Bands in the Studio

Note: I believe this information to be true and accurate as posted by people who either were there or close to those. But t'is the internet so who really knows! Anyway, rock on.
I couldn't be bothered hyper-linking all the sources so the main ones are..........
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/andy-sneap-151/
Gearslutz.com
http://www.michaelwagener.com

Arch Enemy
Bullet for my Valentine
Carcass
Capdown
EXODUS
Fear Factory
Kreator
Killswitch Engage
Korn
Machine Head
Metallica
Nasum
Nevermore
Obituary
QOTSA
Ozzy
Spiral Architect
Stuck Mojo
Stampin' Ground
Testament

Arch Enemy

Anthems of Rebellion - vocals - Amek 9098 and Neuman 149 , also Alan Smart compressor.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Arch Enemy - Doomsday Machine - Drum Reverb - DVerb in Pro Tools, same verb on snare and toms.
Toms: Natural, no triggers.
Finished kick on the album was (Andy Sneap's) dw24 triggered with drumagog, about 3 to 4 good samples . The two drum triggers per kick were so daniel could monitor with the brain whilst playing and recording the trigger also.
Guitar - Chris was using the JSX peavey with the same cabs
Bass- an ESP, + he has his usual retro pedal selection
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Arch Enemy - Wages of Sin - guitar is (mainly) Engl savage 120 + 2 tracks of 5150.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

"The effects used on the vocals were double tracking all vocals manually whether it be clean, heavy or harmony's, an eventide H300 [sic] was used on all vocals with a tiny chorus effect also a short delay somewhere between 200 ms and 300 ms . This was definitely the treatment on the voice as I produced and mixed the album."

Mar 26, 2007
Source: Colin Richardson on the Andy Sneap forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Carcass

- Exhume to Consume -
" My first encounter with the band! -I loved it right away!
on 'Exhume', the whole thing was recorded and mixed the same day. It was for a compliation album if I recall correctly, Earache records. It was our first encounter, and there was no producer, just the three band members and me. They stayed quietly and nervously huddled in the back corner of the room (this was in the old "Amazon" studios building in Kirkby) and occasionally huddled together and usually a shy 'delegate' was prodded forward to ask for changes to the mix. I generally tried to relax them and joke about things, but they were generally very nervous and didn;t ask for much.

At one point, the band asked if it was possible to lower the pitch of the 'vocals'. I put it through a harmonizer, and set it to about a fifth down.

-"How's that?"
"not bad… can it go any lower?"
"yeah, it can go down a full octave, but it'd be pretty growly… here…" (and I punched in 0.500 for the pitch ratio… this was on an AMS DMX15-80S). "-How's that?"
"Ah. Better."
[pause]
"er…. can it go any lower?"
"Hmmmm… well one octave is as far as the AMS units go down… further than that and it gets a bit unintelligible…. I can patch it back through the second channel and re-transpose it down even further, I suppose…" (and this I did…) -"How's that"
"Ah…. MUCH better!!"

And with that they returned to the huddle, apparently satisfied.

Now this had had a pretty ruinous effect on the intelligibility of the vocals, which already sounded like they had been sung by the Cookie Monster, so I was now faced with something sounding like glitchy subsonic rumble to get over the "wall of doom" guitar sounds! -I set about hunting with an Equaliser to see if there was anything that might return it to making some kind of sense… after a while, the frowns returned, a huddle was resumed, and finally another delegate was assigned the task of making a request of me… (I found this all a little worrying, but in hindsight, very amusing!)

"Ummmmm….. we were just wondering about the vocal sound…. we were wondering about being able to make out the words…?"
"Yeah, … wow. -Er… see with this harmoniser it's making it really difficult to make out the words, so I've been trying to bring out the diction or something… I think this EQ is helping a bit, but there's only so much that I can really do without bringing the pitch back up a bit… if you guys wouldn't mind…."
"Oh… you've been trying to make it more audible?"
"yeah…. I mean… of course…."
"Ah.. -can you take the EQ out and see what it sounds like?"
"sure [click]…"
[together]"Ahhh… MUCH better!!!"
"Howzabout if I go the other way with it?"
"Ah… Perfect!!!"

-I shrugged, and just did what they wanted after that…"
Source -Keith, SSLtech, http://www.prodigy-pro.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Carcass - Heartwork - guitar - 5150 mixed with a (little bit of) 12 wt marshall practice amp.

" Can you share a little info about this recording ? Maybe which mics you used ? Amps ? I would appreciate everything you still know about this session.
Okay… the album was recorded at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool. Take a look at the link. At the time I was chief engineer there, after Peter Coghlan and I had teched the place from the ground up. The 4-studio 'Amazon Studios" complex had relocated there to the city centre after starting out in Kirkby, north of the city. http://www.parrstreet.co.uk/

The recording was started in studio 2, on the Neve VR. There are some layout pics on the Parr Street site, studio 2 has excellent visibility from teh control room into the main area (25-feet ceiling height, 2000 square feet inthe main room, plus various acouostic iso rooms) and each of the iso rooms (Stone, Wood and Dead) are 'fanned out' in such a manner that there is direct visibility with the main room.

Drums were cut with the drummer's back to the main control room window, with the usual mic complement, plus the doors to the wood and stone rooms (which he faced) opened to lengthen and 'shape the tone of' the ambience. Parr Street has permanently-mounted stereo PZMs on the walls of all the various acoustic iso areas, so there's easy access to blending the room sound… the mics normal to high-numbered mic inputs on the Neve (49-60)

The session was recorded to 2" (Studer A827) with no NR, at 30ips.

the drummer wore lead velcro'ed-on leg weights to help with some of the faster double-kick parts, and had an assortment of different weights, chosen and switched-out as and when each section required. There was a fair amount of punching in, and the fashion at the time was for 'clicky' kicks (the dreaded "typewriter" kick drum sound!) cutting through the mush of thickly-distorted detuned guitars.

I don't remember much about the Bass guitar, and sadly my assistant -Dave Buchanan- was killed in a car accident a couple of years ago, so there's only myself and perhaps Colin Richardson who might remember and for the time being I don't remember much at all.

The band had demoed some stuff in studio 3 at Parr Street -not many tunes, but a couple- and were happy with the sound inthe small demo room. It had an Allen & Heath 'Saber' console. When it came to the guitar sounds, things ground to a halt. the drums had been cut with 'guide' guitars, just to steer the tune, but when we got to print them for real, we knew there was some work to do.

Bill Steer (guitar) was bothered all the way through the backing tracks that the guide guitar (through his beloved marshall) had been too scratchy sounding. We tried moving the pickup height. We tried different amps (Soldano, 5150, various Marshalls, Dual rectifier, many, many amps!) then we tried different cabs… Nothing sounded as good as the demo sound. We had started with the same combo as the demo, but that was the "scratchy" sound that was annoying Bill… then I had an idea.

This was like making a resonant kick drum by putting two kicks back-to back with no heads in between. I took two Marshall 4x12 cabs. We took the backs of both of them. We took the speakers out of the second one, and we blocked off the holes with plywood and corrugated cardboard, as the closest thing we could find to a 'seal'. This was definately getting boomy, and quite interesting, but Bill still didn't like the top end. It was sandpapery and irritating to him.

As a last resort (after 4 days of trying things out, double-tracking things, seeing if things got better or worse after layering… then erasing everything right away!) we went up to the demo room (studio 3) and took our "Frankencabinet" up with us. We miced up the cab and brought it up on the Allen & Heath. There was our sound. Was it the room? -probably at least partly, but we'd tried 5 or 6 completely different areas in studio 2… ord knows there's no shortage of acoustic spaces there… or was it the Allen & Heath Mic preamps? -Who Knows? Who Cares? -I'm wheeling the Studer upstairs, and we're booking some time in studio 3!!!

The cab was miked as was my custom at the time: Two SM57's, right against the speaker cloth, but one on the center of a cone, one at the edge of a different cone. The two were combined and maybe shifted slightly for maximum summing, or smoothest top end, but that's usually a good starting point. Don't ask me why it works, I've tried to riddle it out, but it works.

Colin Richardson is a twiddler. He likes to fiddle with EQs every now and then. This was a great case in point. We ended up taking a Massenberg Eq and EQing the combined 2-mic signal. The band had initially wanted Bill Steer and Mike Amott to just do one track each, to get away from the "Wall of Thick, mushy guitar", but we ended up doing 2 tracks of each player. olin wanted there to be a differentiation betwen the two players, other than just slight playing style or inflections, so he put the Massenberg EQ -both channels cascaded in series- across teh buss insert, and he set up two variations that made him happy, which we labelled "Mike and Bill" and we switched one in and the other out as we alternated players. Then we basically went into "factory" mode and printed guitar tracks, 2 of each player per tune.

That was the big part of the album. The rest was just vocals (Trying not to sound too much like the cookie monster!) and mixing in studio 1, which has a 64-input SSL 4000, with my own 'AAD' (Amazon Audio Developments) Equalisers replacing the original SSL 82E02 cards.

I love the band. There was a conscious effort on 'Heartwork' to make the sound more 'expensive' without making "selling-out". Reference stuff was Pantera, Alice in Chains and a few other artists who have names which always have -and always will- make me laugh… like "Fudge Tunnel"…
Source -Keith, SSLtech, http://www.prodigy-pro.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2



Taken from this forum:
http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/mv/msg/26148/0/16/0/

Part 1:

Carcass Revisited.

In the years after first encountering Carcass, I'd begun to see them featured somewhat regularly in things like 'Kerranng' (British rock/metal newsstand magazine) and also from time to time on MTV Europe's 'Headbanger's Ball' TV program. They were being taken quite seriously, and I'd become 'secretly' quite proud of them, what with them being a local band and everything.

Just to ice the cake, I think that all the band are vegetarian, -in fact last thing I knew, all but one were actually Vegan, which made some of the titles and subject matter even more ironic to me.

They turned out an album fairly soon after I first worked with them, and followed with another album a year later. By 1991, I had risen to post of chief Engineer at Amazon, coming back full-time, which curtailed my doing any projects at any other studios for a while (and I particularly missed working overseas), but the MAIN reason why I took the post was that it allowed me to relocate the entire facility to a brand new facility in the city center. We were moving all three existing studios and adding a fourth. The house tech and I were doing all of the wiring and installation, Roger Quested had actually done the room layout and acoustic plan for the two main control rooms, and I did the studio areas for the two main rooms and the whole layout and acoustic design for the two smaller rooms upstairs. The studios were going to be H-U-G-E; -The two downstairs control rooms were each 550 square feet, with natural light, and the studio areas were 2,000 square feet (studio 1- SSL) and 2500 square feet (studio 2-Neve V3).

During this period (which spread from 1991 to 1992) I was spending time in both locations, and doing occasional sessions in the old facility in between the inevitable on-site jobs and visits, but nothing too lengthy. It was during this period that the band Once more booked in to record an album. About this time I really was longing to do a 'proper' job for them, having still only done their first track a few years ago... but sadly I really couldn't do it, because of all the other stuff going on, so Keith Hartley (another 'Keith'!) engineered that Album. I think that by then I had a drawing office set up at the new building downtown, and was probably there most of the time, although I do remember that I was up at the old place a few times doing shorter sessions, and when I was there, I always chatted with the band in the games room or whatever, and dropped in to hear how it was going. They always seemed pretty happy for me to drop by, and I'd certainly characterize our relationship as particularly friendly by then.

When they finished the 1991 album ('Necroticism Descanting the Insalubrious') I remember thinking that it was OK, but I really wished that I'd have got to work on it -there was a sort of tonal 'strength' which I really wished for, that the band still hadn't really accomplished. Oh well.

The band line-up on that album was the original three, plus mike Amott, who might not have 'fully' joined the band yet, but was definitely bringing something new to the table. The Producer was the irrepressible Colin Richardson, and I remember that the 'second engineer' was half Dave Buchanan and half Ian 'Skinnie' McFarlane. There was some kind of scheduling reason why they couldn't work with a single assistant for the entire project, but I don't recall the details now. I think that Ian Skinnie started the project off and Dave finished it, -I don't think that Dave particularly enjoyed most rock sessions, but by the end he was definitely enjoying the personalities on that particular session, and found plenty of humor in the music. I made a mental note; -I'd never seen Dave truly enjoy that kind of session so much before.

So when the band booked back in for a month to record another album in 1993, we'd replaced the V3 in studio 2 with a brand new, slightly larger Neve VR60. The studio was pretty well sorted out by then, and so I'd gone back to engineering longer projects. I really wanted to do this album. I think that Keith Hartley also had his eye on it, and I hope I didn't make an enemy, but I really wanted to try my hand with a Carcass album.

The rest of the line-up was pretty much unchanged from the preceding album. Mike Amott had by now settled into the band, Colin Richardson was again producing, Dave Buchanan was assisting, the studio had PLENTY of flexibility in terms of sonic options, and if anything in the room wasn't exactly how I wanted it then I only had myself to blame. (I'd essentially built the place, after all!)

Day one, and we started setting up. The drums and probably the bass were the things which I think we really wanted to keep from the backing tracks; the guitars we might probably re-do. The drums were set up directly in front of the control room window, a short distance in front of the glass, with the drummer's back to the window. That way he was facing outward into the studio area, for clear line-of-sight with the other players.

Talking of line-of-sight, the studio area (studio 2) was laid out quite specifically. The main recording area was quite large. It was about 1,800 square feet (180sq.m)and the ceiling height inside varied from 18~25 feet (5.5m~8m). In addition to the main room, there were three smaller rooms along the far wall, opposite to and facing the control room window. The rooms (from right-to-left) were treated with very different acoustic surfaces; Yorkshire stone in the largest room to the right (which also had a convex curved wall) all wood (Ash) on the walls in the middle room. Both rooms had hard floors (unfinished tile in the stone room, and the wooden room's floor had in fact been 'reclaimed' from the chapel at Walton Prison when it was demolished while we were building the studio, so it already had its own history!) and the third room, all the way to the left was padded, carpeted walls. Each of the three rooms had the lowest eight feet on the front as a glass wall, with a swing-open double door in the glass area. In addition, We'd mounted pairs of PZM microphones high on the walls in each room, and they all normalled to the mic inputs on the console patchbay on channels 49-upwards, so the last bucket of modules on the Neve had 'listen mics' or 'crash-bang-wallop mics' and all you had to do was push up a fader.

Drums

The drums were a double-kick kit, and I remember noticing Ken's Velcro leg-weights for the first time. Basically, drumming non-stop for several days is one thing, but double-kick drum work at that frantic pace is enough to wear ANYONE out, so Ken uses leg-weights (which are like ankle-bands with slabs of lead in them, attached and removed by means of a Velcro fastening strip) of various weights, and he used to change different weights if we were doing a lot of different tempos. Being able to 'control' the resistance did indeed help with steadying the tempo somewhat. We (Colin, the band and I) talked about kick drums and whether or not to use triggered kicks. We all felt that (while it is an easy way to get 'consistency' in terms of strike velocity, and even just a single 'half-hit' kick will usually make a double-kick 'blast' sound stumbled) we should at least try to use the real kicks. I was particularly wanting to try and keep them 'real', because I wanted to use room as much ambiance as I could get away with, and I didn't want too much of a disconnect between the trigger kick sound and the room ambiance.

While fast kick drums in music of that type had already started to sound like clicky 'typewriter slapping' for many bands, we were determined to try and retain as much 'strength' and 'depth' as we possibly could. We tried using click-pads on the kick drum skins, but it really was TOO much. It put so much hard 'click' on the impact that it overwhelmed the 'note' of the drum, and the click was so loud that it mad the kick drum ambiance almost as loud-sounding as the snare ambiance -all wrong. Mind you, peeling off the click pad and using the beater direct onto the head was not 'distinct' enough, so we tried a couple of different click pads, and eventually settled on an Ampex 2" reel collar, cut down to 2" x 2" square, with the corners chamfered to make it into an octagon, and with the cut edges 'filed' down to round them off, so that there were no sharp edges to cut into the drum head. We liked the sound of this, and I recall there being a small square of toilet paper folded up behind it, sandwiched between the tape collar pad and the drum skin, when it was taped on (with a circle of duct tape of course!)

The kick drums had second kicks in front of them, and the whole kick setup was 'tented' slightly to manage the room ambiance volume, but we did like the tone of the drum in the room quite a lot. We noticed that Ampex reel collar plastic tends to split a couple of times a day, so I had Dave Buchanan 'pre-build' a bunch of 'carcass-ized' click pads so that we could swap them quickly, without 'losing' too much magic, if they failed while the band was hot-to-trot. I think Dave also took it upon himself to add the job of replacing the click pads each morning, along with cleaning the heads, checking the tape cal and all the other jobs which he did for me, including making the tea, -usually served with a smile and a terrible joke!

The doors to the stone room were about ¾-fully open and we used the ambiance mics in there. All of the drums were recorded using the console mic pres (I was never much of a 'different preamp for every track' sort of guy - my motto was usually: 'if it feels good - feel it again!') Kick drum mics were most likely either AKG D12s or 'possibly' Beyer M380s. Snare was an SM57 on top and I think a C414 on the bottom. Rack toms were Sennheiser MD421's; overheads- I don't remember, but I was using Bruel & Kjaer 4006 omni's on overheads a lot up to about that time.

Bass

The Bass was DI'd and miked. The cab was in a little freestanding stone 'dungeon' with a super-heavy sealed-door, which we had built from the remaining Yorkshire stone when the studio was first constructed. It was designed to be used for exactly this purpose; basically completely silencing amplifier caps no matter HOW loud they were! the guide guitar cab was in the far left 'dead' isolation room, and run at a moderate volume.

About this time there were some reservations expressed about the guitar tone. I remember that Bill was complaining about the sound being a little 'scratchy' and 'thin' sounding. I wasn't unduly concerned because it was only a guide, but there didn't seem to be any benefit in using a bad guide guitar sound, if a GOOD guide guitar sound could be easily had, (after all, it always helps to be able to refer good sounds one-against-the-other) so we played around for a little bit. I didn't hear the 'scratchiness' so much in front of the amplifier, but I did in the control room. I seem to think now that we tried a second Marshall head- possibly Mike Amott's and the sound changed a little, but still Bill's brow was furrowed by the guitar sound; -it wasn't the rich, strong thing which he'd been hoping for. Little did we know it, but this was a harbinger of some difficulties to come, later on.

Anyhow, we all sensed that there was no real point in getting bogged down over a guitar sound which we had no real intention of keeping, and so we started printing backing tracks. Day two saw the first of the 'keepers', and after a week or so, we had all the tracks in the can. Bass fixes were done as we went along. Drums were punched where necessary, but this was of course all done to two-inch tape (24-tracks only, although the room had a pair of Studer A827s, none of us wanted to unleash the 'spare track monster'!) so it's not as if there was a stupendous amount of 'assembly' used to make the basic takes. I think that Jeff (Walker, bassist) may have done one or two bass tracks from the top just to restore a sense of 'continuity' after some drum punches, but I have the recollection that there wasn't much of that done at all.

A note on tape calibration: It was my habit and custom to slightly under-bias the tracks where I used to record my 'metalwork' mics. My usual layout was kick, kick, snare (two mics combined during recording) then hat, then rack toms, then overheads then ambience. The Overheads and hi-hat mics would be biased to about a ½dB over-drop at 10kHz at 30ips, and the rest would be biased to 1½dB over-drop. With heavily-smacked cymbals, or any levels which somehow got away from me, I found that there was much less low-end 'muddy-crunch' if I did that. I'm completely certain that Dave had standing orders to make sure that calibration practice was followed for this session. The studio had Dolby A and Dolby SR for all of the multi tracks, but I'm certain that we DIDN'T use it. One thing which I am still very happy about on the album is the 'clarity' of the drum metalwork. Not many people notice it, most folks mention the guitar tone, speaking of which;

Guitar

Guitar time.

'Oh wow'

I don't think I was ready for what happened next, and I fully confess to 'losing the plot' a little.

See, about a year earlier the band had been into studio three upstairs -which had been conceived and built as a room for recording demos and small projects. It had an Allen & Heath 'Saber' console in there (one of the early ones) and there was a 1" 24-track and a 1" 16-track machine, to allow bands to work on a budget, and to also allow people to bring projects in from outside rooms who used 'semi-pro' tape formats. Anyhow, they'd been in working on a couple of demos -with either Keith Harley or Ken Nelson I think- and they'd just thrown a mic on a guitar cab, lobbed the sound onto tape, and been pretty pleased with it. It sounded pretty good in fact, and they all still thought so.

-So now we were faced with getting an 'impressive' guitar sound, because 'we all agreed' the sound of the backing tracks was pretty damned pleasing. I for one was REALLY pleased with how it was sounding, and Colin seemed to be pretty pleased too. Now all of a sudden, the pressure is on, and we're worrying about a 'fizz' on the guitar sound. There was this 'harshness' in the tone, and Bill wasn't happy with it. Mike wasn't happy either, and Colin had dialed-in on it, and was now certain that it had to go. The band dug out the tape of the little sixteen-track demo which they'd done, and it sounded better. I'm not going to deny it, the guitar sound was better. The drum sound couldn't compete with what we had now, but if we could just get THAT sound with THIS backing track, everyone would be in 'metal heaven'.

So we spent a whole day on it. the cabinet was being miked from RIGHT in the front of the speakers, mic grilles pushed RIGHT into the cloth, so I didn’t really think that the room would have much to do with it, but we tried it in the main room, we tried it in the dead room, we tried it in the wood room, we tried it in the dungeon, we tried all of the different speakers in the cabinet, and different combinations, we tried a different cabinet.

Nothing worked.

PART 2:

We tried different mics, we tried facing a wall, we tried facing away from the wall, we tried blankets to 'muffle' it, we tried everything we could think of.

Guitar day one ended with no guitar sound. Colin called the session over for the day, and I think we maybe felt that we were trying too hard and perhaps it'd just slot into place when we came back the next day.

Side notes/Back-stories: Colin's wife Lora dropped by frequently. She and Colin were expecting their first baby fairly soon in fact, and of course there were were LOTS of things to do, and no shortage of matters to stress-out over, all of which were considerably more important than guitar sounds. Maybe. Wink I like Lora, -She's clever, funny and VERY strong.

At the same time, I had recently ended a seven-year relationship with the girl who became known as the mad woman. In addition, I'd also recently met another young girl, and while we weren't actually seeing each other yet, this seemed to be no reason for my stalker-ex not to start ramping up the psycho-factor. The new girl was 18 or 19 years younger than the mad woman, and was a professional dancer (no; not THAT kind of dancer!) and the combination of these two details conspired to drive the mad woman into a jealous rage, and to the sort of absurd behavior which I would never have thought possible. My father was in hospital with cancer, and had only a few months to live. (In fact in nine days from now it'll be the fifteenth anniversary of his death, which handily helps date the sessions in my memory; they had been a few months earlier, so right around June 1993) The new girl had also lost her own father six months previously, and she was naturally incredibly empathetic, but also would do things like going to visit him in hospital if I couldn't make it (the hospital was about one mile up the hill from the studios where we were recording, so I did visit often, but not EVERY day, looking back of course, if I were to do it all over, I'd have made CERTAIN visited EVERY day, but of course if we were born with hindsight, we'd all have eyeballs in our butts.) Anyhow, we all had our own outside pressures right about this time.

So, day two of Guitar-time, and today we're going to get that guitar sound and nail it to the wall! Oorah!!!

About day two, we'd rented some more amp heads, including a Soldano (which we taped over some letters, so that it said SOLD then later on, Dave Buchanan wrote Book him on a sheet of paper and taped it over the SOL part of the name. I had to have that one explained to me!) and a Peavey 5150, as well as a Mesa Dual-Rectifier. Day two ended with no further progress in terms of sonic joy, and an even more gloomy outlook.

Day three began, and I distinctly remember leaving Colin in the control room in the middle of the day, fiddling with things while I went outside for a smoke, I remember being utterly convinced that there was nothing more that I could come up with, and that I'd been listening for so long now that I'd utterly and completely lost any impartiality. Everything was starting to sound the same to me now, or if I thought I heard a difference, someone else wouldn't hear it, or if someone else heard a difference, I wouldn't be able to hear it; not a happy place to be; In short, I was losing the plot.

Bill throughout this period kept going back to ;maybe we should record the guitars upstairs? upstairs; meaning studio three, with the small semi-dead recording area and the Allen & Heath console) but I didn't think that would be the answer, and I don't think Colin was ready to think that way either.

I remember that I myself had focusing on perhaps the problem wasn't really with the top end 'brightness' as such, so much as a lack of depth to the tone, and I'd been trying to 'fill out' the sound. With a kick drum which has no 'boom' to it, you can of course always put a resonator in front of it, (or just cheat and use a 40Hz oscillator! Wink ) and eventually I suggested to Colin that maybe the cab needed more volume in order to 'thunder' a little bit more. Colin was definitely guarded at first, but we HAD two guitar cabs here, and so I popped the back off of both of them, then took all four speakers out of the 'straight' cab, leaving the speakers in the 'angled' cab. We tried the angled cab with the back open, but it just didn't sound right at all. I took some barstool tops and used corrugated cardboard as a sort of a firm 'gasket' to make the whole front panel fairly airtight, then we put the two cabs back to back, put some weather stripping between them, and sealed them as tightly as we possibly could with Gaffa tape.

The result was actually pretty impressive! It sounded deeper, and rather 'bigger' in the room, so we went to have a listen. The mics also heard a different sound, and I rather liked it. Colin liked it too, but by now it might have been slap-happy delirium for all I know! It sounded interesting, but STILL there was this 'scratchiness' in the sound which Bill wasn't digging at all.

Once again, Bill kept saying to;maybe we should record the guitars upstairs? but I STILL didn't think that would be the answer, We did however notice that Studio 1 (another huge studio area, with more acoustic options, and a 64-channel SSL E/G console) was open for a morning, so we trundled the guitar rig (including 'frankencab!') over there on day three, to see what happened.

Same story. We'd now tried a different console, different monitors, different guitars, different mics, different cables, different cabinets, different amp heads; and I was beginning to get pretty miserable.

Day four. Not happy. by now I'm trying anything that anyone says, but I'm not enjoying life. Nossir.

Day five. After a couple of hours, we decided to humor Bill (after all, nothing ELSE has been getting us any nearer to guitar-sound bliss!) and we rolled 'Frankencab' and the 5150 upstairs. I dug out a couple of mics and we ran it into the Allen & Heath board in studio 3. We didn't do ANYTHING special, just plugged it into the console preamps.

And it sounded better.

Immediately.

I mean, it wasn't perfect, but the scratchy 'buzz' was gone, finished. Nowhere.

Colin and I were in a state of semi-disbelief, so we printed something to DAT just to have a listen to on the downstairs monitors, just to make sure it wasn't a monitoring issue, but the test came back positive and we knew right then and there what we had to do.

I spoke to Paul (the studio manager) and that room had a few sessions booked in for the coming days. I had Paul call the bands (mainly local bands doing demos) and ask them if theyd be happy with a free first-class-upgrade to work on the Neve in studio 2. Everybody except one client agreed, the sticking point being about the increased tape costs for recording on two-inch tape instead of one-inch, so I offered to install the 1"; sixteen-track machine in the Neve room for them; they changed their mind after thinking about it for a while, and so we had our room. All of the rooms at Parr Street were laid out and wired so that the machines could swap from room to room fairly easily, so all we had to do was to wheel one of the Studers into the elevator and roll it into studio three and we were tracking.

The guitars were recorded almost entirely with the 5150, though I recall ;'book him Dano!' being used, perhaps for one track. There were four tracks of rhythm guitars on each tune: two of Bill and two of Mike, panned in pairs, with the two Bill tracks together and the two Mike tracks together. We decided that we wanted to 'treat' the guitar sounds slightly different to help differentiate them from one another in the mix, and so we 'borrowed' one piece of gear from the big room which we'd just vacated downstairs: a 2-channel GML equalizer. The two channels were wired in cascade; so that the signal went through the left channel first and then back through the right channel. We bypassed the right channel and used the left channel for Bill, then bypassed the left channel and set up the right channel for Mike.

In this manner, we were able to move smartly from tune to tune, building up the guitars for each tune before moving on to the next, but never having to stop to 'tweak' too much. Plug in Bill, use the left channel, record two tracks, plug in Mike, use the right channel, record two tracks; move on.

Solos were done MOSTLY at the end, but I think we started putting solos on a couple of the earlier tracks before we did the last few rhythm tracks, just so that we didn't load up the 'pressure' on the guys to come up with too many 'awesome' solos all together -break it up for them a little.

So It took four and a half days to get the guitar sound. During that period, I just about lost my mind. My objectivity was shot, my confidence had taken a bit of a hit, but I at least got re-taught the lesson that you need to try EVERYTHING, and not discount someone else's idea because you don't think it's going to be the answer.

So we didn't put any guitar tracks in record until halfway through day FIVE; but I have to say that if we'd have skipped any stage of the process, the result would have been good enough' instead of what we actually ended up with.

Vocals

The vocals were all Jeff. We set up, there was some discussion about Bill recording some vocals, but I remember Bill being reluctant to do so. While I like them both, I can't now imagine if Jeff hadn't done all of the vocals. I even remember Jeff trying to persuade Bill to handle a tune or two, but it was Bill who I remember being quite emphatic that he liked Jeff's work more than his own, and I think that even Jeff took some convincing.

Right when we got into the vocals, my dad had taken a couple of turns for the worse. They'd started him on Chemotherapy, and the sudden dramatic changes for the worse in his appearance had a sudden, shocking effect on me;Up until now, we'd been recording 'tunes'. We'd been working on putting 'big sounds' to tape and concentrating on rhythms, timing, tuning and the like. Now there were words to deal with.

We were using a Neumann M269 for the vocals (similar to a U67, but with a different tube amplifier section) and we were back in studio 2 with the Neve again. Jeff was in the 'dead' room (the one to the far left, Across the main room from the control room) and we got the vocal sound without too much fuss. (what a relief after the guitar sound nightmare!)

We started on the vocals and it was largely just a matter of punching-in to get the right 'feel' but I had lyric sheets which Dave would usually annotate for me with penciled-in counter numbers for autolocator reference.

I forget which day, but it was certainly a day when I'd just been to see my dad, -so presumably some point after lunchtime- I was really shocked by how he'd been, and he really was starting to see that it was a question of how long he was going to hand on rather than if he could 'beat it', and he was clinging to his faith; it was a very harrowing thing for me to watch; the man who raised me, the man who was always 'strong' suddenly so sick and desperate; so weak and terrified. Then I came back to look at lyric sheets with medical references, repeated mention of rot, decay, blood, gore, filth;and then the comments about man creating God, God being dead, etc It was all rather too much for me.

I spoke to my assistant Dave, told him that it was all about punching in, that I probably wouldn't understand most of the words once they were recorded, that it hopefully wouldn't bother me by then, but that I couldn't do this right now. I spoke to Colin, and Dave sat in the engineer's chair for the rest of the day, and I think the following day too, just banging tracks into record, and punching in. He definitely dug it.

I came back better for the rest, and by way of good cheer; my dad had perversely bucked up a little, so from then on things were definitely much easier on that front for me. The mad woman was, well, still quite mad, but really things were a whole lot more bearable.

The album was mixed in studio 1. The SSL I just find easier to work on, since I'm habituated to mixing on them, and that one had the first 48 channel equalizers replaced with ones of my own design. plenty of outboard FX; lots more than wed need for the project.

Colin had vacillated a little on the kick drums and whether to use triggers, but by mix time, Dave Buchanan had used an audio-to-MIDI trigger to generate a MIDI event for each kick drum. There were a couple too may false triggers to be able to run triggers live in the mix without false-triggering from spillage, or missing the occasional light stroke, so Dave made a set of Cubase projects -one for each tune- and had manually edited out the false-triggers, and had punched in any missed beats with a higher gain setting. Over the course of a few evenings, he'd made sure that Colin had a Cubase file for every tune which would afford him the option of easily auditioning triggered kicks if he felt that they would be required.

In the end, triggers were used, with samples coming from an Akai S1100. There were a bunch of options for the kick sound, but in the end we used one with not much 'boom in it, since the original kicks on tape were pretty 'strong' and 'deep' The trigger was only really doing the job of 'sharpening' the top end of the sound; the rest was Ken's drumkit. I remember that Dave also made a snare trigger track just because he could, and it would be much easier to say 'already done' instead of 'okay, that'll take a while' if Colin ever asked for one!) but that was never used. The original snare used varies with the tune, but there two Ludwigs I think, one of which was a black beauty, and another snare used was a Noble and Cooley.

Things which I remember contributing to the mix; the reverse reverb 'sweep' in 'Embodiment', and then suggesting the (real!) tape phasing on top of it. There were a couple of other places where we spliced-in tape phasing, and every time you hear it, it's real. We used the Studer A810s for the phasing, because I'd wired remote controlled multi-turn locking varispeed pots into the center section of the console, along with the transport command buttons, and a varispeed in/out switch. Any time you hear phasing on the album, it was done after the fact and spliced in.

Dave Buchanan had another session which he REALLY wanted to do, but which overlapped the very end of the 'Heartwork' session, so Andrew Wright took over the assistant engineer duties for the last few days in studio 1.

Final mixes were printed to ½" Studer A80RC, 30ips, no NR. Safeties were printed to DAT at the same time from memory I think that the tape phasing inserts were run from the master DAT, through the two A810s, and onto the A80RC, from where it the phase section was spliced back into the ½" master, then another 'post-flange DAT 'master' would be copied, just so that we always had some sort of 'master' level DAT to make cassettes from, etc.

I still look back upon that project as being one of the most 'intense' periods of my life; even moving to America and getting married wasn't as 'intense' because it ALWAYS felt 'right' For a few days there, with a terminally ill dad, a psycho 'ex'; (who just to give you an idea of what she was capable of'; came to my dad's eventual funeral, left early, staged a fake attempted break-in at my house by pulling a ladder out of a neighbor's yard and leaning it up against a window around the back of my house, just so that she could then interrupt my evening meal with the 'new girl' by coming into the restaurant and announcing that my house had been broken into; yeah. That was one thing she did) all of that madness going on while despairing of EVER getting a guitar sound that anyone can live with; Intense. ;Yep, that's the word.

A year or so after the album came out, I bumped into Bill downtown, shopping on a Saturday afternoon of all things. (what a rock star!!!) I asked how it was going, and how the album had been received, from his point of view. ;He said that a couple of people had said that it was a little bit too 'polished', and maybe a little bit too 'hi-fi', but that he personally still liked the album. The record company were pressing the band to make the next album a little more 'raw' sounding, and 'go back to their roots' sort of thing.

I also detected something in Bill that I hadn't really seen before; a slightly jaded edge to his attitude. Previously, -while you'd never really say he was 'irrepressibly enthusiastic'-(that description probably fits Colin pretty darned well though!) he was always positive. Reserved, yes, but positive. Now I'd have said 'reserved' and a little tired. They went back into the studio with Colin Richardson again just after I came to live in the USA, this time back with Keith Hartley twisting the knobs. I heard some of the newer stuff, and I privately preferred the slightly more 'polished' Heartwork But there are no hard feelings, I got to record the album that I really wanted to do, but without the band';s perseverance and Colin's ministrations, it really wouldn't have been quite as good.To my way of thinking, it was a great team.

-And as time goes inevitably by, the more people that I meet the more people tell me that Heartwork; in particular has been a seminal influence on them.

Colin is STILL the man, and if anyone EVER wants anything in that genre mixed, they could do a LOT worse than to contact Lora (who is still his manager). Bill, Jeff, Ken and Mike are from what I'm told still Lords of metal, and still not eating meat. Long may they reign. Dave Buchanan unfortunately was involved in a car accident driving home from a session about ten years ago, and is no longer with us.

About 2½ years ago a producer who lives close to me (about 1½ miles from my house) decided to put an SSL mix room in his house, to go with the Amek tracking room at the far end of his yard. Colin had just mixed his last project, and he was by now doing LOTS of this kind of music, and wanted to start mixing it as well. While I was putting the SSL in for him, and commissioning it, he was working with Trivium in the other room, then Chimera, and they found out that I'd engineered Heartwork. The guitarists were all over me with questions about the guitar sound, and how those guys were to work with; It seems that the 'effect' of that project has actually 'increased' over time. I liked it then, and I certainly believe that it stands up VERY well today, over 15 years after we did it; -but the number of people who tell me how important they think it was never fails to astonish me.

Oh yeah... Lora now manages my near-neighbor also!

Before I left Liverpool for good (1995) I was clearing up some stuff and getting rid of some gear. ;I had a couple of experimental bass cabinets which I'd built about ten years earlier, which had a total of four basically unused Celestion G12M speakers inside them. I figured that the band could probably use them, so I agreed to sell them to the band, and chucked out the experimental cabinets that they were in. In the end, I never got around to collecting any money for the speakers and I really don't care about that. They've given me plenty of great memories, and an album that I can be proud of... -It was probably the very least I could do.

Keith

#1kaomao, Jan 6, 2012

from Guitar World, August, 1994
"Death Lives", p. 54

Guitar World: How do you define death metal? Can you explain what makes it different from other extreme forms of metal such as thrash and speed?
Bill Steer: As a player who's supposedly involved in death metal, I'm probably one of the worst people to comment on it. We don't even use that terminology. We accept that nine out of 10 people see us as a death metal band because you have to call music something, and we sound closer to death metal than any other genre—mainly because of the way Jeff [Walker] sings. As far as we're concerned, though, that whole scene is more or less dead now. We feel that it peaked in the late Eighties. So it's a bit weird to be approaching the mid-Nineties and find that the major press has just caught up on it.

GW: What bands played a major role in the creation of death metal?
Steer: It really does depend on what period you're talking about. The groups that really kindled the flames were people like Death or Possessedthe kind of bands that took their cue from the first couple of Slayer records but were initially just releasing demo tapes. Although Slayer was never a death band, they had a lot to do with starting it up. It's been said a million times but Reign in Blood is a very strong record, and there are still a lot of groups that strive to match just 10 percent of that aggression. I must stress that when the scene first started it was made up of people who were just music enthusiasts. There was none of this crap about how crazy you are or what you believed in and so onit was purely musical. All the other rubbish associated with the genre came about much later.

GW: A great many death metal bands, including Obituary, tune their guitars down to D [D, G, C, F, A, D, low to high]. In fact, some, like Carcass, even go lower. Is detuning essential to play this style of music?
Mike Hickey: Carcass tunes down to B. By that I mean we take a normally tuned guitar and then drop each string down two-and-a-half steps, so they go: B, E, A, D, F#, B, low to high. To counteract the string slackness created by this tuning, we use pretty heavy gauges.012 to .056, I can't remember the ones in the middle, but the G string's a plain .022. B isn't the most practical tuning in the world, but it's probably the heaviest, and we're stuck with it whether we like it or not!
Steer: It's like playing something that's almost halfway between a guitar and bass, actually. We've tuned this low ever since the band started, because it's so crushingthere's nothing else quite like it. Having said that, it has a lot of shortcomings in terms of tone because it's a very unrealistic tuning; we've really had to struggle to make it work. Since we've been doing it so long we can just about pull it off, but to be brutally honest, I think D, or, at a push C# [C#, F#, B, E, G#, C#, low to high], are the best tunings.

GW: What gear and settings do you guys use to get your tone?
Steer: Just for simplicity, I only use one amp livea Peavy 5150 with a Marshall Guv'nor pedal in front of it to beef up the overdrive just that little bit extra. In the studio, though, it's a different matter; I use several different ampsa selection of Marshalls and the 5150.
Hickey: One of the amps Bill used on Heartwork was a Marshall 30th Anniversary head that's really fierce, and he also used a tiny Marshall stack on pretty much every track to add some extra high end.
[Note: Mike didn't join Carcass until after the Heartwork album was recorded.]
Steer: Yeah, if I remember correctly, almost all of the guitar tracks were done with at least two amps going at onceone of them being a large amp, like the Anniversary [on channel two], a Marshall SL-X 100 watt or the 5150, and then also more often than not, my 10-watt [Marshall] Valvestate micro-stack for extra texture.
Unlike a lot of other bands who do the kind of stuff that we do, we tend to use a lot of mids. I don't think some people realize how important middle is to a guitar sound.
Hickey: Absolutely, mids are essential in a solowithout 'em your tone is real thin. My current backline setup is a Marshall SL-X 100-watt head and a Peavey 5150. I suck the mids out of the Marshall but not out the Peavey. I started the Heartwork world tour using a Guv'nor pedal too, but I just got tired of stage divers stepping on my shit!

GW: Describe how you write your material.
Steer: Aggression is woven into what we do, whether we like it or not. It's just such an accepted part of our musical vocabulary that we don't even think about it. When we play together, we don't force ourselves to play something intensethat's just the way it is; we're not really capable of playing in any other style. We're not subtle players.
Carcass has developed by doing things unconsciously. We find ourselves shying away from certain things and leaning towards others, without really knowing why. So, the way we tend to write and phrase our riffs is just what we like to hearwe never think in terms of intervals, time signatures or tempos. That's how my guitar style has developed, too. I'm not a disciplined enough person to practice, so I just play and do the things I like hearing and feel most comfortable with. One of the most important things for people to learn is that some of the most respected guitarists out there are absolutely riddled with idiosyncrasies that, going by the rule book, are incorrect. And often it's the stuff that's missing that actually makes them great—they have a recognizable style that leaves a thumbprint on whatever they do.

Capdown

- Pound For The Sound - Guitar: head in the control room, long speaker cable to a 900 4x12 marshall cab (modern celestions inside) and a rivera 4x12 (vintage celestions). SM57 just off centre of cone of one of marshall's speakers, sennheisser 421 off axis central to one of vintage cones. Both very near the cloth - distance adjusted to eliminate phasing between mics. Used mainly the 57 with the 421 mixed in to add some colour to the mids. Then adjusted the sound on the amp, being able to hear it throught the studio monitors. Focusrite platinum pre-amps were used, and very mild compression from a tubetec compressor - more adding warmth of the tubes rather than doing much on the dynamics.

Mix-wise, the dipping that you are hearing is from the mastering rather than the mix. I arely use side-chaining, only if there is a particular problem which needs to be dealt with.

In the mastering, I used Maxim limiting plug in, and Finalizer plus, to bring the level up to commercial volume, and if done well you end up with the guitars ducking the drums nicely resulting in more life and excitement in the final result. (if done baddly it can be hard to listen too!)

I usually mix with a rough mastering set up in place, and then take out the compression at the last minute before putting the music down. That way I can here how things are going to sound after the mastering process, and not be surprised later! source- dave chang

EXODUS

- Shovel Headed Killing Machine - Guitar -2 tracks of peavey xxx
Tempo of the Damned- guitar - his grey esp v with emg hz into a Marshall JCM800 modded by Tod Langner into Marshall cab with standard 75's celestions., 2 tracks.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Fear Factory

- Demanufacture - guitar :modded Jcm 800
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Kreator

" We originally tracked it with the boogie but it just kept sounding to fizzy and over gained in the mix so I reamped it. We've done just 2 rhythm tracks and its given it a great mid range with the 5150."
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Killswitch Engage

- The End of Heartache -guitar: Framus amps.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Korn

- Word Up (producer T.Lord Alge) - "Well, first he said that the first thing he does when he gets the Pro Tools session is transfer and consolidate everything and print to the Sony 3348 machine (16 bit/48K!!!). That's the source he does the final mix from.

As far as drums, on this song at least he had about 3 different kick drums going. There was the one supplied by Korn, then there were two more that were samples Tom added in, each with its own sound and character. The three together comprised the final kick "sound".

For snare, he kept the original snare (he said he always keeps the original snare, since there is usually stick drags, ghost notes, etc.), and again augmented with his own snare samples for the smack. Not sure if he compressed each individually or all as one, since he had printed back to the 3348 most of his processing already.

Overheads were pretty well compressed, and the room tracks were positively crushed to hell, which, once he put those in, all of the sudden there was all the ambience and bigness for the kit. I don't think any outboard or artificial reverb was used, it was all room mic ambience.

Korn had included a drum loop from the original recording of "Word Up", which Tom EQ'd to have a midrangey, loopy sound. He also spanked the hell out of it withcompression and keyed the input of the compressor with the kick drum from the drums, so that each time the kick drum hit, it would severely duck (basically mute) the loop's kick so there was no flamming between the loop and the kick drum.

The bass came up on one fader, and was compressed pretty hard, so that it just sat right there in the mix, around 40ms attack and 80ms release. I asked him about the rumour that he liked to roll off the low end with a high pass filter to about 130Hz or so, and dial the lows back in with a sharp bell bump around 90Hz or so, and he was non-committal about the answer.

There were a bunch of guitar tracks, all with varying tones and EQ's. Some sounded out of place by themselves with odd EQ's, but put all together it created a really huge ound.

The vocal was so compressed, I can't begin to describe it to you. Even Tom commented how massively compressed he had it when he brought it up by itself. We didn't get the full chain, but it appeared he had at least two, maybe three compressors in series on the vocal. However, when he brought up his vocal effects, which he had printed to two tracks on the 3348, all of the sudden it sounded just right. It was a combination of delay and reverb, and Tom said usually off the bat when he pulls up a mix he'll calculate 1/4 note and 1/8 note triplet delays to have available for various elements.

He said he usually uses the Red 3 for a few db of compression on the stereo mix with a low atio 1.5:1, although for this mix he had gone back to the SSL bus compressor. And finally, he prints to 1/2" analog tape for the final mix, which gives him some additional compression.
Zach Ziskin "

"He didn't do any master fader rides that I was aware of, but plenty of automation stuff. The vocal alone required lots of moves, just to duck the breaths, since they were super loud after being so massively compressed.

A couple other things of note. There is this really high pitched divebomb sound that was originally buried later in the song, and Tom decided to fly it over to the solo ection to make the section more interesting. That's one thing he said he does all the time, which is try rearranging elements or sections if he thinks it will add something to the song. He said when someone hires him to do a mix, they're going to have to hear his mix first (i.e. what he envisioned), and then if they don't like the changes he's done they can have whatever mix they want with the original parts and arrangement.

He also said when sending ref mixes to the label mooks, he'll run the mix through a Finalizer for a pseudo homebrew mastering job so that it will be nice and loud for the mooks, and that way they don't call back saying it doesn't sound as "loud" as their other CD's and requesting unnecessary changes.

Tom also mentioned that in general he rolls off everything below 40Hz on basically every track, as there's no need for any of the info down there which will just eat up headroom. And of course he never uses any plugins, only hardware outboard gear, unless there was something very specific that the client printed as an effect or special sound from Pro Tools.

He still monitors mainly using NS-10's coupled with a single subwoofer, and feels that if he can get the mix sounding great on those, he's got it made.

And finally, there is one secret weapon he uses on drums, particularly snare, that can instantly get the sound he likes, and that is the SPL Transient Designer. Countdown to ebay price explosion, 3, 2, 1….
______
Zach Ziskin"



Machine Head

- The More Things Change - guitar - was 5150 into marshall 30 watt vintage cab, 2 421's, tube screamer ,Telefunken mic pre's and GML 8200 EQ + SSL on mix down.
the mics in relation to the cab? - both pretty much on axis straight on.
SSL = Solid State Logic, we used a 96 input G+ at Larrabee in LA to mix.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com


Metallica

- master of puppets - to the guitars: they had recorded six track of rythm guitar. They were panned: one hard left, the second one (playing the same riffs) to about 11 o'clock. The other two main tracks (playing slightly different riffs than the left side) where panned the same way to the right side, one full the other to about 2 o'clock. Then there were two tracks chugging just the low E string on the actual "chunks" and those were panned hard left and right as well and were responsible for all the low end of the guitars. No compression (a guitar amp compresses enough IMO) and just a little short room from a Quantec QRS Room Simulator.

Here are the ADA settings:
Overdrive 1 : 4.0 dist
Overdrive 2 : 5.5 dist
Master Gain : 7.5 dist
Bass : 12
Mid : 6
Treb : 6
Pres : 12
Voicing : .tube
FX loop : off

From the ADA MP-1 (BTW, I still have version 1.0 software in the ADA. I changed it to version 2.x and it was quieter but wasn't quite as dynamic, so I changed it back to 1.0.)it went into the McIntosh 2100 (transistor) poweramp and from there into a vintage Marshall 4x12 cab with the original G12H inside. At that time I normally used Fostex M11RP ribbon mics and Countryman Lavalier mics through a John Hardy M1 to record guitar.
Source: Michael Wagener (via Gearslutz.com), mw@michaelwagener.com, http://www.michaelwagener.com

The following is a post by Flemming Rasmussen… a little about the vocal recordings on Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets.
Both those albums were recorded on my Trident A range desk from 1976. (I still have it), and I used the mic-preamp in the desk, and the eq as well.
The signal was then send to a Urei 1176 Compressor and straight to tape. Both albums recorded on 2" ampex tape.
I cant remember what mike i used, but I will check that out for You.
It was probably a Neumann U 87, but Im not shure.
Flemming Rasmussen

This is the Jamez Guitar EQs for Battery rtm gtrs.
The Amp is Jamex Boogie into 2 Marshal cabs. Inserted in the loop on the amp,
is a B&B Audio (Aphex) parametric EQ EQF-1 as show on the left side of the pic.

The mics used are:
1 SM57 Shure in the center of the cone on one of the lower speakers.
1 B&K (DPA) 4006 omni on another speaker centercone.
1 AKG gold-tube in a 45 degree angle to the side edge of the cab. aprox 4 feet away.
Miking is identical for both cabs.

The settings on the top is the amp settings including the Graf EQ on the Amp.
Mid Right is the EQF-1 loop eq settings.
Bottom is the EQ on the Desk a Trident A-range.
far left SM 57 it means
5K=-2 10K=+3, 150hz=+9, 1K=-3, 50hz lowcut(hipass) Fader=-10.

Hope this is understandable.

Enjoy

Flemming Rasmussen

As I could not put a picture here U get a Link instead.
http://www.sweetsilence.com/GearSlutzNotes.htm

Source: Flemming Rasmussen (via Gearslutz.com)


Nasum

- Helvete - read all about it on the official Nasum site on the Helvete page, which also has loads of pictures etc. The following text is a summary. R.I.P. Mieszko Talarczyk
"The Making of "Helvete" - Quite a few people have over time asked me numerous questions about my recording techniques, equipment we use on Nasum albums and recording/sound tips. This column is for those who are interested in a more in depth look at a Nasum/Soundlab recording session. I'm not going to explain how different equipment works so if you're confused/bored by words like "eq" or "pre-amp" you should probably stop reading right now.

Just so you know, this is not at all a guide to how an album should be recorded. This is just how I (we) did it; I've probably made countless mistakes along the way that would most likely annoy the shit out of a properly schooled engineer, but hey, I couldn't care less. I'll probably start hating the sound on "Helvete" in six months or so anyway… but here it goes.

Drums
Just a few weeks before entering the studio Anders bought a cool DW kit which really sounds killer. We used coated Genera2 Evans heads on the toms (12" & 16") a Remo Coated Ambassador on the snare. The snare is a Pearl Chad Smith (!) Signature (first time in a long time I used a metal snare, I think…). The kick is a DW though, size 24". The head we used for that one was an Evans EQ2 Batter. Anders plays with plastic DW beaters.
The drums were all tuned by Per Lindberg who's a tuning expert I use from time to time. He came in and re-tuned the drums every now and then between takes. Remarkably the toms kept a pretty steady tone, probably thanks to the Evans heads and Anders steady hands.

This is the microphone setup for the whole kit:
Kick drum 24" - Sennheiser e602 inside and an AKG D112 in the hole.
Snare 14" top - Sennheiser TGX-10
Snare bottom - Shure Beta 57
Rack Tom 12" - Sennheiser MD 421
Floor Tom - Audio-Technica ATM 25
Kit Overhead - a pair AKG 414 B-ULS
Ride Cymbal - AKG SE300B with a hypercardoid capsule
China Cymbal - a custom made condenser from Finland
Ambience Room - a pair of Shure SM 94
Hi-hat - Neumann TLM 103

The placement of the microphones is pretty standard. The reason I used the Finish microphone on the china instead of the hi-hat (for instance) was that the snare made it clip. The china however gave it no problems. The reason I used the TLM 103 on the hi-hat ("what a waste!" I hear you say…) is simply because I didn't have anything else to put there except some crappy old SM57's or stuff like that. I just wanted a condenser on the hats, that's all. I do regret the choice of ambience/room mic's. I usually have the 414's on the room and they work great but I wanted a better close cymbal sound this time than what the Shure SM94's were capable of producing, so I made a switch; 414 on the overhead and the SM94's on the room. Looking back, it wasn't the best switch but it came out ok. The room sounded a bit muddy at first but some eq: ing and compressing made it all fit in nicely. The Soundlab main studio room is an oddly shaped area of 40sqm with the ceiling 3.5 meters at its' highest and 2.4 meters at its' lowest. The drums were placed with maximum space between the cymbals and the ceiling. I put the ambience microphones about 60cm off the floor 3m from the kit and 3-4m apart from each other, pointing at the snare.

That was it. Everything going straight in to the mic preamps and then directly in to Pro-tools. I don't have a cool old school analogue soundboard to record things through, so I've gathered a stack of decent dedicated microphone preamps instead. Some are tube preamps and some are solid-state class A stuff. Whatever pre-amp I use, I always go directly to the "tape machine" (be it pro-tools, adat, or analogue).

So with everything recorded straight without any eq or dynamic changes done, we pretty much altered the sound by moving the mic's around until we achieved the sound we wanted. Well inside Pro-tools I used some eq's and compressors and a few other tricks as well, of course. The idea has always been to keep the sound "alive". The listener should have a sense of almost being in the room with the musicians and no single instrument or effect should sound "synthetic". Keep in mind that I don't put to much weight on how things are played or performed - it may well be artificial, as long as it doesn't sound artificial. The kick and the snare are backed up by "triggered" sounds (we used Soundreplacer, a Pro-tools plug-in FYI), we blended the sampled sounds with the originals, about 60/40. For the kick we actually sampled Anders's 24" DW kick drum. The Pearl snare was blended together with a Sonor snare I got of a sample cd.

Guitars
We have always used the same configuration for our guitar sound. It's simple; Fender Dual Showman Reverb Guitar Amp + BOSS DS-1 Distortion through a Marshall 4x12. This setup has always worked for me; muddy & raw and without the possibility to sound weak no matter what note/string you strike. It sounds close to the Boss Heavy Metal pedal, but not quite so Entombed-ish… This time however I wanted something different, not to completely leave what we had used before but to have the same kind of sound with more clarity and tone. We all felt that the new riffs deserved a bit more clarity. So I tried several combinations of heads/cabinets and ended up with a Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier and a Mesa Boogie Pre-amp. I like the distortion in the Rectifier but I just don't think it fits our sound. It's too neat. The Mesa pre-amp however, had just the right kind of distortion. So I ran it through the clean channel of the Rectifier, it may seem like a waste to some but this setup delivered just the sound we were looking for. The cabinet I used was a Marshall 4x12 from 1982. The guitar was a BC Rich Mockingbird.

Microphones on the cabinet:
Neumann TLM 103
Audiotechnica ATM 25
Sennheiser MD 421

The cabinet and the mics were covered by a heavy canvas to prevent ambience "leakage". Mic pre-amp used for guitars was a Focusrite Octopre. All mics were blended nicely within Pro-tools and recorded to 1 track. Oh, and I recorded everything in 44.1 kHz 24 bit.

This was the first time we really wanted to have 4 rhythm guitar tracks per song. I've never used more than 2 before. And for that we needed a sound that would fit in with the "Mesa + Mesa" sound. This came to be a BOSS HM-2 through the clean channel of the Rectifier (again). Same microphone setup as for the first 2 guitar tracks with a slight balance change between the mics.

All additional guitars (there weren't that many to be honest) were recorded with the natural sound of the Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier.

Bass
The bass amp was a Mesa Boogie BASS 400+ run through a Trace Elliot 4x10. For distortion I used the crunch channel on the Mesa pre-amp (same as for the guitars). The microphone I used was a good old Sennheiser MD 421 which ran through a TLA pre-amp. The mic signal was blended with the processed signal from a Tech21 Sans-Amp Bass Driver. There was really nothing more to it. I had a Triple-C compressor working on the bass frequencies as well as some annoying mids and sometimes I over distorted the sound inside pro-tools but all in all the bass setup was pretty simple and painless. The bass used was an Ernie Ball Music Man.

Vocals
Again, it came down to the AKG 414. I tried the Neumann TLM 103 but it just didn't work on my vocals. Too many S's and it highlighted frequencies in my voice that weren't meant to be heard. The pre-amp used this time was a Mindprint En-voice. And this time around I did eq and I did compress the sound before recording it. No de-esser was needed though. As I recorded almost all of my vocals by myself I had to sing in the control room. Having never tried that before I was worried that the ambience of the room might have a negative impact on the vocal sound. Luckily the Soundlab control room is pretty "dead" ambience-wise, so it worked just fine.
Some of the vocals were dubbed, to be honest almost every "chorus" is dubbed once. The purpose of this was to give the vocals an extra dimension in those parts, so they wouldn't sound flat and boring as constant screaming in 35 minutes can do, and often does. There really isn't anything else to the vocals. Occasional delays and some reverbs were added at times but it's mostly pretty dry.

Mix
Mix is really all about taste. Some people like their vocals well over the music and some like them hidden way, way back. Some like their drums hidden behind guitars and vocals and some like it when the kick is so loud you can barely hear the riffs. What I like for Nasum you can hear on "Helvete". At least this is what I liked during the mix. Now I sometimes hate myself for not bringing this or that up or for not cutting this or that word out of that song. There are countless things I'd like to redo. The one thing that I didn't think I'd have trouble with actually gave me the most trouble during the mix; the kick drum. While the drum in it self sounds great it didn't really come through as I wanted it to in the grind parts and the fast d-beat parts. In the slow parts however it came through perfectly. This had nothing to do with how hard/soft Anders was playing the kick, mind you he really "kicks hard" at all times. But I felt that the kick didn't have time to "respond" with full tone in the fast parts. Perhaps because it was a 24" sized drum? Maybe those larger kicks aren't very suitable for faster play? I might be wrong and I hope I am. Either way, we solved that problem with the help of some clever software and some clever use of eq and compressors.

So there you have it. I hope this has stilled your curiosity somewhat, and again; this is how WE did it. You do not have to do the same. Do your own thing and keep grinding.
Cheers. / Mieszko

Nevermore

- Vocals: Shure SM7 into 9098 into distressor then cranesong A to D's, Processing: reverb one, digi delay, bit of pitch shift -9+9 either side, compression was renaisance compressor with PT and waves De esser just to keep him in check.

Nevermore (Self Titled):
Solid State Head Unit (Exact Model Unknown - Owned by Jeff at the Time)
Solid State Preamp w/Peavey Power Amp
Unknown 4X12 Cab with Celestion Speakers (Exact Model Unkown)

This album was composed of two demos recorded sepeartely on the different rigs mentioned above.

In Memory EP:
Mesa Boogie Mark IV Head Unit
Marshall 1960B 4X12 Cab (w/Celestion G12T-75 Speakers)

This EP was recorded during the same sessions as the "Politics of Ecstacy" album using the same rig. It was released 3 months prior to "Politics."

Politics of Ecstacy:
Mesa Boogie Mark IV Head Unit
Marshall 1960B 4X12 Cab (w/Celestion G12T-75 Speakers)

Dreaming Neon Black:
Mesa Boogie Triaxis Preamp
Mesa Boogie 2:90 Simul-Class Power Amp
Mesa Recto 4X12 Cab (Armor Plated Model w/Celestion Vintage 30 Speakers)

On all the albums with Neil Kernon, there were 4 tracks of rhythm recorded, and primarily a Shure SM-57 or Sennheiser 421 was used.

"I was pleased with the way the album came out. Personally I think it was my best work with the band, and I really liked the material a lot.
As with ASU, POE and IM, we did the album down in West Texas, at Village Productions (the name would of course change to Sonic Ranch a few years later). By then I was living in TX, so for several years I was doing all my work there. The album was a bit rushed though as the budget ended up being reduced from that for POE for some reason. I think we did the entire thing in 17 days, from top to bottom, including the mix, which I think I got 3 days for. Still, I remember we had a lot of fun doing the record. I always enjoyed working with Nevermore - great bunch of lads. Lots of wacky zany fun with the NM chasps.

As far as the end result, I don't have any issues with it, because as yet I've never encountered the problems others have mentioned on any of my systems. The album was mastered in HDCD which potentially is a louder mastering process than the normal 16 bit process, so I can only presume that some systems couldn't handle the extra volume generated by the 24 bit mastering process, producing some weird distortion or something.

As far as recording techniques, I don't think I did anything particularly out of the ordinary on that album. Also, as we had less time to make the record than on POE I can certainly remember putting in longer days on DNB just so we could get it all done. That said, it's still MY favourite of the four releases that I produced for the guys.
Neil K."Source: Neil Kernon on his http://www.ultimatemetal.com

DEAD HEART IN A DEAD WORLD:
Custom Built 7 String Guitar loaded with EMG 707 pickups. The guitars were routed into a Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer that was used as a signal boost. The settings on the TS-9 were:

Drive: 9 O'Clock
Tone: 10 O'Clock
Level: 12 O'Clock

This was fed into the amp that was used on all of the rhythm and leads. The amp used was a Mesa Boogie (2 Channel) Dual Rectifier that was straight from the box. The Mesa Recto was routed into a Marshall 1960B 4X12 Cab with the stock 75 Celestions they have. Settings on the Mesa Recto were:

Silicon Diode Setting
Bold Setting
Red (Modern) Channel
Treble: 11.30
Mids: 10 O'Clock
Bass: 11.30
Gain: 12:30
Presence: 12.30
Master: 10 O'Clock

There were 4 tracks of rhythm, with 2 tracks being panned 100% left and right, and the other set being panned 80% left and right. There was no compression, limiting, etc…only a slight touch of EQ used. Two Shure SM-57's were used for recording, one on the center of the cone about an inch away. This was the approximate's denoted by Andy Sneap previously.

ENEMIES OF REALITY:
7 String guitars loaded with EMG 707 pickups
Ibanez Tube Screamer TS-9 (Se Similar to Above)
Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier
3 (rhythm) guitar tracks
Source: Andy Sneap (and Silverwulf) on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

The Godless Endevour
Guitars: 2 tracks each of Mesa Boogie Dual rect and Krank Revolution1. Both with OD820 infront, into a Mesa cabinet.
Source: Andy Sneap (and Silverwulf) on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com


Nile - Annihilation Of The Wicked

For guitars we used several types of Marshall heads and cabs, miced with Shure SM 57s. Bass..hmm…I used an RE20 and a Sennheiser 421 - no DI. I forget what type of amp it was though. It wasn't very reliable though..it had all sorts of noises and crackles that took a while to troubleshoot, but when it worked it did sound very good.
We did quad track the gtrs on Nile. Quite a job, but it worked great.

I used a single 57 on the gtrs.
No compression or EQ (I prefer to use the amp for all the colouration if at all possible)
The Marshall was one of the high gain heads, 2000 I think is the model.
I used an Avalon tube mic pre/EQ/compressor on the vocals. This one:http://www.avalondesign.com/vt737sp.html

The Nile guys were a lot of fun to work with. Great work ethic. Hard working, very bright guys. We were doing 16 hour days for weeks and it just flew by. A blast!

Drums: I used a D112 on kick, 57 on snare, 421's on toms, and a variety of overheads (all condenser). No compression on the drums or guitars. I used one of my homemade kick samples, but decided not to use a sample on the snare. I just felt it blurred too many of the nuances of what George was doing on the real snare, and he has a great touch.
The only thing I usually compress as I record it (and the amount varies according to the performer of course) is bass and vocals. I usually do this just to even stuff out a bit, and if it's a digital recording, to avoid any nasty irreparable overs on the vocals etc.

To be honest, it was one of the toughest mixes I've ever had to do, as there's so much going on most of the time. The faster songs are up there..250bpm, and one of them is at 265!. So that made my job quite a bit tougher, particularly in trying to keep everything as clear as possible. That all being said, I'm extremely pleased with the end result. There are a couple of things I might do slightly differently if I had the opportunity again, but all in all I think it's a good representation of the band.

The guitars are tuned in Drop A, so I really didn't have much of an opportunity to filter them at all if I wanted the low end power. Both guys have massive palm muting techniques so it was important for me to keep as much oomph as possible.
The kick is massive. It's a sample I made for the album, and has lots of click but loads of low power as well. I built the Nile sample in Pro Tools from about 10 different kicks I liked different things about. Mixing them in PT allowed me to get them all nicely phase coherent, removing flams etc. and get the most out of all the components. As they used to say when I was working on reggae sessions back in London "Maximum bass at all frequencies man".
The bass is fitted in somewhere in between the kick and the low end of the gtrs. Heh..

The gtr sound was a 57 on a Marshall amp/cab. Standard positioning really. Sorry, I didn't take any pics..never do really.
I think the gtr reverb is probably a combination of delay and Lexicon 480L, if I remember correctly.
The only thing I did use on the mix for the gtrs were 32 band graphics. I often use those for that though, so that's nothing new for me.
The album was recorded into my Pro Tools HD system, on the road in South Carolina, and was mixed in Chicago on an SSL 4000 series, with 16 E modules and 32 G modules.
Source: Neil Kernon on his http://www.ultimatemetal.com


Obituary


- James Murphy's gear - "on obituary i used my old marshall jcm 800 head with a ts-9 and a charvel i borrowed from Mike from Nocturnus."


Primus

- Frizzle Fry -
Kick - single 421
Snare - SM57
No bottom snare mic
Toms 421's
Floor tom U87
Little tiny toms (8 of them) - 57's in each one pre mixed to 2 tracks
Overheads - 414's
Bass was Direct through a ADA gtr preamp.
421 on cab was not used because Les loves Direct stuff.
Guitar was two 57's.
All vocals were done on the SM7.

All tracked and mixed through the same SSL "G" (if I remember right).
I remember wanting an 1176 and the assistant said "why, you have the best compressors built right into the console".
They didn't have any outboard pre's or comps, just tons of reverbs!
I struggled to say the least.
That record was tracked and mixed in two weeks.
Somewhere in there I spilled the bong water into the SSL like the sleeve says. .

"a lot of it was live with punches.
Quite a few passes usually to get a decent take from everyone.
The vocals went down live with punches as well.
There's still a couple really bad mistakes in there, but that's kinda what made it cool (at least that's what we thought at the time).
Les was in the iso (hallway) singing and playing, with his bass rig and Larry's amps baffled in the live room.
I just made sure they could see each other and let them do their thing.
There was some overdubs left out in the mix stage, so it would sound more like the live show.
I remember thinking "Are people really going to listen to this crazy s**t?"
I guess they were.
That's about it other than it was was all analog (Studer+SSL).
I'll also add that Les has really great timing.
He sort of drums on the bass, actually he's pretty dang good on drums too."

"And yep, Sailing and Pork were ADAT.
I did a couple things on Sailing (played guitar and accordian) during breaks from recording another record.
I remember thinking the kick sounded just like a basketball and there was way too much bad reverb on everything."

Source: Winey, Gearslutz forum

QOTSA

- Lullabies to Paralyze - (producer Joe Barresi ) "It was cut completely live (2 guitars, bass and drums)….sometimes with 2 drummers (josh and Joey). Yes the cymbals were overdubed (something Josh has done since Rated R), but regardless, its a pretty cool drum sound. Protools was used strictly as a tape machine when I ran out of tracks on the Studer A800 (for vocals mainly, horns,etc). No auto tune, no grid editing, no nonsense. Each song was intended to have its own sound……some reminiscent of the first record (Medication, Insane), and some completely unique. Different than anything out there.

…..as far as overdubbing cymbals goes…….it is a technique that allows you to mic drums at a distance and capture the sounds of the drums themselves with no "high end" leakage ie, cymbals, hat,etc. Toms can be miked from a foot away to really capture the low end and body, and they can be turned way up in the mix without overbearing wash. Rooms can be just that too……a drum room sound. Compression applied compresses only drums and not cymbals. It is a tough technique for drummers to do, and I think Joey Castillo rose to the challenge and kicked its ass. Some songs we had the equivalent of a rubber pad to hit (as a hat, ride, etc) so he could keep time on that. Some songs we had a "V" drum set-up that actually triggered the sound so we could all hear it when needed. Cymbals were done later in the reverse fashion. Fake kick/snare and real cymbals miked up, with Joey hitting his leg or other objects on snare/tom hits as he played along to the drums. NO CLICK track used or needed. the man is an animal.

……we used many mics on the record for vocals……brauner, sm57, m49, u87, the list goes on. it varied section to section as well sometimes. all had to do with how it was sung and what sound we were after. Cymbals are intentionally low….Joey C rehearsed with a full kit, but the overdub drums just lent a new quality to the drum sound….not any production changes. The only prod call would be the songs with 2 drummers on it..namely I Never Came, and Broken Box. Cut live as well, as seen in the DVD. as far as guitars go, cant go wrong with a 57 or a 421. 2 desert island mics.

…..ah clipping…………..an artform these days. sometimes it comes from mastering in the attempt to make things as loud as a deaf A&R man can handle, sometimes it comes from mixing….levels way hot on tape or god forbid +12 in tools, and it distorts the input of the mixing desk. sometimes its the sheer amout of tracks all piling on one another to destroy the stereo bus, sometimes its the digital distortion no one seems to hear while they are recording, being amplified by lots of compression and eq later, sometimes its the shitting duplication at the pressing plant. there are so many things in the path. I don't know what happens. All I can say on a personal level is that any distortion I hear (unless its intentional) I try to get rid of. Sometimes its a result of my excess levels and compression, and I cant control it. sometimes its a matter of sacrificing punch by lowering all levels to just under the point of breakup and making up for it elsewhere. getting things louder than everything else while still being clean and clear is something i have not yet mastered. And what happens after i approve the mastering and turn it in is a mystery to me."
-Joe Barresi

Ozzy

- Ozzmosis: "on the "original" recordings/mixes of Ozzmosis Zakk used a stock Marshall 800 and with a stock 800 cab and his LesPaul with EMG pickups. No pedals, just crancked up until the distortion was right. We recorded two separate rhythm tracks and I panned them hard left and right. The solos where also doubled (in one take, might I add) but panned on top each other."
No More Tears - "Well, I didn't record "No More Tears" just mixed it. During the mix I used a UREI 530 (my fav EQ for guitar) and …err…a BBE 802, no compression. Rooms/reverb came out of the 480L can't remember the settings on that one. I did work with Zakk on the recording of the next project (very similar guitar sound) and we used a stock Marshall 800 with a stock 800 cabinet. Microphones: SM57 right in the center of the cone, Fostex M11RP (ribbon) also middle of the cone of another speaker about a 1.5" away, and a Beyer M88 slightly off to the side of yet another speaker, all in the same cabinet and phase aligned. Mic pres were all Hardy M-1s. The amp was cranked and (as you know) Zakk was using a LesPaul with EMG Humbucker pickups. BTW Zakk is hands down one of the best gittaar players I have worked with. He would ask me to cycle the tape around the solo part for five minutes while he came up with a guitar solo. After about 5 minutes he asked me to record an did the solo in one take. Then he wanted to double the solo and I thought "Yeah right", but he doubled it in ONE take, pretty amazing.
______
Michael Wagener
Source: Michael Wagener (via Gearslutz.com), mw@michaelwagener.com, http://www.michaelwagener.com

Spiral Architect


- A Sceptic's Universe. Guitar - We used a Soldano preamp into the power amp input of a Soldano integrated tube amplifier. We did that because the integrated amp didn't have the gain we needed and the separate pre did. The guitar used was a Paul Reid Smith owned by Steinar
Source: Neil Kernon on his http://www.ultimatemetal.com


Stuck Mojo

- Guitar (Rich Ward) 74 Gibson les Paul Standard with Duncan Parallel Axis Pick Up, into 50Wt Marshall JCM800 with 6550 mod and Soldano Hot Mod. Greenback Marshall Cab with 1 57, into API pre.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

Stampin' Ground

- A New Darkness Upon Us - 5150 and Boogie into a Marshall cab with 30 wt celestions. The kit was actually a Pearl Export with emperor heads. My Sandberg bullet bass into the sans amp plug in and also a peavey Firebass 700 I think

Testament

- The Gathering - guitar - Dean gtr with seymours, Boogie Triple rectifier and boogie cab with vintage 30's (shure beta 57).
Recording: Adats and soundcraft Ghost!! We hired some outboard stuff, a couple of neves, Tube tech, SSL and GML8200, but no automation, mixed down onto 2 tracks of the last adat, dropping in on sections I wanted different.
Drums: toms are totally triggered
Mix: SSL comp across the whole mix, and a finalizer also a tiny bit.
Source: Andy Sneap on his forum at http://www.ultimatemetal.com

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