Monthly Archives: November 2016

27/11/16 – Recording Bass Guitar – LO4

Today I will begin recording all of the bass guitar parts for my EP. I have written much about the bass tone of Chris Wolstenholme on this blog and hopefully my research will help me to craft recordings worthy of replicating the likes of Muse and also Rage Against the Machine.

My intention is for three of the tracks to have 3 or 4 different bass recordings. A clean channel, a distorted channel with an EHX Big Muff, a distorted channel with the Big Muff and a Boss BO-3 in order to try to replicate the tone of the Animato that Chris uses, as well as the Digitech Bass Synth Wah in order to create ‘Plug-In Baby’ and ‘Hysteria’ -esque tones, and in one of the tracks, a channel with an octave pedal set to -1. In my study of Wolstenholme’s bass recording I found that this was the typical setup, which I think at least partially explains how they managed to find such a dominating bass sound. I will record a clean signal through my bass amp, which unfortunately isn’t a Marshall, which Chris used, but I believe the pedals should make the bass amp tone slightly irrelevant in this context. The clean signal will be split to the amp, but also into a D/I signal, using an A/B pedal, which I will use to feed back the amplifier with pedals added later on in the session. This will mean that I can use the exact bass recording each time without needing to use multiple amps in different rooms. While Muse have the space and money to do this, I don’t. This should be an effective substitution. I’ll use my Overwater bass with humbucking pickups to replicate Chris’s sound, as detailed in ‘Pickups.’

For the final track, Antagonise, I intend to create a bass tone similar to that of Tim Commorford of Rage Against the Machine. For this I’ll switch bass guitar to my Overwater Jazz bass, similar in tone to Tim’s own Fender Jazz. Commorford’s bass tone doesn’t require anywhere near as much setup as that of Chris Wolstenholme although careful detail will be followed in order to get his sound correct. I’ll split the signal as above, with a clean tone coming from the amp and a D/I signal coming straight to the audio interface. The D/I will then be fed back through the amp with an overdrive pedal, to create a more aggressive tone for the chorus sections of the track.

I’ll be using a Shure SM57 to record the bass parts, which is a dynamic microphone, capable of handling the high SPLs that will need to be captured from the amplifier.

Once recorded, I’ll begin to mix the bass parts before the next stage which will be to record the guitars. In several Muse tracks from the first three albums, one or more of the bass tracks is panned in order to create a wider stereo field. While panning bass is not commonly found, it is an option for Muse due to having 3 or 4 bass tracks running at once. This allows the more distorted tones to find isolation and space to be heard. This is a technique I aim to try. Examples of this can be found in ‘Bliss’, ‘New Born’, and ‘Hyper Music’, all from ‘Origin of Symmetry.’

Absolution Drum Sound (LO3)

After much study I have come to conclusions about how I want the drums to sound on my EP; similar to those on Muse’s Absolution. This mainly relates to my learning outcome 3. I had originally thought that replicating the drum sound from this album might be too much of a challenge to take on, as they are done so professionally. However with some help from Muse’s Making of Absolution video and a Sound on Sound article with Rich Costey (both found below), I have decided that I am really keen to try and capture the ambience and room sounds of the drums on that particular album.

First, I will link the drums-only, or drums and vocals only tracks that I found which give a really clear look into how the drums sound isolated. While they have some clear differences, the snare drum tone being the biggest, it is easy to tell that Costey had a solid idea of how he wanted the drums to sound on the album. It should also be noted that while there is a lot of room sound, there doesn’t seem to be a lack of solidarity that comes with using a lot of reverb. Costey explains this in an interview with Sound on Sound: “another reason for the tight sound may be that I don’t tend to use much reverb on things like drums when I’m mixing. I pretty much just used whatever ambience was to be found on the room mics.” This piece of information has become crucial to how I intend to record my drums and also prompted me to record them at somewhere with more ambience than the university Multi-Track Studio. Insonic Studios is where I will be recording them which Lee has told me has a room which may be able to replicate the sort of room sounds found on Absolution. I have chosen to try and capture a clean and clear room sound when recording the drums in order to mix them in the same way that Costey did, and therefore capture the natural ambience that he captured and created on Absolution.

In the same article, Costey explains that the band also tried to record outside, in a courtyard with a lot of natural reverb. While they didn’t follow through with this, it shows the level of natural ambience that Costey was trying to find with the drum sound. Another experiment which was taken forward however, was to record the kick drums-based opening of Apocalypse Please in a swimming pool. Drummer Dom Howard was submerged in the pool, with the drums on the edge. An image of this is shown below. Whilst I don’t have the funds or contacts to be able to hire a swimming pool to use, it did make me look at the recording spaces I was considering using to record drums.

In the Sound on Sound article, Costey explained how his idea for the drum sound came about. “I had this idea that I wanted the drums to be intimate and very close, yet with a unique distant ambience. At one point, while we were rehearsing in the smaller Studio B, the band was running through the number with the doors open and I could hear it echoing around the courtyard.”

LO3 is to ‘identify and replicate the use of recording spaces used by Rich Costey on Absolution to create similar sounding reverbs and ambience’ and hopefully by recording and mixing drums in this way my EP will be well on the way to achieving this outcome.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZKvJXg6PI

http://www.musewiki.org/Rich_Costey:_Recording_Muse%27s_Absolution_(200312_Sound_on_Sound_article)

Recording Starts: Drum Recording

Tomorrow, 21/11/2016, I will begin the recording process of this project. I will be recording drums at Insonic Studios in Lincoln. I was actually recommended this studio by my tutor, Lee Gretton, who told me about a room they had which might be able to capture some room ambience which may allow me to replicate the drum sound of Absolution. This corresponds to LO3, which is to replicate spaces and reverbs used by Rich Costey on Absolution. The original plan was to record drums in the University Multitrack, however it soon became quite apparent that such a drum sound wouldn’t be possible in this studio without post-recording processing and using convolution reverb, rather than capturing the natural sound of the room. For more on Muse’s drum sound see my post entitled ‘Absolution drum sound’.

The plan for tomorrow is to close-mic the kit as normal but pay particular attention to the sound of the overheads. I plan to find a great overhead sound before I even think about adding mics to the actual drums, as this will be hugely important in capturing the ‘liveness’ of the room. There will also be a room mic, which I hope will capture a sound that I’ll be able to use in mixing. While often room mic recordings aren’t used, I aim to pay particular attention to it in order to capture the sound of the room as well as possible. The owner of Insonic, Gary, has suggested I try placing the room mic in the corridor outside of the room. I will experiment with this.

I have given myself and the drummer 7 hours in which to do the recording, which I hope means that I will have ample time to make sure that the kit sounds nice, and that the microphones are set up correctly.

Attached below is an image of my MAP form for tomorrow

image11

Making of ‘Showbiz’

The ‘Making – Showbiz’ video is a short documentary I watched featuring John Leckie and Muse which gave me some small insights into the recording of Muse’s debut album and John Leckie’s production style. Muse at the time were very inexperienced in a studio environment, hence hiring the much more senior John Leckie as producer. Whilst not a great deal of detailed information was included in the video, I did learn that when recording certain parts, panels were made into rooms surrounding the sound source, all in the same room. I find it interesting that the majority of the album was recorded in the same space, meaning that panels were necessary, as this shows that not a great deal of space is needed in order to record a high-quality production.

Contrary to what I had previously believed and is part of my Learning Outcome 2, there are no conventional synthesizers used on Showbiz. There are guitars, basses, pianos and drums, all with various effects added, but no electronic instruments. The piano used is shown in this video and will help give me an insight into how to shape the piano sound in one of my tracks. As I will be using a software instrument piano, I would class this under LO2, with trying to replicate non-audio sounds used.

The video shows the band in session at RAK studios. In the video, Matt Bellamy, Muse frontman identifies the issue with modern editing techniques, stating that Leckie taught him that those discrepancies are what makes the band sound human. I find this stance from Muse very interesting given the level of detail they go to in terms of editing on their newer material. That said, Showbiz was recorded in 1999, so the technology was nowhere near as powerful as it is today. This was also before Bellamy took an interest in synthesizers.

 

Pickups (LO1 and LO4)

The pickup is the most important part of the guitar when choosing tone. Many artists’ sounds are built around the use of either single-coil or humbucking pickups and, while both Muse and Rage Against the Machine have very distinctive characteristics in their music, the pickup choice is important.

The guitarists and bassists of the two bands use the following configuration:

  • Matt Bellamy, Muse guitarist: Matt uses mainly humbucking pick-ups in the bridge position in his guitar recordings, leading to what many would say is an archetypal lead guitar tone. Humbucking pickups are known for their warmth and their powerful response to distortion. The information presented on pickups can be found in the link at the bottom of this page. As Bellamy used quite a large amount of distortion on the majority of the tracks in Muse’s first three albums, a humbucker made sense and gave Bellamy a tone which was both clear and powerful in the higher frequencies, while filling out the high-mids and mids.
    Matt is known for his custom-built Manson guitars (these can be found in the ‘MuseWiki’ link at the bottom of this entry). While he didn’t have these on Showbiz, they were used on Muse’s following two albums. These guitars were fitted with predominantly a humbucker in the bridge position, and a P90  in the neck position. I think the use of the P90 can obviously be heard in the outro to Micro-Cuts. The guitar tone is not as heavily distorted as others on the album and there are a lot of brighter frequencies in the sound. The tone is more like a drive than an actual distortion, which is generally more suited to single coil and P90 pickups as the noise cancellation by having a dual-coil pickup is not there. This means that single-coils and similar pickups are easier to drive and also more prone to ‘hum’ and feedback. My Fender Stratocaster HSS, which is fitted with both single-coil and humbucking pickups, should be perfect for replicating a variety of sounds from Muse’s first three albums. I intend to display both humbucker and single coil tones on this EP to capture the sounds created by Matt Bellamy with John Leckie and Rich Costey. (LO1)
  • Chris Wolstenholme, bassist of Muse: Chris used primarily Pedulla Rapture basses in Origin of Symmetry and Absolution. They can be seen on videos of the Origin of Symmetry tour and also in the Making of Absolution documentry. From the research I’ve done on what pick-up was in Chris’s bass at the time, I believe that it was either a humbucker, or in fact a split coil pickup. The information I found about Pedulla Raptures did not help a great deal as throughout the years they have been fitted with a range of pickups. From tone alone, I am leaning towards the conclusion that the majority of the sounds of Chris’s bass in Origin of Symmetry and Absolution were created by a humbucking pickup in the bridge position. As most of Chris’s basses at the time were fitted with a single pick-up, this means that the bridge (and only) pickup will be slightly further up the guitar than a regular bridge pickup. I will need to take this factor into account when recording bass. I will be using my Overwater Jazz bass, fitted with a humbucking pickup in the bridge position to model sounds created by Chris, John Leckie and Rich Costey (LO4)
  • Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine guitarist: Tom is known for using Fender Telecasters, most commonly with a single coil pickup in the neck and bridge positions. The link to Morello’s ‘Equipboard’ page can be found at the bottom of this entry. Tom’s tone does not change a great deal from Rage’s first album to their last, and in many songs he has a single-coil sound which is extremely distinctive and archetypal of Fender guitars. Whilst Tom is most famous for his blue ‘Arm The Homeless’ guitar, fitted with two EMG humbucking pickups, much of his studio sound comes from the Telecaster. In an interview with Musicians Friend he said of the Telecaster: ‘this is in a song with all the Rage [Against The Machine], Audioslave, Street Sweeper [Social Club], The Nightwatchman songs that are in drop D tuning. Killing in the Name, Freedom, Testify, all those that are in drop D, played and written with the band on this.’ While I’m finding it tricky to know for sure, the sound closely resembles that of a neck pickup, and in the video the pickup is switched to the neck setting. In a live version of Testify, the pickup is also switched as such. Neck pickups are known for their prominance in bass frequencies while creating a slight absence of mid-range frequencies. Again I feel this is obvious in many RATM guitar tones. I will be using the single coil neck pickup of my Fender Stratocaster to try to achieve a Morello-like tone on one of the tracks on my EP. (LO1)
  • Tim Commerford: Rage Against the Machine Bassist: Tim has used a combination of the Fender Jazz bass and the Musicman Stingray throughout his career however on their later material the former is primarily used. On Renegades the tone is quite clearly that of a Jazz bass, and most likely the bridge pickup. As I own an Overwater Classic Jazz bass fitted with a single-coil bridge pickup, I should be able to closely replicate sounds created by Commerford on the album.

 

http://www.dawsons.co.uk/blog/main-electric-guitar-pickup-types

http://www.musewiki.org/Manson_Guitars

http://www.musewiki.org/Bass

http://equipboard.com/pros/tom-morello/fender-american-standard-telecaster-electric-guitar

http://equipboard.com/pros/tim-commerford