In my first tutorial of this semester I met my tutor, Lee Gretton.
I told Lee of my intentions to record an EP, but I didn’t know what I wanted to base it on yet. Together we came up with the idea of doing something related to Muse, an artist I really admire.
For the next tutorial I was to have a more concrete idea of what I wanted to work towards.
When I recorded my bass guitar, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve and how I was going to do it. This can be found in the other posts on this blog on bass guitar but in particular in ‘Recording Bass Guitar (LO4)’. I can definitely say that I followed through on this preparation and I think the Muse (and Rage Against The Machine) influence on the bass can definitely be heard in my final tracks. For bass I recorded everything and re-amped exactly as I said I would and it was all done in one session. I used the basses and pedals I mentioned in the posts on bass and feel that on reflection the bass tone, particularly in Muse, was slightly more difficult to replicate than I originally anticipated.
Despite this, I am happy with how the bass guitars on the EP have turned out post-mix.
The microphone position and pedals used can be seen below.
As detailed in my ‘Recording Starts: Drum Recording’ post, the drums were something that I wanted to get right in order to replicate ambience on Absolution (LO3).
I feel that while the session went well and I got what I wanted, with time to spare at the end, there are a few things I would have liked to change. For one thing, I feel that the kick drum could have been much better in terms of tone, and it could have been easier to record. The drum kit we used didn’t have a hole in the front kick drum skin, meaning that the microphone had to sit outside the drum. This meant that there was a lot of bleed from the other instruments. Another thing that I found challenging was finding a nice snare sound. I’m not completely happy with the snare drum on the EP and it needed a lot of processing to get it to where it is.
The room sound, however, exceeded my expectations. Below is an image of how we set the drum microphones up.
This was all fairly conventional, save for the lack of hi-hat microphone. I only had 8 channels at my disposal which meant unfortunately the hi-hat mic had to be sacrificed in order to have the last channel free for the room mic. This turned out to be a good decision as the hi-hats were picked up adequately by the overheads.
Here’s an image of the room mic position I ended up using:
By positioning the microphone so low down I avoided picking up too much resonance from the overheads. The wall shown had a nice natural reverb to it and so I decided that positioning the microphone there produced the best ambient sound. I wanted to use a room sound for my reverb in order to replicate the method used by Rich Costey. “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”
I also tried removing the panels on the walls to further enhance the ambience of the room, but decided that it might be a little difficult to control in the mixing stage.
Below are some of the more unsuccessful attempts at finding a room sound including near the door, out of the door with the door open, and out of the door with the door closed (attempting to get a sound out of the lobby)
Overall I’m quite happy with my drum sound although there are certainly elements that could have been better. I think that following Rich Costey’s philosophy on Absolution has meant that I’ve got natural sounding drums, similar at least in terms of ambience.
http://www.musewiki.org/Rich_Costey:_Recording_Muse%27s_Absolution_(200312_Sound_on_Sound_article)
As mentioned in the post ‘Mixing Bass Guitar (LO4)’, much of the production of certain instruments was done before and during recording. This means that when it comes to mixing the guitar, which I’m starting today, I have a clear idea of how things should be set out in terms of placement, volumes and plug-ins used.
The first key piece of information is that when I recorded the guitar I did so with 3 microphones on the guitar amp at all times. Two SM57s on each speaker of the 2×12 cabinet and then an AKG C414 slightly further back. I decided that the C414 upon listening as part of a mix will not be used in the final product but both SM57 tracks will be in most circumstances. This is to create a richer tone where necessary, as each mic recorded different aspects of the tone I was trying to achieve on each track. Combined, they sound closer to the desired tone than either alone so for me it was an easy choice to use both. As shown in the picture below, when recording ‘Origin of Symmetry’ and possibly Showbiz and Absolution as well, John Leckie/Rich Costey and Matt Bellamy used several mics on different parts of the amplifiers, to capture different tones. The picture also shows that they predominantly recorded using Shure SM57s, which I chose to use when recording my guitars.
Another technique that is obvious throughout Muse’s early catalogue is the use of double-tracking guitar parts. Other than on solos and key riffs (see Plug-In Baby, Stockholme Syndrome (intro only) and Micro Cuts), the guitar parts on all of Showbiz, Origin of Symmetry and Absolution seem to be mostly double-tracked. Again, this is important in creating a stereo image for a band with only 3 members, particularly when many songs are simply guitar-bass-drums-and vocals. For more information on this see my posts titled ‘Muse’s Minimalism (LO5)’ and ‘Use of space on Absolution (LO3)’ I recorded most of my guitar parts for my EP twice in order to replicate the technique used by Muse but also by Rage Against the Machine on Renegades (see tracks such as Microphone Fiend and Renegades of Funk). The fact that for the majority of guitar parts I have two different takes and each take was recorded with two different microphones means that I have a lot of choice when it comes to colouring the tone to replicate guitar sounds in the mix. It also means that the guitar, while only ever playing one part (apart from a few tiny sections), is capable of being spread widely across a stereo field. Examples of the double-tracking of guitars on the Muse records include Time Is Running Out, Hysteria, the choruses of Plug-In Baby, Muscle Museum, New Born, Hyper Music and Thoughts of a Dying Atheist.
The guitar parts on Origin of Symmetry in particular that were not double-tracked, such as the outro of Micro Cuts (see 3:18) are interesting in terms of panning because they move from left to right in the stereo image. This is both to create space where there isn’t much, and also to create a slightly disorientating effect in the listener’s head. I’ll be using this technique on several sections of my EP to create movement in the stereo field in the more minimal areas of the tracks. Other than this, the prominent guitar riffs such as Plug-In Baby are mostly completely central in the mix.
In Muse’s first three albums and indeed in Renegades by Rage Against the Machine, quite a minimal amount of reverb has been used on the guitar parts. This makes for quite a dry sounding record and up until Absolution, where Muse became a little more liberal with reverb and delay-based effects, there is very little noticeable reverb to be found. Exceptions include the ‘clean’ section Citizen Erased, Megalomania, Muscle Museum and Unintended. With artists such as Muse and Rage Against the Machine, who have limited setups in terms of instrumentation, reverb is the kind of effect that is merely used to blend the guitars with the rest of the track rather than as a noticeable stylistic choice. In my EP I will attempt to use as little reverb on the guitars as possible in order to replicate the albums I’m studying. As mentioned, Absolution does feature a fair amount more ambience which I feel is a stylistic choice which was added to match the change in musical style. That said, the majority of Absolution is still quite dry in terms of reverb. Only one of my tracks, Alive, will feature noticeable amounts of reverb, which is mainly due to the fact that the song is more similar in style to Absolution than the others.
In terms of compression, it is hard to know for sure how much compression was used on any of the albums I’m researching but through listening I have determined that it has been used on guitars and in particular, the clean sections of tracks. See Citizen Erased for an example. In an article for Sound on Sound where he was discussing the recording of Foo Fighters’ ‘The Pretender’, Rich Costey is quoted saying ‘I tend not to compress distorted guitars very much when I’m mixing, because they’ve usually already been compressed. It’s strange, but to my ears, when you compress distorted electric guitars while you’re mixing, the whole mix starts to sound overcooked.’ Obviously this is an article regarding a track I’m not studying, it is interesting to find Costey’s philosophy on compressing distorted guitars. I therefore intend not to compress the distorted guitars I have recorded unless I feel it’s necessary.
In terms of EQ, there should not need to be much work as most of it was done while shaping the tone through the amplifier while recording guitars. That said I will need to EQ several parts of the guitars to get rid of some muddiness in places but also to make the double-tracked takes stand out from each other and peak in different areas of the frequency scale. One track I tried to replicate in terms of guitar tone is Muse’s ‘Micro Cuts’ from Origin of Symmetry. I wasn’t able to get enough high frequencies from the amp to replicate the tone and therefore I’ll need to add them through the EQ in Logic.
The track, ‘Alive’, from my EP is intended to replicate multiple guitar tones in Muse’s New Born from the same album. The first tone, heard at 1:24, is heavily distorted with a fuzz pedal and with a scoop in the mid frequencies. The second, heard at 1:36 (the two tones layer on top of each other), is prominent in higher frequencies. While I tried to capture these tones straight from the amp and pedals, there will need to be EQ’ing in order to replicate the guitar tones from New Born.
Effects such as delay are sporadically used on the guitar, in particular on Absolution. For more information on this see ‘Use of space on Absolution’. These effects will be added at the mixing stage as I found it difficult to get hold of pedals able to replicate the Echoplex. Another thing I will add during mixing is a bitcrusher on ‘Fame.’ On this track I attempted to create a tone reminiscent of that on Plug-In Baby by Muse, and while I think I got the amount and style of fuzz right, the sound isn’t yet saturated enough.
On Renegades, much of the same techniques used by Muse can be found, such as double-tracking and pitch-shifting. It seems to be more simplistic in nature however. I believe the tone I got straight from the amplifier when recording one of my tracks with a Tom Morell0-esque guitar tone was almost perfect and should not need much post-recording processing to complete.
With all of this in mind, I can begin to mix the guitars on my tracks to what, hopefully, will be an accurate representation of the guitars heard on the four albums I’m studying.
http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/secrets-mix-engineers-rich-costey
The next stage of my project is to mix the bass guitar. While most of the production on the bass (influenced by the bass on the four albums I’m studying) was done prior to and during the recording stage, I feel that the mixing is also a big part of achieving the bass guitar sounds I’m trying to replicate.
On Absolution, in the Sound on Sound interview I’ve linked below, Rich Costey noted that ‘as most arrangement decisions regarding the songs were made while recording, the overall modus operandi amounted to settling on a direction that would subsequently determine the nature of the overdubs and then the mix. This, in turn, ensured that the mixing process was relatively short and straightforward.’ While this is a philosophy I’ve tried to follow on all of the recording aspects of my project, there are a couple of highly characteristic pieces of production after the recording stages that make the bass guitar stand out.
The first, is the panning of certain bass tracks. Origin of Symmetry is strong evidence for this and in particular the track ‘Hyper Music’ (linked below) displays the way that the bass has been split and then panned to create a stereo image. As mentioned a lot throughout this blog, the band’s limited line-up instrumentally means that they have always tried to make the instruments they do have go further and by splitting the bass into three different tracks and then panning them, they successfully achieve this. I’ve followed a similar style so far in the mixing of my project and in three of the four tracks there are at least 3 different bass tracks, which will be panned accordingly. As mentioned in my other posts about bass guitar, one of these tracks will be entirely clean. This is because many distortion pedals lose some of their low-end when used with bass guitar. The Seymour Duncan link below goes further into this idea. Obviously as the bass’s primary job is to add low-end depth to a piece of music, adding a clean track underneath the distortions and then EQ’ing out frequencies over around 300Hz means that the bass retains it’s power in the low frequencies and the distortion tracks are free to create their tones which are generally more prominent in the mids and high-mids. This in turn creates a powerful set of bass tracks, able to dominate a piece of music where there’s a limited amount of other instruments.
The track in my EP with only two bass tracks, Antagonise, was intended to replicate the bass tone of Tim Commerford (Rage Against the Machine bassist) on Renegades. While the bass plays an important role on this album, it isn’t as dominating as the bass of Chris Wolstenholme on any of the Muse albums I’ve studied. That said, Rage Against the Machine are still a instrumentally limited band where all of the instruments are required to be heard in the mix. The track contains two bass tracks; the main, which is a clean recording of my bass amp with the bass set up to mimic a Commerford bass tone, and a track with a DI’d signal of the original recording which has been re-amped but this time with a Boss Bass Overdrive pedal added. The distorted bass sound on this album couldn’t be much more different to those used on the Muse records so when recording I left the EQ on the amp flat and tried to boost the lows on the Overdrive pedal. The bass tone on Renegades (best heard distorted on ‘Pistol Grip Pump’) is one that tries to boost the low-end tone of the bass, rather than adding a presence in the higher end of the EQ. This is unusual for a bass distortion track as often it’s an effect used to substitute for a second guitar, such as in Muse.
While there is some panning of the bass on this album, (see ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’), generally the bass guitar sits completely centre. For the track where I’m trying to replicate Commerford’s bass tone, I’ll therefore do the same.
In terms of compression, while I struggled to find concrete evidence of the type and amount of compression used by either Leckie or Costey on these four albums, I have found through listening that Costey seems to be more liberal than Leckie in terms of the amount of compression used on the bass guitar. See some of the bass tracks on Showbiz for evidence of this compared to the likes of ‘Hysteria’ from Absolution. I’ll be experimenting with compression in order to try and replicate what I can hear on these four albums.
To conclude I feel that with the research done on the bass guitar and the way it was produced in the albums I’m researching, I should be able to replicate the sound and style that the producers used.
http://www.musewiki.org/Rich_Costey:_Recording_Muse%27s_Absolution_(200312_Sound_on_Sound_article)