If We Should Sing Together - AndyR Original

[Ted]

It took me awhile to put my finger on it: This reminds me of Spacehog--in a very good way!

Add me to the incredulous!

[BAG]

Extremely accomplished playing and recording. I really like this one.

[AndyR]

It took me awhile to put my finger on it: This reminds me of Spacehog--in a very good way!

Interesting - not heard of them personally, but "heavily influenced by David Bowie, Queen and T Rex"... yep, that's me! 

I also have very big roots in The Bee Gees, Johnny Cash, all things 60s, most country, and 70s rock up to and including Judas Priest - I kinda gave up on Metal/Rock in the late 80s, but I have all Judas Priests albums  . All pop music, even the stuff I don't get/understand. But around 1979, hearing Led Zeppelin II got me into the blues - I'll go any direction on that subject, but my BIGGEST hero was Rory Gallagher (in fact I'm watching DVDs of him right now...)


Anyway - yep, this track is all MBR, including mixing and mastering, I think I pushed it to it's limits this time - or mine at least - but it still keeps surprising me.

I'll go and dig out my track sheets and write an essay later on how it was put together, also covering how I've conquered the recording vocals thing - need catch up on my correspondence first though...

[hooper]

This has got it all: Well written, arranged, performed, engineered, mixed and mastered. Lots of experience shows here.  Great job! And looking forward to hearing more. 

[Bluesberry]

hearing Led Zeppelin II got me into the blues - I'll go any direction on that subject, but my BIGGEST hero was Rory Gallagher (in fact I'm watching DVDs of him right now...)

Now we are talking, Rory Gallagher is my all time favorite singer, guitar player, songwriter, performer, you name it, he is at the top of my list.  I have been playing his CDs and DVDs nonstop, week in, week out for the last two years when I discovered him and his incredible music.  You have very good taste AndyR. 

See ya around.

[AndyR]

OK – I promised it, so here’s my “secrets” on how I used the MBR for this one.

It’s a bit of an essay – and it’s taken most of the day to write. But I’m hoping it demystifies this recording, and shows how the MBR really can do this stuff quite easily with forward planning and a lot of patience .

I’m off to see the Black Crowes now, and then off on holiday – speak soon…
===========

I tend to approach recording guitar parts in an old fashioned 50s/60s kind of way – find out what the chords are, come up with a part as quickly as possible, run through it, get it taped, get on with life… Usually your first idea is the best one, but you have to listen to the rest of the track – ESPECIALLY what the singer is doing… don’t get in the way.

Bass-playing is much harder work for me. The bass you can hear is still the guide bass. The drum arrangement was almost fixed by the time I wrote the bass part so it’s not too bad. All I did to get this bass part was rehearse it 2 or 3 times a day, with the track, for 2 or 3 days, before I went to work. After a while I thought “that’s good enough for a guide” and recorded a take – that’s the one we’ve got. When I got to the end of tracking I really couldn’t face relearning the bass part!

Once I had a drum arrangement, the guide bass and guide vocal, I saved a copy of the song, wiped all the other “exploratory” stuff and got down to recording real guitars.

All of the guitars on here are a Custom Telecaster. For amp tones I use a Vox Tonelab LE modellor –most of the parts on here are a Marshall JTM45 model going through an AC30’s 2x12, some are a Fender “tweed” of some description. All of the guitar tracks use some “room” reverb plus the following (all from the Tonelab, so I’m recording “wet”): one of them has got a little chorus, one has a “tubescreamer” model in front of the amp, and several have a quarter note (I think) delay (two repeats) tuned to the tempo of the track. Only one of the 6 guitars at this stage was recorded in mono – all of the others are recorded stereo, helps with the panning and stereo image.

I work in layers, bouncing to stereo, making as many final decisions as I can, as early as possible. I know vaguely what I’m trying to achieve before I start – I think this is quite important, but I’m up for serendipitous accidents as well.

So, on this one, bounce layer 1, “G12” was the two basic “clean guitars” I wanted to use:

Guitar 1. Neck pickup, mellow chords and bass-line stuff.
Pan L50=C00
Rev 0=86
Guitar 2. Bridge pickup, jangly stuff.
Pan C00=R50
Rev 86=0

Notice the reverb is opposite in the mix to the guitar that it comes from – the reverb for that bounce was Hall, 1.0s, 0, 50.

The next layer was just one guitar, Guitar 3, stereo again – the basic thick crunch rhythm guitar. It appears mainly on the choruses and outro, but also provides some of the chugging leading up to chorus, etc. When it was mixed with G12, G3 was panned L50=R20, reverb was 11=64, the reverb this time was Hall, 1.5s, 0, 50.

The main EQ and compression for each layer happens as I bounce – so G1 and G2 were compressed and EQd when I made G12. G3 was treated while creating G123, but no further effect was put on G12 – if it becomes obvious G12 isn’t quite right, I go back and recreate it from G1 and G2 before attempting G123. In this way you only compress your basic tracks once before final mastering (unless you want to, of course!). Also, I always take some bass off of guitar parts, they always seem to fit better that way. I use the Mastering Toolkit for this – I’m loving this 3 band compressor

Next layer was G4 and G5. These two played the harmonics for the “Aha” hook on the intro and after each chorus. These were both recorded stereo, then bounced with the same sort of panning and reverb treatment as G1 and G2 (reverb was 40 for each guitar this time, using Hall, 2.5s, +8, 50).

I couldn’t use the new G45 bounce until I knew roughly what the level the vocals “might” eventually be (they needed to match the lead vocal, and not get in the way of the “Ahas” I was going to put on there)

This meant I needed G6 first. I recorded it in mono because I thought I was running out of virtual tracks and I didn’t realise I was going to have to move to another copy anyway… This was a bit of a mistake. G6 is the “lead guitar” on choruses that gets doubled by the organ. I think it’s also the one that does the driving one note dugga-dugga later when all hell breaks loose.

G6 was bounced with G123 to create G1236. G6 was panned R14, and it used 26 of a reverb setting of Hall, 2.3s, +6, 50.

At that point there was a LOAD of *rsing about getting the levels right using a naff guide vocal and the guide bass. I recreated G123 at least once, and G1236 several times. Eventually I decided that the organ parts were going to have fix it(!)

When I had G1236, I bounced it with the harmonic G45 stereo mix from earlier… this gave me my master guitar mix G123456.

I backed it all up, removed the separate G4 and G5 so that I could record the organ. The organ was done on 3 pairs of stereo tracks “chorus bottom”, “chorus top”, and “overdubs”. These all got mixed to a single stereo organ part – I tried not to create a three-handed part, but there’s a little bit on the outro where I go over-excited!

So I ended up with a full set of virtual tracks comprising:

Guitar “G123456” Stereo Master
Organ “Org” Stereo Master
Rough Mix (G123456&Org) Stereo
Guide Vox
Guide Bass
Plus all the separate tracks required to recreate the Stereo Masters (except the original G4 and G5).

I knew I couldn’t do the vocals on this, so I trusted to luck and saved to a new copy where I deleted all the separate parts.

Vocals were terrifying. I live in a noisy flat, I like loud trebly monitoring when I sing, I have a powerful voice that I find difficult to get a decent level without digital distortion… All my vocals over the last few years have sounded tentative and not committed enough – because I’m straining to watch meters or worried about the recording while I should be performing… So I decided to do a lot of work finding out how to record my vocals in a relaxed way.

I use a large condensor mic (Rode NT1000) into a Yamaha desk to provide the phantom power. I learnt this time (from watching film of Agnetha and Annifrid doing Abba vocals in the studio!) that I need to suspend the mic pointing downwards, with the tip about level with my eyes, I’ve always had it up the other way before. With my pop-shield, I’m about 15cm away from the mic horizontally. For monitoring, I started using my little mp3 player’s in-ear phones, with my open backed Sennheisers over them to provide a bit more protection against bleed.

I still had background noise, street noise, floorboards and level to contend with. So I decided to learn how to use a dbx 266XL compressor/gate unit I bought several years ago. I stick that as a track insert on the Yamaha desk and then use the desk meters to monitor what’s going on while practicing some loud and quiet bits.

Then the line outs from the desk go into the MBR (remember to switch to mono “Rec” after turning on the LIN input!!). With some practice I managed to find settings where I could sing and hear in a relaxed and comfortable fashion, and all the extra noise is just about gone – these settings, including mic stand measurements, are ALL written down now!

Right, what’s on the MBR? First of all, a new guide vocal went down (without the screams at the end, I couldn’t reach them). It was almost good enough, except I got some words wrong in the first verse – you wouldn’t have noticed, but they were the wrong words!

Then I worked on the chorus (and out) backing vocals. I used four tracks – two for the high part, two for the low part. The two choruses are slightly different, so I had to sing them both – I’m usually happy to copy and paste backing vox.

The bounce panning to stereo for this lot was high L27=R27, low L33=R33

Then I worked on the Ahas and Ooohs. The Ooohs were recorded for the outro, but were later cut up for use in verse 2 as well (you don’t want to hear the lot in the second verse on their own!). There are actually 8 of each – I recorded 4, bounced them L50 L30 R30 R50, then wiped them, did it again and bounced the two versions together. The Ooohs were reasonably easy – I wanted soft, which is what lots of your own voice is likely to do. The Aha’s were harder, they were meant to sound increasingly desparate, I did some falsetto, some screamed, some deliberately out of tune, etc.

Then I balanced the two sets of backing vox against the guide lead, and mixed them into one stereo backing vox pair.

In the middle of all this I was using some of the vocal effects (“FarDista” I think it’s called), but that caused me problems in that it created mono bounces! In the end, I created the bounces first, then treated the left-right as mono tracks for processing, recombining them manually as stereo afterwards. Once I had the masters, I started cutting and pasting to move extra oohs and the final very T-Rexy “Aaaah!” about.

Then it was lead vocal time. I like to do a single performance, but that was asking a bit much this time. So on one track I recorded all verses, on another track all choruses. While I was wondering how to do the screams on the outro, I realised that the choruses could take double tracking. So that’s what I did – and it fixed the outro screaming as well. I bounced the three vocal tracks to a single lead vocal.

After that it was mixing:

1 = G123456&Org + Bass
2 = 1 + Rhythm
3 = 2 + Lead Vocal
4 = 3 + Back Vox

It wasn’t quite enough, so the final piece of recording was the lead guitar for the outro – luckily, I restrained myself from adding any other guitar overdubs.

Final Mix = 4 + Lead Gtr

Then I mastered it.

Er… simple as that!!


EDIT: Btw, I can recommend a book called "Guerrilla Home Recording - How to get great sounds from any studio (no matter how weird or cheap your gear is)" by Karl Coryat... a lot of what I know comes out of that...

[Ferryman]

Wow. I jumped to listening to this one ahead of some others based on other comments and it's absolutely stunning. Andy, you have confirmed what I believe, that you don't need anything other than the MBR to churn out pro-quality tracks. This is DEFINITELY pro quality, superb mixing and production. The test for me is that it sounds great on my "radio mix" low quality speakers as well as through the Sennheisers - you really know what you are doing. Oh, and it happens to be a great song as well! Excellent playing and vox all round. Just stunning and inspirational.

Cheers,

Nigel

[Bluesberry]

After reading about your recording method (madness?) I have to say, man, you are without a doubt the MicroBR master.  I don't think anybody here has come close to the complexity of recording that you have pulled off here (except for maybe Ferryman).  And the fact that it sounds perfect, professional, great song, all that and more.  There is nothing out of place here, everything has its purpose.  This must have took a long time.  My last 2 songs that were done on the Micro were getting pretty complex (no where to this level though) but it was driving me crazy and I ended up getting the BR-1200.  The fact that you have done all this on the Micro is stunning.  You are the MicroBR master.  Thanks for showing us just what can be achieved with our little micros with a lot of talent, patience, and time.

[Ferryman]

Thanks very much for sharing Andy. I love your idea about recording the guitars in stereo with the reverb panned against the guitar. Cool idea, I shall be stealing, sorry leveraging, that. Like you, I make a lot of use of the mastering toolkit - I always bounce bass tracks to another track and use the mastering toolkit to adjust the eq.

Looking forward to more stuff and please keep explaining your methods - you really do know what you're doing! That's why this forum is so great - we can all learn off each other and make better music.

Cheers,

Nigel

[Wiley]

Wow this is very good.  Everyone has already said it all Great job!!