix service alone is an awesome tool for learning to be a better engineer. 

The premise is every month, stems from an A grade recording of an A grade band are provided (all within ‘heavy’ music, ranging from pop punk to death metal to djent) & each member does a mix of the song. To give an example of material that has been provided so far, there has been songs by Chelsea Grin, We Came As Romans, Neck Deep. 

At the end of the month, the top 20 mixed are chosen by the producers & the #1 mix wins a prize of some sort. After that, they do a quick interview with the winner discussing the techniques & creative choices they made, then finally one of the producers will do a live mix of the song themselves, explaining every action they take, from Eqing a snare, compressing a guitar to applying reverb to vocals. 

While a fair few of the songs provided can’t be posted up to Soundcloud due to copyright reasons, I figured it would still be worthwhile to blog about the mix to discuss the issues I found & things I learnt from working on the project. 

Check out Nail the Mix here: https://nailthemix.com/

This month’s song was a single recently released by Machine Head - Is There Anybody Out There 

Unlike the Recluse project I worked on a while back, tight pop metal was the name of the game for this song. After listening to various things mentioned by the producers & the guests on their podcasts, I’ve been introduced to many things I would never think to use or go into detail with..with a big chunk of this being the usage of limiters, and automation. 

It was a huge project to work on, with a total of 105 tracks, comprising of roughly 20 drum tracks, a single bass track, 15 guitar tracks, 25 strings tracks, 30 vocal tracks & 15 fx tracks. 

I’ve finished the mix, but there are still some tweaks I think the track could do with. Sadly as I’m away for the next few days, I won’t be able to make any more changes to my mix before the hand-in date. I’m not sure exactly how long I’ve spent on the project, but I must have plowed at least 20 hours over all, including editing. 

As I had the time, and I figured both for the production quality & practices sake, I did a lot of editing. As a reference, I used one of the older NTM projects, a tech death song with drum edits so tight that every individual hit from kick, snare tom & spot mic'd cymbal was precisely cut out to remove all bleed. It took a fair while, but I managed to chop up the toms & cymbals pretty well. I started on the snare & kick drums but halfway through decided to buy a plugin called Debleeder by Wilkinson Audio, which is basically gate made specifically for drum shells to remove bleed, while preserving the transients of the instruments. It excelled at both kick & snare, with the bonus of being much quicker to operate than any other gate I’ve used. 

This a snapshot of the unconsolidated edited drums. 

Split band bass mixing is where you duplicate the bass track, having a low pass on one & a high pass on the other, at roughly 130-150Hz, then treat each track differently, for instance distorting the high track & leaving a lot of dynamics in, while leaving the low track fairly untreated, but keeping the dynamics highly controlled. 

I discovered this method after Joey from NTM mentioned it in a podcast. It helped hugely in keeping the bass in the song consistent but also allowing me to be creative in the guitar/bass blend. 

I made use of a limiters more than I thought I would ever use, at the mixing stage at least. After seeing mixes done & listening to podcasts by the producers from NTM, I had many more uses of a limiter in my head, both on instruments where it made sense & others that it wouldn’t necessarily. With that said, some of the uses only really apply to productions such as this, where a modern sound is the end goal. 

In my previous mixes, on kicks & bass guitar I would usually compress, but it never occurred to me to use a limiter to keep the low end seriously in check, so that it would not budge an inch unless I allows it to. With the split band method, this worked extremely well. 

I limited the guitar tracks fairly hard, which while isn’t a hugely out of this world idea, before now i was in a mindset where compression wasn’t really beneficial for guitars, given the dynamics killing that lots of  amp saturation does to hi-gain guitars. Limiting helped the overall production, making sure the guitars stood out in the mix. 

The odd use of a limiter was on overheads. I used it to bring the snare down in the overhead tracks, so they could focus on giving a picture of the overall cymbals. It worked nicely, doing the task but not destroying the cymbals tone either. 

Saturation really came in handy during this mix, particularly on toms. Instead of using Eq to get a nice punchy sound, a saturation with a barely audible affect did wonders fattening the toms and making them jump out of the mix. 

I found a fun little trick using saturation on the snare, where I automated in a close to distorted saturation plugin during the breakdown & using automation sent it to the strings' concert hall reverb, resulting in a fat metalcore type snare sound. 

As I was busy this week helping friends in the uni studios, I had to get the mix done as best as I could & submit it. It’s  bit of a shame as I feel my mix was getting there..but i still had a fair few tweaks to sort some details out. Regardless, I feel I made a good attempt of the mix. 

A/Bing my mix against the official release, the first thing I noticed was the limiter I had put on my master bus for a ‘loudness preset master’ I had crushed some of the life out of my mix, given the amount of dynamics in the official mix. On a less crucial note, I had approached my mix a little different stylistically, keeping the FX tracks much lower and less obvious, going for a much darker less in your face snare tone and on the string tracks, I had more of a focus on the high end of the violin tracks, that seemed fairly buried in the proper mix. 

Recording: Recluse - Cover Album (Day 2)

February 14th, Valentines day. What would I be doing other than waking up early on a Sunday morning & spending a day recording a band in a studio!? Aside from the fact that any studio day is usually fun, it was nice to have something actually planned that day...
I woke up a little later that day, as there was no rush to set things up, given the fact we left all the gear there from the previous day. When the band showed up, it seemed we had all caught a cough overnight and were feeling a little ill, which wasn't the best of things for a recording day; but as the phrase goes, "the show must go on".

Guitars were the next in line to be tracked. The songs only had one rhythm section, with a few solos here and there, which made recording guitar a fairly fast process. He was playing into a Marshall JCM800 paired with a JCM900 4x12 cab, with a Boss SD-1, Phaser of some sort & Dunlop crybaby wah going into the input.
When it came to getting a tone, I was surprised to hear the guitarist saying that he set the amp on a fairly clean, quiet setting, adding most of the distortion using the SD-1. Given that it was an old school Marshall, which typically like being played loud, not just for the 'pushing air' factor that every amp benefits from but also playing the power tubes hard, it was surprising to see the amp set like that. I asked if I could mess around with the amp controls and ended up setting the preamp gain at 10:00 o'clock and the volume at 3:00 or so. By now the amp was sounding quite raspy, which suited the genre of songs being recorded, but also it was loud as hell at this point, which ticked both boxes in my opinion.
When I was happy with the sound in the room, I stuck my ears up against the speakers (for as little time as possible!) to work out what mic placement would work. I decided to stick up a microphone against all 4 and try out various combinations. I started off by putting a 414, MD421, SM57 & RE20 against the center of the cone, with another 414 about a meter or two away from the cab in figure of 8 pattern, to capture the room sound using a mid-side technique.
Pulling up the mics at the desk, I found the most obvious change was to cut the RE20 out entirely as it phased with any combination of the other mics I tried. The MD421 picked up a fair bit of low end and low mids, which I was happy with, as I would use this to support other brighter sounding mics. The 414 (against the grill) sounded really good, capturing a nice 'real' representation of how the guitars sounded to my ears in the room. The SM57 I wasn't too happy with, as it was way too bright and fizzy, even by a 57s standards. I moved it so it was off axis, pointing a couple of inches from the edge of the speaker. This improved it's tone drastically. It was still a very bright sound, but it had more high mids in it, which helped the presence of the guitar tone when combined with the MD421 & 414. The room mic worked nicely, capturing a quite big sounding tone, with no particular emphasis on any spectrum of the EQ.
I was surprised how quickly the setup went, with only one or two quick changes needing to be made.
Ttracking rhythm guitar went pretty smoothly, with only one or two hiccups, however the leads took a little longer, as the guitarist hadn't done a solo over one of the songs before, so was trying to figure out something in the studio. As they were only short takes, it wasn't an issue redoing the solo many times, however in the end, we ended up deciding to use two solos. One of them was much too short, however I liked the way it came in, and the other was much longer, however had a weird middle section where the wrong note was played. So I took the longer solo and cut it to just after the wrong note, then brought the other first solo in and found a point where they sounded like they were playing on the same scale. I left the mics exactly as they were for the lead as the high sustained notes sang nicely.
There were some other comps here and there that I did, which was mostly at the end of a few songs, because his guitar was a little bit faulty and the input jack crackled in the ringout.
To summarise, I was pretty happy how the guitars went. The tone was good & the recording went pretty smoothly.

A couple of the songs suited acoustic guitar, so we decided to track acoustic guitar, leaving whether it would be included in the final mixes till a later date.
I used a stereo pair of 184s in a method i've found has worked well for me in the last couple of sessions. I placed one facing the soundhole, with a 45 degree angle of the mic facing the upper  end of the fretboard. The other mic I placed over the guitarists shoulder, pointing downwards towards the soundhole (no need to mention that they were placed equidistant to avoid phasing). I also tried a 414 in figure of 8 mode to try a mid-side technique, however found it phased out when combined with the 184s. I instead changed it to an omni polar pattern and put it a little distance out from the guitarist as a room mic.
The tracking took no time at all, as the parts were very simple and there weren't many tracks that needed acoustic guitar on them. While we had the acoustic mic'd up, I also quickly tracked an acoustic song that the guitarist was working on as a personal project.

Vocals were final piece of the jigsaw.
Once again, they were pretty simple to track, with only one vocal line, with no backing vocalists.
After we had finished with recording the guitars, I had a little while to setup a few microphones to test which would work best, while the guitarist/vocalist went outside for a smoke. I set up the C4000, AT4033 & 414, getting the vocalist to switch microphones when the song changed sections (e.g. verse went into a chorus). He came into the control room and we decided which microphone would be best for tracking. The AT4033 won out in the end, with the C4000 being bland & boring as I expected, however the 414 had fairly flat response that sounded good, but the AT4033 had a nice low end warmth that made it more pleasing to the ear than the 414. I've used the 4033 for a fair few projects now and as I mentioned in the last blog, it's always worked for any use I throw at it. In the back of my mind I expected that I would choose it over the other two mics, but testing different microphones and techniques out is great to do when you have the time.
Most songs only required one take to get right, so tracking didn't take long at all. There were a few hairy moments however, where I found the quiet sections of some songs metering healthily at around -12dB, then when louder passages came round, at times it metered at something close to -3dB, at which point I was slightly shitting myself, hoping it doesn't clip. Before the next vocal take, I attempted to hook up a compressor on the input path to sort out the volume difference, however after a while fiddling around with the compressors & patch bay, I gave up and decided that I would sort it out in the mix with automation & compression plugins. Massive difference in vocal volumes wasn't all bad however, I liked the dynamic range, despite the fact it would certainly have to be reduced a fair bit for the mix.

We finished at around 5:30, which meant that I had spent around 16 hours by myself tracking enough material to be the length of a short EP. I was pretty chuffed with how much we had accomplished in a relatively short amount of time. With that said, there is a little of work for me to do on the mixdowns, but nothing too time consuming.
I was pleased with how I handled the session, getting a fair bit of experimentation in without disrupting the session too much, with most mic testing ending up benefiting the end product. I had a few hiccups & made a few mistakes here and there, but over all, think I ran the weekend well.

I would like to thank Tom, Britt and Alex from Recluse for their time and I hope that I can provide some good mixes of the tracks for them. It has been a pleasure working with them!

Recording: Recluse - Cover Album (Day 1)

As a first post to this blog, I thought I would copy a post I made on my other blog back around February.
I finished the mixes for the songs around the start of May, here is a link to the un-mastered versions: https://soundcloud.com/rufus-ambler/sets/cover-album-recluse-pre

Anyway, onto the blog post:

I had a great weekend last Saturday recording a Cardiff based alt-rock band called Recluse (Facebook & Bandcamp link here: https://www.facebook.com/recluseuk/timeline, http://www.recluse.bandcamp.com/).

I contacted them at first when I posted on a welsh gear exchange page on Facebook, asking if any musicians or groups were interested in any recording time. After contacting one of the band members, we soon organised to run a session on the 13th & 14th of February. As they were still working on material for their next album they organised to record some covers.
Due to the the rather shoddy gear booking system currently in place at the university (particularly the fact that the earliest you can book anything out is two weeks before a session) I was able to secure all microphones that I wanted, including a fair few others that I took out just for the purposes of testing. I'm sure this left one or two other people a little shorter on gear over the weekend than they liked, but they should have been more on the ball and booked equipment sooner than I did.

I got up early on Saturday (for once) at 8am and did my usual studio day preparations, namely made a flask of coffee, filled a bottle of water & made a big tray of pasta to eat throughout the day. As soon as i'd got everything ready, I headed out to get a Protools project ready & tidy the studio up for the band.
After they turned up at around 10:30, we briefly introduced each other & had a chat about how the production was going to go, then got to work setting up for the guide tracks.
I tracked the drums in the demo throwing mics up, just to get any signal from the kick, snare & cymbals. While the kit was still being setup, I also took liberty to set up an AKG C4000, Audio Technica 4033 & AKG C414 facing away from the kit in roughly the same spot, to test them out as room mics. I tried to do the same with a Neumann KM184 & the other 414, placing them roughly over the center of the kit as mono overheads, however had issues so stuck with the 184. For the bass & guitar track, I decided to DI both as there would therefore be no drum spill in the signals whatsoever, which would help keep the final drum recordings in time. I ran the bass straight from a DI box into the desk and used my Line 6 POD HD500x for guitars, running a dirty Marshall-ish patch (which suited, given the guitarist would be running a JCM800 for his guitar takes). For vocals, I put a dynamic mic of some sort in front of the guitarist, which caught a little bit of spill from the drums, which I didn't really care about.

As the tracks were laid down, the songs kept on coming, in the end leaving me with 8 covers of varying lengths. At first I thought to myself "I highly doubt that i'll manage to get all of these finished off".
Once we decided the guide tracks were of good enough quality, I listened to each room mic recording and decided on what purposes they would best suit, if any at all.
I found the C4000 sounded a little dull, but had reasonable low end response. I decided that it would be good as a secondary kick mic, picking up the real low end, with large diaphragm dynamic picking up the attack.
The 4033 had a nice balance of low end and airy room sound, so I thought this would be best for getting a room sound of the cymbals. On a side note, i've found this mic is very versatile, doing well in almost any application i've thrown it at. It's great for vocals with a nice warmth to it, does acoustic guitar well, i've used it as a drum room a fair few times now..I need to pick one up myself at some point!
The 414 didn't do that much for me as a room mic, it was a little thin compared to the other microphones and I wasn't that excited by the high end or midrange.

Before micing the kit up properly, I quickly redid the 414 vs 184 overhead test and decided to use the 414s as they had a little more bottom end. I ended up using a Glyn Johns technique as it's fairly simple to setup, and just something that usually works for me. I could have experimented a bit more, but this session wasn't really the time for that.
Next I moved onto the kick. I stuck to my usual choice of an Audix D6 as my first kick mic to capture the attack, then had the C4000 reinforce the low end resonance. I found that the C4000, even with a pad had such a hot signal and had to move it about 5 inches out, which wasn't ideal as it started to pick up a little bleed from the rest of the kit, and had a bit less of a bassy sound. A while later in the recording, I remembered about the -20dB pad on the console...
The snare was the next to be mic'd up. As a quick a test, I placed an SM57 & Beyerdynamic M201 in roughly the same position on top and shot them out. While the M201 sounded okay, it was a little scooped which I didn't quite think would fit with the session, so I stuck the to the usual of a 57 on top & bottom of the snare. I found that it took a while to cut the hi-hat bleed down to a minimum, something that's lately shown to be a part of micing a kit that I need to practice. Two songs into the drum recordings, I found I had forgot to reverse the polarity of the bottom snare mic, which pretty much meant I had to retrack the songs, which luckily the band wasn't too phased by (Aren't I punny?).
Toms were the next part of the drums to be mic'd. As usual, I settled on Sennheiser MD421s, placing them at about 30 degrees off axis, 3 inches from the rim and an inch or so from the skin. Like the snare, I also had issues with spill on the floor tom, with one of the ride cymbals cutting through despite the fact I had aimed as much of the null as I could at the cymbal, raising it up as high as I reasonably could. Aside from spill, I also found the rack tom was sounding quite dull so I did a mixture of moving the mic closer to the center of the skin & EQing on the desk to improve the sound.
For room mics I used a C4000 on cardioid polar pattern facing away from the middle of the kit, at roughly the height of the top of the kick drum. I also tried a new idea, which was to place the 4033 a little above the top overhead mic, facing the ceiling. I found this combinations of room mics worked nicely, as the C4000 picked up a little more of the fatness of the snare, kick & toms while the 4033 captured the room sound finer, adding a little bit of top end to the snare & cymbals.
At this point, I was just about ready to get on with recording, but after a discussion with some of the band, decided that I wasn't quite picking up enough of the hi-hat or ride cymbals. I scouted out a few more mic stands and put a 184 over the hi-hat & rides (I had some issues with a channel that didn't seem to work, so changed the other 184 to an Oktava Mk12, but didn't bother changing mics back when I found the issue was the channel).
It was finally time to track the drums. It went pretty smoothly (aside from my fuckup with the snare bottom phase), only needing a few takes at max to get a final take for each song.

Bass was the next instrument to be tracked.

It was fairly easy to set up the amp. I ran the bass into a DI, then from the DI into the bassists pedalboard and amp. He ran a fuzz & wah pedal into a Laney amp with a 4x10. I decided to mic up all 4 speakers, using an AKG D112, Electrovoice RE20, D6 & C4000. The mics all were placed roughly on the center of the cone. I ended up cutting the RE20 out as it didn't pick up much lows or even low mids. I didn't decide on the day whether I would even keep all the mics and left that to the mix.
Tracking the bass mostly went smoothly, aside from one or two sections that the bassist had trouble with. They were mostly quite easy to do drop ins for as they were small parts in between different song sections, however one part would always mess up a technical run that he had written. After a fair few takes, we gave up on that part and he wrote a simpler part to fill it. When he had worked out a part, we tried recording it and found he was even messing up that, which was probably as we were all a bit fatigued by that point as it was fairly late in the evening. In the end, to finish the song up we just had him play root notes following the guitar line. It was a shame that it came to that, as the bass line he had originally written sounded pretty good, adding a bit of variation to the song.

By the point we had finally got the bass all tracked, it was about 8:30, so time to pack up. I left the bass mics setup in case we would try that troublesome bass section out the next day, but other than that, nothing more needed to be done that day.

Introduction

I am a 20 year old audio engineer, at the time of this post in my 2nd year at University of South Wales studying sound technology. If I can manage it I would enjoy a career in working as a engineer in a studio, but life may have other ideas or opportunities so the future remains to be created.

This blog is a space where I will be sharing the work I’ve put into productions I’ve done or worked on, which will mostly be music based but for all I know I may go on to work with video & other media.