The Great Post Mortem Begins ..

So. Yes. Finally the dust has settled, the CD is now out and we’re all breathing deep sighs of relief and wondering where we go next. And for yours truly, its time to have a good think about the approaches we took and what we (and by we, I mean I) have learnt and would do differently next time….

Lets start by rewinding to the beginning. I play guitar with Nottingham rock band Skeleton Crew. We are a 5 piece band that play “classic rock” original material. Since our inception we have developed a strong local following and play live regularly at reasonably high-profile gigs. In late November 2007 we decided to record our first full-length CD, and despite some local management interest offering us money/studio time we decided we would rather have a go at doing it off our own backs. You can listen to the results of our hard work on our website, www.skeletoncrewrocks.com.

You can use the "post mortem" labels to filter out just the analysis posts, and the "recording" labels to filter ... you guessed it, the recording posts ...

Why?

Firstly, it was something new to do. We are all “band veterans” who have clocked up plenty of studio hours. For me particularly, it was something of an adventure. I spend my day talking and writing about recording and production technology and I have experience of working in decent facilities. But this was an opportunity to work on a complete project using the kind of equipment a band working to a budget would buy, without the aid of professionally designed rooms and thousand pound mics.

Secondly, we wanted to be able to do this without a ticking clock. Time is money in a studio and more often than not you end up committing to a take because its time to move onto the next track.

Thirdly, we had a very clear idea of the sound that we wanted. It can be a real case of pot luck whether an engineer “gets” the sound if you’re not paying top dollar for a good producer. We wanted the finished product to be the best possible representation of the sound of the band playing the songs – not a rough live demo sound and not a massive production sound either.

Fourthly - money. The Filthy Lucre. To record 10 tracks in a studio the minimum I would expect to budget for is 10 days - 6 days of recording and 4 of mixing. That, by anyone’s standard, is rushing things, once you subtract from that a day or so to set up and get the sounds you want. A 10 day session in a half decent studio will cost around £2000. Its great to have someone (management or label interest for example) prepared to pay for you to record, but ultimately they need to recoup all the money they have spent plus production costs before the band sees a penny, and thereafter take cut of the profits.

The flip side is that you can easily buy modest kit for the same amount of money as you will spend on studio time. At the end of the process, you can sell any equipment that you may not need to use again to fund the next stage in the process. Or buy beer.

Finally … its fun.

So what did we do?

Over the period of 18 months we recorded 10 songs. That involved recording live drums, bass, 2 electric guitars, some keyboards, lead and backing vocals. These were all recorded in our rehearsal room. The mixing and obligatory little bits of editing were done in my little studio room at home, as was the production of the masters. We had the CD booklets printed professionally, but the CDs we burnt ourselves. During this time we also filmed and edited a video, made an internet release of our first single and built our website.

We aimed for a minimal outlay for equipment. The initial idea was to use an old ProTools Mix system that I bought from auction mounted in a portable rack complete with computer, although this proved too cumbersome and we switched to more modest laptop-based system. Our full recording facility was housed in a laptop bag and a 4u flightcase. We didn’t have the option to leave everything setup in the practice room, so portability was essential. We spent money buying some extra mic preamps giving a total of 24 mic inputs.. We also bought an AKG drumkit set and supplemented them with a pair of Beyerdynamic Opus 53 condensers for drum overheads. The other mics that we used were ones that most bands would have – SM57s and 58s – and I also used an AKG C414 that I already had for vocals. The only other bits that we spent money on were a simple headphone amp and some extra headphones.

The Recording Process

We recorded the drums first, but not in isolation – bass was DI’d, guide guitars were played in through a Line6 Pod and guide vocals were also tracked at the same time. The audio interface that we used with Logic was a Presonus Firestudio and its one of many audio interfaces that gives you realtime DSP mix for headphone monitoring, so we were able to give everyone a good mix while getting a good drum recording. We used a click to help with tempo, but having the whole band playing together kept the feel nice and live.

Once we felt we had the best drum takes, we recorded the guitars. These were double mic’d with a condenser and a dynamic mic for blending later. The bass was DI’d and then run through IK Multimedia’s Ampeg SVX bass amp plug-in. For most of the tracks the guide DI from the bass was fine to use and didn’t need re-recording. For vocals we used the AKG C414. When it came time for the backing vocals we used a spaced pair of condensers mics with 2 singers on each, spaced depending on harmonies.

Mic Techniques

The advantage of any decent drum kit mic set is that not only do you get a complete kit that’s right for the job, but they most often mount directly onto the hardware which makes for easy setup. The C518s from the kit were used on the toms, with an SM57 on the snare (top), pointed at the batter pattern and the Opus 58s as a coincident XY pair about 1m above the cymbals and centred over the bass drum. The hi-hat had an SM58 about 4-5” from the bell. We didn’t use the D112 kick mic at all – our drummer Drew had an Audio Technica Pro 44 boundary mic and on a whim I shoved it into the bass drum inside some of the damping cushions. We never went back to try another mic after that, it was that good a sound!

We tried a couple of other techniques too – one was putting a mic on the bottom skin of the snare. Now I know some people swear by this approach but I have never heard it yield anything that I would want to use – you just get a load of rattle and an equal amount of dreadful off-axis spill from the bass drum and first rack tom. A mic on the front skin of the kick was similarly unimpressive although if you’re struggling to get the “click” its worth trying. A condenser on the hat proved far too sensitive to spill. For jazz drumming, where there’s a lot of hi fidelity needed itsd probably a good choice but for heavy rock with a drummer bashing seven bells out of the hat, an SM57 works marvelously!

For the most part 2 mics were used on the guitar cabs; an SM57 or a Sennheiser e906 and an AKG C414, both on axis and close up to the speaker, a couple of inches off centre. The great thing about this technique is that you can get a huge range of sounds just by adjusting the blend between the 2 mics without ever touching an EQ! The Sennheiser gives quite a fat, slightly scooped guitar sound while the SM57 has more presence. The c414 has a much wider frequency response that really captures the excessive highs and lows as well as more ambience if moved back from the speaker. Some of the guitar parts, especially solos and clean parts were tracked using the battered old POD again. Those things really are life savers!

Recording Issues - the cloud in the silver lining

This is where we hit the single biggest hurdle of the whole process - one that will affect any band undertaking a similar recording and it’s where the proper studios have their advantage. Getting a good sound at source is the key to any good recording and it makes mixing simple. And the key to getting good sounds is mic placement. Moving a mic a few inches in one direction or another on, say, a guitar amp, can radically change the sound, and a cheap mic in the right position will sound better than a £1000 mic placed unwisely.

The problem was that our rehearsal room didn’t have a soundproof control room which meant there was no way to make critical mic placement judgements based on what was coming through the speakers as there was so much spill from the live instuments! This is a cardinal sin in recording, but unfortunately it’s a very real scenario when working in this way. Good headphones help, but I have never come across a pair yet that you can trust to make critical decisions. So it was a case of trial and error – set up the mics, record a bit, then listen back and move any mics that weren’t producing the desired result. Far from ideal, but it was all we had so that was what we used. For the most part the mics were placed pretty sensibly (as opposed to experimentally) – as long as you do that you can never go that far wrong!

One of the best books I have ever read the subject of mic placement is Howard Massey’s “Behind the Glass” – its not dedicated to the subject, but there are really useful comments about placement and choice of mics. If you’re undecided about what mics to buy, read this book and note which ones get mentioned again and again. And which ones don’t. The interviews in this book are from some of the top record producers of our time. I advise making it your production bible.

Secondly, listen to the instrument you are recording. Where does the sound come from? What does it sound like if you put your ear there? (Be careful with bass drums!) Experiment with placements and see what works even if you have to go away to listen to it and come back another day. When you’re doing it for yourself, time is your ally. I used more mics on the earlier sessions than later on, simply not bothering to put up the ones that didn’t yield anything anything I wanted to use.

MixItUp...

The remit for the mix was to try and create as natural a sound that best represents what the band sounds like live as opposed to a massive studio production job. My little home studio, like so many others, is a very modest affair in a back bedroom. It probably measures 3.5m x 2.5m, has a basic Auralex treatment kit and a pair of Yamaha HS50m monitors. Most of the EQs and effects used in mixing were native to Logic 8, but the DI’d bass was run through IK Multimedia’s Ampeg SVX plugin, and I also used their CSR reverb plug-in which is marvellous, especially on snares. I’d also like to evangelise about the Euphonix MC Mix 8 fader control surface which rapidly speeds up the mix process. Unfortunately I only got to use one on the very last track!

To prepare the masters, I used Waveburner and IK Multimedia’s T-Racks 3 to get the shine and – of course – make my contribution to the Loudness Wars …

Lessons to be learned ...

These are collection of fairly random observations from the whole process that I hope might be useful for other readers or even for myself at some point in the future ...

• Monitoring! If players can’t hear, they can’t play. Good headphones, a decent balance and a clear headphone amp help musicians play better. I had 4 pairs of ‘phones. Beyer DT100s were deemed too heavy and fatiguing on the ears. AKG K55s were too bassy. Sennheiser HD120s were rated very highly. Audio Technica ATHM30s seemed to be the favourites. And cheapest, with the least intrusive cable. Go figure.
• Using different instruments and amps when recording can really liven things up. Most guitarists have more than one guitar and they will all have their own sound. Sometimes you can spend hours trying to tweak an amp to get a particular sound when simply changing guitar will do!
• For rock drums, I wouldn’t necessarily go with the AKG kit set again. For toms, the sensitivity of the C518 condenser mics picked up a lot of spill and needed a lot of gating. The also tended to lack body especially when the toms were hit hard. We ended up selling that on and buying one of the Audio Technica kits where all the mics are dynamics. It also made more sense to have something you can use live (not all live desk with have phantom power that the AKGs need).
• Our discovery of using a boundary mic inside a kick a drum is one that I urge anyone to try!
• If you’re after a natural kit sound, rather than immediately closemic’ing all the drums and using overheads just for cymbals, spend some time placing the overheads in the best place to give you a full drum kit sound, and then augment this with individual mics. As overheads, it’s worth trying to see if you can get a pair of large diaphragm condensers rather than smaller ones. They give a better breadth of sound and tend not to be so focussed.
• Its worth listening to all the drum tracks together before you start to mix rather than automatically sticking gates, limiters, EQs and compression on where you think they should go. Which of course is exactly what I did when I started and then had to undo it all! Also I’d recommend avoiding using saved settings from previous songs. At best, you’ll make two tracks sound identical and at worst you’ll have sounds that don’t fit the song! It doesn’t really save you that much time either.
• If you have poor acoustics in the recording room there are good isolation products from SE Electronics and Red5 Audio among others that can help exclude unwanted reflections from the mic. You can also use cheap duvets and rugs to deaden an overly live room or put down plywood sheets if you want to liven it. Whatever you have acoustically, its far easier to try and work with it and use it to your advantage than it is to try and change it!

The Money Shot.

Everyone in a band is aware of a simple economic: being in a band costs money. In 90% of cases, more than you make. Assuming a 5 piece band does a gig for £150, that’s £30 each. From that, subtract your fuel costs. What remains needs to cover new strings/cables/amp maintainance/drumheads/repairs/rehearsal costs until your next gig. By my reckoning that particular setup probably need at least one gig like that a month to break even, and that’s without ever buying new equipment. So you want to maximise the profit on your merchandise and minimise the cost of getting exposure.

Once we started on making this CD, we started to think about how we could make it pay for itself. Here’s how the economics stacked up:

We decided to go for a small run of CDs that we could duplicate ourselves, but to have the inlays printed. This cost a total of £175 for 300 inlays from Testa-Rossa duplication. 300 printable disks, inks and cases brought this to just shy of £300 for the lot. So the calculation was, if we made 300 disks, we could sell them at £7 each (not unreasonable for a CDR album) then we could net £2100 assuming we sold them all, and that represents a £1800 profit. So the next question becomes, what kit can you buy for £1800 to accomplish this? So I put together a shopping list of all the things that a band might not have that would enable them to do the recording. I’m assuming that at least one member of the band would have a serviceable computer to use, and that there are mic stands and cables that can be used. So here’s the shopping list, courtesy of Jigsaw Systems, that would enable a band to achieve this.

Steinberg Cubase 5 – Focusrite Saffire 40 – Focusrite Octopre LE with digital board – Audio Technica MB/DK5 drum kit mic set – 2 x Audio Technica AT2020 mics for overheads and vocals – Shure SM57 (not all bands have one!) – 4 pairs of ATHM30 headphones and Samson headphone amp – 1 pair of Yamaha HS50M powered monitors.

Including VAT, all of this comes to less than £1780.00

Its not identical kit to what we used, but it allows a very decent recording of up to 16 simultaneous mic inputs. Some of the equipment is better, some is more budget. But if its used wisely, you’ll be at least able to equal what we achieved and probably exceed those results. All you have to do is sell the CDs (and 300 disks is an easy target) and hey presto you have paid for all the equipment. Which means on your follow up, you get to keep all the profits! If you add the £1800 for equipment to the £300 for disk manufacturing you’re back the amount we originally allocated for doing a rush job in a studio earlier!

Getting it on the Web

Once we started on this project, we started looking into other things that we could do for free, or cheaply, to minimize the outlay. Firstly came the website. We initially had a hosted website which was fine. However there is a hosting cost involved (especially if you want to stream music) and it was static. In order to update it, once person had to be responsible for it and had to be sat in front of their web editor software, so it didn’t get updated very often. So we ditched it in favour of a Blogger hosted site. With some gently tweaking, Blogger can be used to create an excellent site. Its very quick and easy to update and it can be done anywhere you have web access, by anyone that wants to share the job. You can post via email if there’s something you want to get up there quickly, and fans can follow it via RSS syndication. You can incorporate Twitter feeds, and even use it to distribute new tunes or video clips as podcasts.

The second stage was to add ourselves to iLike. ILike.com is a fabulous site for those creating music and for those looking for new music. Its completely free, and once you have a page and have uploaded songs to it, it will create a music player for your website, provide a Twitter interface, publish a gig calendar for the band, get tou on iTunes and publish an artist page on FaceBook. The best bit is you only have to update information in one place, and iLike can update the rest of your pages automatically!

On with Blog!

Well that the post-mortem of the recording process over and done with – on with the blog! I hope you find it interesting …