Home Recordings

[Juggz]

I recorded this about 10 years ago, when the Gigsmart podcast wanted music about superheroes for some reason. At the time, I had moved into a remote bungalow with no neighbours, so was able to set up the sitting room as a home studio, pretty much. I moved all the furniture out and had an old Pearl Export kit mic'd up and would fuck about most evenings recording bits and pieces. The setup was a DigiDesign 002 rack unit with a Behringer ADAT 8 input mic preamp going into ProTools, which allowed me record 12 mics simoultaneously. It was mostly a cheap Audix drum mic set with a couple of SE pencil condensers for overheads and the snare top mic was a Beyerdynamic M201. The room was actually really nice to record in, surprisingly, and we recorded the first Acrid Nebula demo in that room too. I'll put up something from that later.

This song was a departure for me because it was the first time I recorded all the guitars and bass without using a real amp. They were all done on a Pod DI'd into ProTools. For the verses, the drums are just one mic in the corner of the room, compressed to bejesus and the close mics come in during the choruses to give it a bit of pep. There are usually two or three guitars on the go at any one time, sometimes fighting each other, sometimes backing each other up. The Hawking voice was done using a Windows application called Talk Any, which I have used for all kinds of shite over the years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuJJI0nRhKU

[Juggz]

This is a more recent one, all recorded at home. Drums are programmed Slate Drums, guitars and bass are both DI'd through a Digidesign Eleven rack and the vocals are the only thing which went through a microphone. No real fancy business, one guitar left, one right and then a subtle additional filth guitar in the middle to boost the choruses a bit. With most of the heavy stuff I mix, the guitars are pretty thin to give space for the low end to come from the bass so, even if the bass doesn't sound like it's that big, you really notice it when it's not there. I spend a bit of time EQ'ing getting the bass and guitars to sound like one big instrument rather than going for separation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85jdalXfgCM

[Hambeast]

I'm liking the sound of those drums. Don't think I'd have noticed it was a drum machine unless you had mentioned. Nice work!

What's SS Drums like to work with? Take much tweaking to make it sound natural? I've always kinda overlooked it because the interface looks like some late 90s/early 2000s RPG

[blessed1]

I write everything in guitar pro. drums, pianos, synths, choirs.
Then my brother records the guitars for me on his laptop as di tracks.
All thats left to do is record the vocals which i do in a studio. having everything recorded before you go to a studio is brilliant as it costs less to just record the vocals and you aint dicking about trying to get the guitars perfect in a studio as this could take me fuckin ages.
I recorded an entire album this way and it worked a treat.
Heres one of the tracks from it.

https://youtu.be/dfyfVt3E5r0

[Juggz]

That sounds really good, fair play. You wouldn't try recording the vocals at home too?

I'm liking the sound of those drums. Don't think I'd have noticed it was a drum machine unless you had mentioned. Nice work!

What's SS Drums like to work with? Take much tweaking to make it sound natural? I've always kinda overlooked it because the interface looks like some late 90s/early 2000s RPG

Thanks.  I went with Slate because the drum sounds were so good. I'd imagine there are easier systems to work with but I bought the Slate pack as I was selling my kit, I don't have experience of any other drum plugin. The interface is pretty clunky for sure. Essentially, you've a section where you choose the kit and sounds, etc, but the flexibility of how you can send them to close mics, overheads and room mics and, from there, the ability to send it to different outputs which you can then have as individual tracks in PT is amazing. For the groves, you get a load of midi grooves with the package, broken into verse, chorus, fills, intro, bridges, etc and I piece them together in the midi editor of PT. You can also import other drum grooves in midi format, which is nice. Some are quite mechanical, some loose, depends on who created the midi files. I do all the tweaking in the PT midi editor too which, I'm told, isn't great, but it's all I know. I don't think I've ever used a drum groove without personalising it. I've been using PT for almost 20 years, I'm not changing now 

The new version of Slate Drums came out a few weeks ago and seems to expanded on the ability to tweak the sound, the mic and channel options seem endless now. I haven't had time to play around with it yet or use it in anger but hopefully will get stuck in soon.

[blessed1]

we tried recording some vocals in my brothers but there was serious clipping going on so i just taught it would be easier to get someone else to do them.theres a few female vocals in the album as well and even they were clipping like mad when we tried recording them.
i dunno what thats all about.

[blessed1]

i was actually only thinking as well, its mad what you can achieve with just a laptop in your bedroom these days.
makes demos way more enjoyable than the crap that used to be thrown out.

[Juggz]

i was actually only thinking as well, its mad what you can achieve with just a laptop in your bedroom these days.
makes demos way more enjoyable than the crap that used to be thrown out.

The power of a cheap laptop and a cheap Behringer audio interface is unbelievable, compared to even 20 years ago. The first recordings I made were by putting a tape deck in front of an amp and recording that. Then playing back the tape and playing along, recording that into another tape deck and so on. Forget four-tracks, even by comparison what you could do in your average recording studio is beaten by it. I remember recording demos in 16 and 24-track studios to 2" tape. You were physically limited by the desk, the tape machine, the limited outboard gear the studio had and, of course, at the mercy of an engineer who most likely wouldn't have had a clue of the type of music you were trying to record.

[Hambeast]

What was the clipping issue? Could you not just turn the volume down a bit, or was the whole setup completely fucked?

[blessed1]

yeah they were completely fucked. we were doing them in a tiny room with no soundproofing or anything so that could have been causing the problem.

[blessed1]

Juggz i just listened to those two tracks you put up. loving them vocals and i just smoked a joint so the music is going great with that ha. seriously good job on the drums making them sound realistic.you really wouldnt tell unless you knew.
Hambeast had a listen to the track you postedas well and while im not a massive fan of funeral type doom it sounds great for something you recorded yourself. i love those deep death vocals as well.

[Juggz]

Ha ha thanks man, glad they went down easy 

[Emphyrio]

Was using a Lite version of Guitar Rig but songs that are VST heavy were causing stuttering in Reaper. Guitarguitar were doing a sale on the Line 6 Amplifi TT so I ordered one. Can be used to record direct to DAW so that should be much lighter in processing. Looking forward to seeing the results.

[Juggz]

Cool. Hadn't seen that before, nice piece of kit. When you were recording and getting the stuttering, were you recording the effected tone or using Guitar Rig as a plugin on a clean track in playback?

[Emphyrio]

Clean track with Guitar rig providing the effects/tones.