How I Record my Rhythm Guitars in The Box! (3 of 3)

UPDATED: 2 Jan 2018

In this final part of three on how I record my rhythm guitars in the box, I'll cover mixing the stems. Part 1 and part 2 can be found here.

Drums (green), Bass (blue), Rhythm and Lead (magenta) and Vocals (purple)

Background

I'll list a couple of YouTuber's that I've learnt from here, about the mixing stage for rhythm guitars. Like in the first post, I am just listing what I gathered from watching their videos and I'll hopefully show enough background to support my own mixing template setup.

Complete disclaimer, I have only been mixing for about a year and still very green. I am in no way an "expert" and am still learning myself!

How Do You Mix Your Songs? | Pete Cottrell

Pete Cottrell is the YouTuber that inspired me to start playing guitar again after a 18 years. I watched a few of his video's and went out and bought my RG8 soon afterwards.

In this video, Pete talks about how he mixes his guitars.

• High Pass Filter somewhere between 90 - 100Hz
• Low Pass Filter somewhere between 4 - 12kHz
• +3dB boost between 1kHz - 3kHz for solo/lead
• Compress palm mutes using Multiband Dynamic Compression
• Compress fast attack (1ms), fast release (5ms) 4:1 ratio
• Compress slower attack (10ms), slower release (50ms) 3:1 ratio
• EQ to taste

How to Record Heavy Guitar | Spectre Sound Studios

In the Glenn Fricker video mentioned in the first blog post, How to Record Heavy Guitar, he mentions:

• Multi-band compression remove palm mutes 350Hz & 850Hz -6dB GR
• Aggressive High Pass Filter at 80Hz
• Gentle Low Pass Filter at 7 - 10kHz

Get great metal guitar tone in 5 minutes | MixBusTV

Also mentioned in the first blog post, MixBusTV's Get great metal guitar tone in 5 minutes video:

• EQ dip the highest low frequency
• EQ boost the lowest high frequency
• EQ cut mid frequencies to taste
• HPF at 60Hz, LPF at 3.5kHz
• Preference to use an ‎API 2500 Compressor / SSL Console EQ

Mixing modern metal guitars: mix trick to make heavy guitars sound bigger and fatter | MixBusTV

This is more a mixing trick than guitar setup - again from David at MixBusTV. After tracking and setting up your guitars, where you have a main theme or chorus, double track each guitar to emphasize the section. To further emphasize these parts:

• Double the bass notes on a piano VST (‎4Front Piano VST is recommended)
• Make sure they are not loud enough to be recognised as piano notes
• ‎Heavily compress them, at around -6dB GR, with HPF, LPF, some EQ dips
• ‎Match the compressor attack settings and EQ with the guitars

After I saw this video, I realised I wasn't really thinking about my "main theme" in my songs. I don't write verse, verse, chorus, verse songs, so there is no obvious main theme. And that explains why I still sometimes create walls of sound. This trick above has forced me to create a dynamic between riffs and start picking which one has to stand out.

My Mixing Template

So, you'll see I've exported my stems from my rhythm guitar tracking project and imported them into the mixing template.

In the screenshot above, you can see my stems.

At the start of each stem FX chain, I have a tape simulator, Variety Of Sound FerricTDS. For me this removes the sterile digital clean sound - which I understand, some people like - but for me, at least I like a bit of tape saturation, even only lightly, on my stems.

I'm using a warmer analogue Variety Of Sound BootEQ as my console plugin. For this project, I was looking for a more saturated warmer sound. You'll notice I've disabled the EQ side of the plugin and am using it just for analogue saturation, tube harmonics and transformer simulation. On other tracks such as the drum bus, I've followed it with Dead Duck Software's Channel2 Console Strip. In all honesty, I could in future EQ each of the stems and perfect them but in this instance I didn't.

In the screenshot above, I'm showing each of the four console plugins for each stem - ENGL, Mesa, Peavey and X530. The BootEQ's have an implied low pass filter to tame the high frequencies.

All those stems are then summed up into a Rhythm Guitar bus, where I've got another BootEQ, but this time with the EQ enabled. I could have followed it with Dead Duck Software's Channel2 Console Strip if I wanted a bit more control over it.

Drums (green), Bass (blue), Rhythm and Lead (magenta) and Vocals (purple)

On the BootEQ, I have a high pass filter at 110Hz. I know that sounds high, but when I look at a spectrum analyser, I can see the kick and bass pretty much fill up sub 110Hz and there is simply no room for the guitars in there.

Next on the Rhythm Guitar bus is an analogue stereo widening with VoS RescueMK2.
UPDATE: I've since swapped out the RescueMK2 for a ThrillseekerXTC Black exciter, focused on mids and highs.

The final plugin is a Tokyo Dawn Studio's Nova EQ I use to "make space" for the other instruments through subtractive equalisation. This is just my own personal preference - I feel like I have more control with this method of EQ. You can see cuts (if the HPF's don't cut them first) at around 80Hz to make space for the kick,  115Hz for bass guitar and 3kHz for vocals, with a gentle Low Pass Filter at 9kHz. These riffs were not palm mute heavy, so I didn't find much use for the multi-band compressor, but the NOVA is very capable of cutting those palm mutes.
UPDATE: I ended up adding a High Pass Filter at 110Hz on the Nova, as the saturation on the Exciter re-added bass frequencies. I also added automation to disable that 3kHz band while the vocals are not present, as it negatively impacted the guitars.

In this project, I've avoided compression on these guitars, as I felt they were already pretty compressed. Any compression done on the mix bus should take care of them anyway.

The MixBusTV Piano Trick

Here is an example where I've used the MixBusTV Piano Trick.

It's quite effective, and when you mute the channel you do notice that it's gone. I used Reaper's ReaTune to create the MIDI from my bass line. It needed some cleaning up afterwards, but it was a quick way to get the MIDI for it.

Conclusion

So that's it from me. I'm not an experienced mixer, but this is where I am at currently. Happy to hear your comments.

How I Record my Rhythm Guitars in the Box! (2 of 3)

This is the second part of three on how I record my rhythm guitars in the box. In this part, I'll cover how I put it all together and what components I use during tracking. I'll avoid talking about mixing until the last blog post in this series.

If you haven't already read it, here is the first blog post of the series.

The Setup

So in a previous blog post about Home Recording Concepts, I referred to traditional recording concepts and how we try to emulate the above setup in in a digital world. Above we see a guitar, played through a power amp, recorded via a microphone onto a recording medium such as tape.

Above is my setup. I have a 2 channel M-Audio M-Track that's connected to my PC via USB. And I need to emulate the "traditional recording setup" graphic above, inside my DAW (referred to as "in the box").

My guitar is recorded raw "Direct Inject" or "DI", straight into my DAW as a WAV file. The WAV file is my recording medium, in lieu of a traditional tape machine. Everything else, I have to virtually emulate inside the DAW. That's what this post is all about.

The Components

In the previous post from this series, I drew up this diagram to demonstrate how I thought Misha Mansoor's setup looked like. I'm going to break up the explanation into two main parts:

• From the Guitar to the Pre-Amp
• From the Pre-Amp to the Recording Medium

From the Guitar to the Pre-Amp

I use Reaper Sub Projects to keep my music compartmentalized into little manageable boxes.

At the highest level, I have my mixing template. The screenshot above is the finished product with the stems already exported and printed, but in the early stages of song composition and tracking, it would be just the top track with the embedded sub-project. I can click-through to my tracking template for my instrument - in this case my Rhythm Guitars.

If you clicked through to that sub project, you'd end up here in my rhythm guitars tracking template. Starting from the right side of the mixer/bottom of the track listing, I'll explain each of the tracks. They go in this order because I use Reaper Folders, which act as auxiliary audio buses, and make it easy to collapse/expand more details/tracks when required.

The tracks are:

• Tracks 24-25: Guitar Left and Guitar Right
• Tracks 23: Guitar DI (sum of Guitar Left and Guitar Right)
• Tracks 13-22: The Amplifier/Cabinet Stems
• Tracks 4-11: The Rhythm Guitar Mix Bus
• Tracks 1-2: Drum and Bass Stems (from other sub projects)

Guitar Left / Right

These are simply the DI recording tracks. I don't use any effects on these tracks - just plain old dry DI audio. I primarily use my Ibanez RG8 for rhythm tracks.

Guitar DI

The left and right tracks are summed here, panned 100% left and 100% right, and they enter the Pre-Amp FX chain. The Reaper stock plugins would work fine for this FX chain, but I use the Dead Duck Software Free Effect Bundle primarily because of their Channel2 Console Strip VST, which I use excessively in my mixing template.

Follow the red arrows for the signal flow

Sorry it's so complicated, but it was the only way to show all the FX in one screen. If you follow the red arrows, you'll see the path the audio travels as it heads towards the amp/cab stems.

VU Meter

The first FX is a VU Meter. I use this to gain stage as best as I can, usually around -20dB RMS/max -6dB Peak.

Tuner

My favorite tuner GTune is used here.

High Pass Filter

This is an interesting one. I sought advice from a fellow Maltese metal guitarist, Tony Micallef of Ferret, as to why I couldn't get a decent Djent tone. He quickly identified that I was letting too much bass through to my FX chain and that a HPF (at around 150Hz) should help shape the sound. And it did - worked a treat! (Thanks again Tony!)

Compressor

High ratio, fast attack, fast release compressor for more sustain.

Gate

The first gate - fast attack, fast release. As was mentioned in the Misha Mansoor video, the sound is either on or off, and when its on its full gain and when its off its completely silent for a more staccato tone.

Overdrive (and alternatives)

Here it gets interesting. I have a number of overdrives I like to use for different stuff. I don't use them to distort the guitar, but to shape (apply high and low pass filtering) and colour the sound, etc. For rhythm and "Djenty" riffs, the TSE-808 seems like the way to go. I recently heard on the FB forums to use two in a row for a sharper tone, but I haven't tried it yet. Ignite Amps TSB-1 is my go to for lead and the TSE R47 has a warmer analogue tone for clean guitars.

Gate

The second gate - fast attack, fast release.

VU Meter

The second VU Meter, I use to gain stage around -18dB RMS/max -6dB Peak.

Pre-Amp to the Recording Medium (Amplifier/Cabinet Stems)

So as per Tue Madsen's Meshuggah video, I send my Pre-Amp signal to 7 different Amp/Cab and Pre-Amp channels. You'll see for every amp/cab combination, I have a gate between the amp and the cab because I couldn't really implement an FX Loop gate. I'll take a guess as to which amps these free VSTs are trying to emulate. My amp sims are from LePou Plugins and TSE Audio.

The cabinet impulses I used are primarily from Guitar Hack's Impulses Pack and I use Ignite Amps NadIR speaker cabinet emulator. I use a VU meter to get the gain staging right, so that the volumes with and without amp sim and/or cabinet stay relatively the same.

• ‎LePou LE456 - Engl Powerball II
• LePou LeCTO - Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier
• LePou LeXtac - Bogner Ecstasy
• LePou HyBrit - ‎Marshall JCM800
• TSE X50 - ‎Peavey 6505
• TSE X30 - ENGL E530 Pre-amp
• LePou's LeGion Pre-amp

So a couple of disclaimers - to date, I don't record a guitar track with less distortion. The closest thing I do is when I'm tweaking one of the amps, that is not taking a primary role in setting the tone, I'll turn down the distortion to get a clearer tone overall. The role of the pre-amps are to do something similar for the bass and low mid frequencies.

LePou LE456 (Engl Powerball II)

I use LePou's LE456 as my ENGL. It's actually a really nice tone, my favorite for my RG8. I'm using the NGL Pro 4x12" impulse.

LePou LeCTO (Mesa Triple Rect)

LePou's LeCTO is a Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier sim with a Mesa 4x12" impulse.

LePou Xtac (Bogner Ecstasy)

Although I have this muted in this project, this channel is for LePou's Xtac Bogner Ecstasy sim with a Bogner Ubercab 412STU impulse.

LePou HyBrit (‎Marshall JCM800 + Plexi SLP)

I also have this muted in this project, this channel is for the LePou HyBrit Marshall JCM800 sim and a 1960A T75 impulse.

TSE X50 (‎Peavey 6505)

This is the TSE X50 ‎Peavey 6505 sim with the Peavey 4x10" and Delta Blues 15" impulses.

TSE X30 (ENGL E530 Pre-Amp)

One of my favorite pre-amps, this is the TSE X30, an ENGL E530 pre-amp sim. I'm trying to use it here as the "C-Watt style" replacement as mentioned in the Tue Madsen video, to add bass and low mids to the tone. If you watch Tue's video and hear what he has to say about the C-Watt, it sounds like an enviable tone to strive for.

LePou's LeGion Pre-Amp

This is LePou's LeGion Pre-Amp. I don't think it's trying to emulate any real hardware - but it's a great tone! For this particular project, I didn't use it. but I have used it as an alternative "C-Watt".

The Rhythm Guitar Mix Bus

These tracks are routed from the stem tracks, so that I can mix my tone without affecting those stem volume levels when I export the stems. I usually use this "Mix Bus" this while composing a song, but I recently read Glenn Fricker's article about using a mixer while recording multiple mics, and committing to the tone early, rather than constantly tweaking during the mix.

So I am now considering, rather than exporting each amp sim/cabinet stem and tweaking them in the mix, that I could commit early to my tone and simplify the process.

The left most tracks in the pic above are my drum and bass sub-projects, that I use to track against. I can click through to them if I need to modify anything quickly.

Conclusion

So as I mentioned earlier, there are dedicated stem tracks that I use to export from. These stems are then used in my (parent) mix template, just like faux mic'd amp recordings. I do this separation on purpose to primarily keep sane, but also to commit to a recording so that I can move onto mixing and hopefully not keep going back and forth in those final stages.

So I hope you found the second part of this series interesting. The third part will focus on the mix.

How I Record my Rhythm Guitars in the Box! (1 of 3)

I've taken what I've learnt from a few YouTubers and Internet sources, to shape the way I do my rhythm guitars on my tracks. Again as is my way, I use only free VST's. I'll do my best to walk through my thinking and how I got here but it might get confusing - so bear with me.

I'll do this in three parts:

1. Background information (this post)
2. Tracking setup before the mix (next post)
3. Mixing (the last post)

Periphery's Misha Dialing in a Modern Metal Sound

One of my favorite modern guitarists is Periphery's Misha Mansoor. This is a great video and you can find out more detail about his setup here at SevenString.org.

If I understood correctly, it's something like this:

Guitar + Tuner + Compressor + Gate + TubeScreamer + Gate + Stereo/Chorus/Flanger + PreAmp + FX Loop Gate + Power Amp

In summary:

• The sound is either on or off, and when its on its full gain and when its off its completely silent
• He starts by resetting the knobs to noon/defaults
• Enough gain to saturate, crunch and sustain on palm mutes
• Adjust EQ to taste (Bass, Mids, Treble)
• Adjust the Resonance and Presence. He explains that Resonance and Presence will boost high and lows without changing the colour or character of the tone.
• He ‎uses overdrive pedals (no gain) to tighten the sound before the preamp
• Gate before preamp and noise-gate in amp (FX loop) to give staccato riffing
• A piece of ‎tape or hairband on the strings at the headstock to stop them resonating

As you read on, you'll notice what's being recommended here is in alignment with a number of the other authors. You know you're on a good thing if it's being recommended by different people.

Tue Madsen mixing Meshuggah

I'll start with this Nail The Mix video, Tue Madsen mixing Meshuggah guitars.

Firstly, he's running 5 to 6 different amps (including the C-Watt Preamp) per guitar. I'm guessing these are:

• Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier
• ‎Marshall JVM410H
• ‎Engl Powerball II
• ‎Torpedo Studio
• ‎Torpedo Reload
• C-Watt Preamp

This video is why I started using multiple amp heads and speaker cabinet VST's in my tracking. And because you can - it costs you nothing to get this setup.

They recorded two single takes, one with full volume on the guitar pickups, the other with half volume on the guitar pickups. This is important because you'll see this technique of different levels of distortion used elsewhere below. I find I usually do the two takes as normal, and then lower the distortion via overdrive VST.

You should note, he sends only the high gain/full volume take to the C-Watt is guitar preamp. This distorts/overdrives, adds bass and low mid range frequencies, and is mixed in parallel with the other amps.

Each take is grouped and EQ'd together. He mixes the full gain first, half gain second.

Once the four groups are done, he removes annoying frequencies. Compares with original (A/B) to confirm it's better without the frequency and sometimes compensates by increasing a higher harmonic OR boost highs EQ after it.

How to Record Heavy Guitar | SpectreSoundStudios

In this next video, Glenn Fricker gives a 2-part run down on how he records guitars.

• Recommends 4x12" Celestian Vintage 30 cabinet
• ‎SM57 microphone
• Start by resetting your EQ on amp to noon/defaults
• Distort enough to saturate
• Output enough for the cabinet to move
• Place mic dead centre of each speaker to find the best speaker
• Once identified, re position mic for best sound (suggests off axis cap edge)
• Finally EQ the amp last, first bass, mid & treble, then presence and resonance

On the guitar bus in the mix, he uses:

• Multi-band compression to remove palm mutes at 350 Hz & 850 Hz, around -6dB Gain Reduction (GR)
• Aggressive High Pass Filter (HPF) @ 80Hz and gentle Low Pass Filter (LPF) between 7 kHz - 10kHz

Loads of good tips here. In a VST speaker cabinet scenario as I'll be using, while the amp is at default settings, choosing the best microphone in the centre position is a great start. The Multi-band compression tip is also a good one.

How to record heavy guitar 2 - Dialing in your amp | SpectreSoundStudios

The second part of these videos, he provides more details for the following steps:

• Using a Peavey 5150 and Mesa 4 x 12" cabinet
• Start with ‎all settings neutral
• Increase pre gain green channel just enough to saturate
• Dial in Bass, Mid, Treble first
• Next do Resonance and Presence, prefer using Treble over Presence
• Just enough post gain to move the speaker
• Use overdrive for clean boost pre-shaping signal before it hits the preamp

The tip to prefer Treble over Presence is a good one.

Get great metal guitar tone in 5 minutes Quick Positive Grid Bias test, discussion about metal tones | MixBusTV

One of my favourite YouTuber's is David from MixBusTV. This is an unusual video for him as it's not specifically about mixing. What I really liked about it was, the concepts he was describing align with the other authors I had watched, so I better understood why I would do such things.

• Track your guitars straight to DI using 2 tracks and pan hard left and right
• ‎Add amp sim and cabinet
• ‎Adjust left and right tracks to different levels of distortion
• ‎Route to stereo bus
• HPF @ ~60Hz, LPF @ ~3.5kHz
• EQ cut the highest powered, low frequency lower
• EQ boost the lowest powered, high frequency higher
• Cut mids to taste
• ‎Duplicate tracks with clean/crunchy amps (less distortion) and mix to taste

I really like this duplicating to less distorted amps, as we saw in the Tue Madsen video also. You get a clearer tone overlaying the thicker guitars.

Conclusion

So you can see, here are a number of authors all promoting very similar concepts and themes.

As I record end-to-end in the box, I will go through in my next blog post my rhythm guitar tracking setup in detail. For me, tracking is just getting the right tone to a recording medium (WAV file) in it's driest, most original format.

Read the second part of this series here.

Reaper Sub Projects Mixing Template

I recently moved from Ableton Live to Reaper. That meant I had to migrate most of the stuff I'd developed in Ableton to Reaper in some form or another. One of the features I instantly fell in love with in Reaper is the ability to embed another project (a Sub Project) as a media item in a parent project.

The Parent Project

So here is a screenshot of my parent project.

My Reaper Mixing Template

You can see I've got the usual colour coded tracks of all my instruments. I'm using Folders to group/bus my stem tracks. Folders are handy in that you can collapse them when you're not using them, both on the mixer and track console.

So here is the nifty bit - while I am just starting out writing the song, all I need to do is insert another Reaper project for say, the drums. Take a look closely at the media item on the drum track - it's another Reaper project.

The top level tracks are Reaper projects

Reaper will render a proxy WAV file from the Master output of the child project, and insert it into my project. This allows me to quickly whip together a draft drum track using my favorite drum setup, while hiding all the complexity from the parent template. If I double-click the drum media item, it will open up the Reaper project for me to edit.

The Child Project - Drums

The Drum Sub Project

After double-clicking the media item, the drum sub project opens up in another tab. At the left most track is my top folder/drum bus, my drum MIDIs, and then my drum bus mix faders. These are separated from the black tracks shown to the right of those which are my stem tracks (all leveled appropriately at stem volumes). This allows me to play around with my mix volumes, while keeping an eye on the 0dB volumes of the stems. The next three tracks are my different drum synths. In the screenshot above, you can see that I've muted the second and third synth, as they are CPU heavy and for the purposes of quickly putting down drums, not required.

Draft Drum Tracks

So let's say, I'm writing a new song, I've got some ideas for drums. Using my simplest drum synth (MT Power Drum Kit 2), I lay down some drums tracks and give it a quick rough mix.

One caveat of using sub projects is, every time you switch tabs (or save the file - choose in your preferences), the master bus is going to be rendered. If your project is too CPU heavy, this gets tiring very quickly. So disabling heavy CPU plugins, rendering to stems, etc. you can speed up that render process dramatically.

Once I switch tabs, the output is rendered, and appears updated back in the parent project, where it can be heard as part of the mix.

Quality Drum Tracks

Fast forward to when I'm happy with my drums and I want to render high quality stems for my parent project.

One of my drum synths (SMDrums)

Once I enable the two other drum synths (SMDrums and TMKD), I need to render these output as they are very CPU heavy.

My rendered drum stems

In the screenshot above, I've rendered my drum stems to WAV files and added them to the project. I'm then able to mute everything else reducing my CPU usage to almost 0% when playing. While rendering I can ensure that no clipping occurs, and adjust the stem tracks accordingly.

Switching back to the parent project

Now that I have drum stems, the mix faders to the left are no longer as important, because I'll be adding my drum stems into the parent project after this. But I want a quick render when I switch tabs, so by having just stems enabled and all my plugins disabled, I can get great rendering speeds.

Mixing Stems in the Parent

Drum Stems in the Parent

So once I'm back in the parent project, and I'm finalising the drums, I can insert those rendered stems into my parent project - as shown above. I'll need to mute the sub project media item, but I'll leave it there in case I need to go back and modify some stuff. With the stems present I can start to process each drum steam and mix into the drum bus folder. If I was happy with the mix settings in the child project, I could quickly copy them over.

The rest of the tracks use a similar setup. I'll go into how I do my bass and guitars in other blog posts. If you want more info about the drum setup, feel free to contact me and I can do another blog post answering your questions.

Headphone Compensating EQ

Cheap Headphones

So I have a pair of cheap headphones (KRK KNS6400). And even then, I got them on sale recently so it's not like I went out spending money on something decent. Me in a nutshell.

Anyway, you'll see it everywhere on YouTube "Don't mix using headphones alone!". And I get it, you need to hear stuff through different mediums, different sound systems and different devices. But I've got four kids who need to sleep at night. And I don't have a sound proofed room (yet!), so once they're all in bed - it's my time ... with the constraint that I don't make any noise!!

I'd already noticed as I mixed with these headphones, that when I transferred the song to my phone/ear buds - it was always really sub bassy and trebly. I was clearly compensating my mix because of these headphones were so poor at bass and treble frequencies. So what to do?

Headphone Frequency Response

So I found this great website called InnerFidelity, where they have measured the frequency response of hundred's of headphones. See https://www.innerfidelity.com/headphone-measurements.

I found my model of headphones, and this is what the frequency response looked like.

Create the EQ

I found the easiest way forward, was to create an EQ that looked exactly like the above frequency response and then reverse all the Gain values, to model a flat frequency response.

First, I started with the broad frequency changes, the high pass and low pass filters. Look in the above frequency response for the broad general curve and try to replicate in your EQ. Look for cross-over points where the frequency crosses 3dB, 5dB or 10dB.

Next, I added the larger troughs. Depending on how pedantic you want to be, you can try to recreate every last peak and trough as you wish.

Flip it on it's Head!

And finally, you flip the whole thing on it's head to get a compensating EQ for your headphones. To be clear, I did have to reduce the overall gain of the EQ by about -6dB.

Now, in Reaper, you're able to add EQ's specifically for headphone monitoring. It's a hidden feature that you only see when you work in tabs. Just click on the Monitoring button (top right) and add your EQ. You may need to re-route your audio so that it only comes into effect only when you have your headphones in use.

I hope you guys found that useful - thanks!

Disclaimer

I am NOT an experienced sound engineer. I'm just a middle aged metal guitarist who likes to experiment with sound. What is written above is just the result of an experiment, my opinion and nothing more.

1970's Analogue Mix

For a while I've been thinking to do a song (mainly for a bit of fun) as an early 1970's rock remix. So I've spent the past couple of weeks, researching, YouTubing and experimenting with the creation of a simulated analogue song recording.

Where to Start

I've always loved that warm 8 track, analogue vintage sound that these bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the early Beatles first recorded on. It was ridiculously simple and yet, they just sound amazing. What really hit home for me was when I heard Wolfmother for the first time many years back and my reaction was "What is that fantastic sound? How do they make it sound like that?"

In my recent travels searching the great plains of the Internet, looking at how to those old bands got that sound - I found that there are a lot of opinions, some conflicting, but all good to consider none the less.

Analogue Tape Machines

Well, there was debate on this one. One guy claims, like The Beatles, it was recorded on two 4 track tape recorders. Either way, I knew I had to limit the channels to 8 to be realistic. This meant minimal doubling of guitars and vocals. Tapes also have saturation, which is a type of distortion that makes the sound sound warmer and fuller and sometimes a slapback echo or phasing effect.

Soft Highs and Warm Overall

In the 70's, you were always battling inherent signal noise. And with everything being physical (like tape reels), you lost your high frequencies every time you touched something. Funnily enough, this meant the music was warmer and not so abrasive. And in today's technology, we have to simulate that, because everything is recorded perfectly and never loses its fidelity. So our ears, are bombarded with all these accumulated high frequencies, which I guess we're not really used too.

Expert Advice

So the YouTube video that really got me interested in pursuing this experiment was from one of my favourite YouTubers - MixBus TV. He did this great video of how he suggests you build an analogue recording setup.

Now, I loved this video, but as I've mentioned previously, I'm not one to spend money on my art (Ha! Hilarious!). One of the first plugins he mentions is Bootsy's FerricTDS.

Now, FerricTDS is actually part of this amazingly awesome free plugin pack called Variety Of Sound (VoS). This pack has a total of 14 top quality free plugins. And of those, 11 are designed to simulate analogue equipment.

For the record, there is another amazing free plugin pack called Antress Modern Plugins. This pack has 24 high quality free plugins - 5 custom analogue designs, 7 modeled after real classic equipment (SSL, Pultec, Fairchild, etc.). This pack will probably be my second setup that I'll experiment with. NOTE: The download link on the homepage doesn't work. Visit http://vst4free.com/index.php?dev=Antress to download.

So the challenge was, can I make an entire analogue mixing desk from a free plugin pack. And I did!

So I took what was said in the video above, and summarised it to something like this.

Instruments/Stems and the Console Strip

On your stems (raw digitally recorded tracks), start with a Tape Emulator. This is to simulate the recording coming straight off the tape. As per the video, I used Ferric TDS with the built-in preset "Classic Tape". Some of the caveats were, I minimised the output "Trim" value as low as it would go, and then adjusted "Input" to maintain a similar volume, but pushing the plugin at a reasonable signal so that it has more effect. If I hadn't done that, the needle would hardly move, which means the effect wasn't really operating at a good volume.

But the other aspect that I was missing was that phasing sound you get from tape. So I used another VoS plugin called NastyDLA, set to preset "Tape Flange". I reduced the Wet value to -21dB as it was a bit too strong as an effect.

Third in line was the BootEQ MkII. This would be where the signal finally hits the mixing desk. BootEQ is an analogue emulating Virtual Console Strip (VCS). I started with the preset "Vintage" but I reset the EQ back to flat. I found the settings I used across all my stems were High Pass filter at low frequencies, remove some "mud" around 300 - 500 Hz, boost some highs between 3 - 5 kHz, and then adjust the high shelf to taste.

Next, I used an analogue saturator TesslaSE (using preset "Vintage"), which was the pre-cursor to the TesslaPro MkII plugin mentioned below in the Master Bus section. This just adds a bit more colour to the sound. It was optional and only used when the sound still sounded dry.

Lastly, I used the ThrillSeekerXTC "black" Exciter/EQ (using the "Warmth" preset, EQ to taste). The black version is tuned for -18dBFS signals, appropriate for stems. Exciters are used "to enhance a signal by dynamic equalization, phase manipulation, harmonic synthesis of high frequency signals, and through the addition of subtle harmonic distortion".

Vintage Compressor Settings (L/R)

I used this same setup on all my tracks - drums, bass, rhythm guitars, lead guitar, clean guitar and speech. The only time I changed the setup was on the clean guitar, where I added a compressor (VoS Density MkIII) set to a custom vintage compressor settings.

Bear in mind, all these plugins are free and of a very high quality, all from a single source - Variety of Sound.

The Mix Bus

So all my stems are sent to the Mix Bus on my project.

I used a number of send/return effects in the 1970's vein, such as custom NastyDLA Ambience (reverb), custom NastyDLA Flanger, NastyDLA Tape Ping Pong delay and custom Density MkIII vintage compressor (shown above).

But the Mix Bus, well here's how I set it up. First was the BootEQ MkII VCS using "Vintage" preset, EQ adjusted to taste. Next was the custom Density MkIII with vintage compressor settings. I then used a the Rescue MK2 stateful saturator using "Bootie's Choice" preset but with the Analog setting enabled. Finally, the ThrillSeekerXTC "blue", tuned for -9dBFS signals, suited for buses and masters - set to the "Warmth" preset, EQ to taste.

The Master Bus

The Master Bus, again starts with the BootEQ MkII VCS using "Vintage" preset, EQ adjusted to taste.

Next I use a Leveling Amplifier ("Vintage Opto" preset). I had to look up what it was, and found that it was used by broadcasters to cut or boost signal levels automatically - which in my mind means it's kind of like a compressor, so I used it where I would have normally used a bus compressor.

Next was the ThrillSeekerXTC "blue" ("Warmth" preset, EQ set to taste) and then an analog Limiter, the ThrillSeekerVBL - using the "Bootsies Choice" preset. I set the input so the signal was around -3dB Gain Reduction, and set the output to peak at -0.3dB (after the Tessla plugin below was enabled).

Finally, simulating recording the Master to tape, I used the TesslaPro MkII, set to "Tape Warmth II" preset.

The Final Product

Below is the recording - it's a very quick mix. I'll embed the original song below it for comparisons. You'll see I removed all the sound effects and kept it at a bare minimum - not unlike a real 1970's recording on 8 tracks.

Please let me know if you like this article.

The 1970's analogue mix.

The original song.

Live Gig Video Editing

On a recent trip overseas, I played with my old metal band, Oblique Visions, in a 20 year reunion gig.

Joining The Band

I had joined Oblique Visions in 1992. Twister the drummer and I were in the same class at college. I didn't even know if I liked metal when I joined them. After two years, we released a self-made 6 track demo tape called "The Fallen". It was recorded with two mics in the middle of our garage where we played. We copied the cassette tapes ourselves and photocopied the covers.

The Fallen demo, 1994

In 1995, we released a self-funded CD, "Seas Of Serenity" and then, in late 1997, I left Malta to return to Australia. Decades later, I would wonder what would have happened with a bit more patience, if we would have gone onto bigger things had I not decided to move on.

Seas Of Serenity CD, 1995

Videoing The Gig

So 20 years later I'd be up on stage reliving old memories. We decided really early on we wanted to video the gig. Jeff the other guitarist had two GoPros that we would mount Front and Side. And the rest would be our wives filming with their phones from the audience. We were lucky that we got some footage from our support band, Victims Of Creation, that had a couple of GoPros as well.

The Video Stems

So in the end, I had the following video stems:

• GoPro Front
• GoPro Side
• Phone #1
• Phone #2
• Phone #3
• GoPro Extra

You can see an example of what this looks like here:

Video Editing Software

So I use LightWorks primarily because it's free, but it's actually a very versatile video editor. The main feature I use, that you can see demonstrated in the YouTube above, is the Multi-Cam bin. This uses an option to synchronise to something in common across all the video stems. Normally this is a time-code sync on professional commercial video equipment, but in my case, I used an audio track. There was some debate on the LightWorks forum whether this should work or not, but from my experience with these videos, it worked for me.

Pre-Work on The Stems

So the first lesson I learnt about video editing, is that audio and video like to desync - a lot! So the pre-work I did was to take the most stable video stems I had - the two GoPros, and sync them to something in common. This would be the audio MP3 from the sound desk of the night. I would use this MP3 to sync everything against, so the Multi-Cam bin would know to what to use to synchronise the different video stems.

I took the Front GoPro, which had really good audio (and later mixed with the MP3 to give it some ambience). I could see that every 2 mins, I would lose about 3 (of 24) video frames. So I broke apart the stem into 2 minute blocks, and sync'd the centre point with the MP3 audio.

You can see in the pic above, midway of the 2 min block, I try to align the GoPro audio (bottom brown tracks) with the MP3 audio (middle pink tracks). I pretty much do this for the entire 1.5 hrs, about 45 segments. This causes a bit of a glitch/stutter as you cross between segments, but while I edited, I tried to avoid them.

So I did the same for all video stems, always made sure the video was sync'd to the MP3 audio. This included handheld phone footage, which was almost always in short bursts under 2 mins.

Multi-Cam Bin

So then, it was time for the Multi-Cam bin. I dragged all these "aligned" video sequences into a Multi-Cam bin and set the synchronisation to occur on the A1 audio track, which was the same audio track in all my video stems. And it appeared to work. All the videos lined up. I double checked using the lighting in the background which is constantly changing, so you can align different light changes across all the stems to confirm it's all synchronised.

3 Second Changes

There is an option in LightWorks to automatically create a video sequence which is made of 3 second (you can set this value yourself) stem changes. I tried this, but it didn't quite work for me. I suspect I had a something wrong somewhere, and in the end I used a key combination of Numpad +, 72 frames Enter, and 's' to move to next split. Using these three keys, I created hundreds of 3 second slots in the final video, where I could switch to any Multi-Cam stem per slot, as shown below..

And that is pretty much how I made these videos. I added some Video Effects in there, some images, titles, etc. but most of the work was what I described above.

And now, this old man has another skill added to his collection.

The Finished Product

And here is the finished product playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlM2-N_ZqJOaGzNVwSb5k-PNBQ4FUiks-

And a sample of one of the songs.

My Earliest Influences

So it's been about 2 months since my last blog post. During that time I've holidayed with my family in Europe, I've played a live gig with my old band as a 20 year reunion and now I'm learning to video edit the footage of that gig into something presentable.

In between all this, I'm doing some music here and there. I'm playing with everything from more Djent, to 1970's style recording and Nine Inch Nails industrial soundscapes.

Growing Up - My Parents Albums

While I was visiting my mum in Malta, she showed me the collection of albums I used to listen to as a kid. At the time I would have been around 10 years old and living in semi-rural Sydney on acreage. I would play these on a small portable record player at full volume in a tin shed, playing air guitar and singing my heart out!

Led Zeppelin IV - This album started it all for me! Jimmy Page would make me want to start playing guitar and would influence the way I play for decades after I first heard this album. John Bonham's drumming would stay with me as I continued to look for quirky time signatures and rhythms in what I played.

These albums were my mum's and although she didn't still have it - I listened to Jimi Hendrix Are you Experienced and Santana Amigos for days on end. Both amazing guitarists and again huge influences on my playing. 

These next three were my Dad's collection. These were all the #1's from The Beatles, so it was a good mix of their songs. Their writing got more complicated in the later albums and I really thrived off some of that weirdness Strawberry Fields and melancholy like Eleanor Rigby.

 

And these guys also influenced me heaps - again, lots of guitar. These accomplished musicians would feed my desire to play guitar in more than just distorted rhythms in 4/4. I never really learned to play acoustic to these levels of skill, but the harmonies and melodies would stay with me a lifetime.

The Teenage Years

At first I was a huge Van Halen, U2 and Guns n Roses fan. But I cut my teeth as a teenage guitarist soloing along to Pink Floyd Delicate Sound of Thunder and Led Zeppelin IV. Sadly, only recently did acquire a great admiration for early Black Sabbath.

Only on my trip to Europe this year, while watching the Syd Barrett documentary, did I realise how much of an influence David Gilmour was on my soloing style.

My Twenties and In The Band

So when you're in a Doom Death metal band, you're gonna start listening to a variety of styles and influences in metal. The list would be huge, but the ones I still remember are: Type O Negative, Sepultura, Cynic, Paradise Lost, Testament, Entombed, Pantera, Metallica, Anathema and Therion.

Bands like Korn, Deftones, Tool, Rage Against The Machine, A Perfect Circle, Rob Zombie, Monster Magnet, The Mars Volta, System Of A Down, Filter and Nine Inch Nails would come later, by which time I would have returned to Australia and stopped playing guitar - but in hindsight influenced me just the same.

Fast Forward to Today

So some of those mentioned would stay with me for decades. If I was to call out my top favorite bands, they would be (in no particular order)

• Type O Negative
• Tool
• Deftones
• Nine Inch Nails
• The Mars Volta

To be honest, I love listening to these bands but I am still influenced by anything that I hear. As I get into more Djent - listening to bits and pieces of Meshuggah, Mastodon and Periphery - I expect to see my guitar style change again and hopefully morph into something unusual and unique.

See you on the flip-side!