Above: “It’s No Mystery” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
“It’s No Mystery” was the last track to be finished for the YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK album. Like “An Accident Of Birth”, “It’s No Mystery” was built from the bottom up by first sequencing the drums and then adding the rhythm guitars on top of them. In this case, I just put the drums basically in the ballpark of what I wanted at first and then continually tweaked them a bit here and a bit there as the construction of the rest of the song progressed, adjusting the sequencing to fit the contours of the track as it developed.
By this point in time I was familiar and comfortable enough with my studio space and equipment that once I had a half-decent drum track together I could bang out rhythm guitar tracks without much fuss, at least in cases where a song was actually written ahead of time and not composed on the fly. The rhythm guitars here were the Gibson Explorer through the Line 6 POD; I don’t think any guitar on YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK was done direct into the DAW without the POD at least acting as an amp simulator. Similarly, bass guitar was run through the Hartke VXL Bass Attack Pedal and Direct Box — as per usual for this album, though I’ve since begun playing some bass direct into the DAW and applying amp simulation after the fact.
With the basic tracking done I laid down the vocals, and after some basic comping to put the vocal track together the song was basically all there. Unfortunately I thought the track itself was still lacking something — the song was fully recorded as it had been written, but just as it was it didn’t really do much to excite me. This wasn’t a great tragedy or anything — I’ve written and recorded plenty of songs you’ll never hear –but rather than force the issue I decided just to leave it be and move on to something else in the meantime.
After letting the track sit for a bit I came back to it and decided the problem was that the song was a bit light on melodic content — which made sense, as it had been written to be played live with me singing and playing rhythm guitar at the same time, which makes adding detailed melodic embellishment very difficult unless one is a highly skilled instrumental genius. (Jimi Hendrix’ ability to do precisely this is largely what elevates his playing to the point where he sits atop every list of ‘best electric guitar players ever’.)
As the track also seemed somewhat lacking in consonant textures, I strongly considered trying out some different keyboard patches to see if maybe some rotary organ or synthetic string pads would help, but as I had some new guitar equipment on hand I’d been itching to play with I went that direction instead. If you can’t occasionally indulge the whim of the moment, frankly this whole making music thing can get be be a huge draggy slog (I can’t imagine how boring playing in one of those carbon-copy cover bands would be) so playing with guitar toys swiftly became the order of the day.
Since the Explorer had been used for the rhythm guitars I decided to play the Traveler EG-1 for contrast on the lead lines: where the Explorer has a nice low-midrange sound, the Traveler gets more of a upper midrange presence that wouldn’t interfere with the rhythm guitars and would remain distinct regardless what effects I threw at it…and I definitely threw a good amount of effects on the lead lines here.
Above: “It’s No Mystery” lead guitar signal chain (click to fullsize)
The photo above represents the signal chain used on the “It’s No Mystery” lead guitar tracks; from right to left, the lead from the Traveler guitar goes into a TC Electronic PolyTune Chromatic Pedal Tuner, then into the Dunlop 95Q Cry Baby Wah, which I don’t think I used on this track in the traditional ‘wah-wah’ sense, but rather set it to one position and left it as a tone control, for which the 95Q is great — far more useful than the tone knobs on guitars, actually. (There’s a reason a lot of artists’ signature guitar models omit tone knobs entirely.) The 95Q also has a switchable distortion circuit; I’m not sure if it was engaged here, but I’d guess not simply because one of the new toys I was wanting to play with is next in the chain: the Fulltone GT-500 FET Distortion + Booster and Overdrive. With two separate distortion and overdrive gain stages, I could get plenty of saturated guitar tone out of the GT-500 along without kicking the 95Q distortion on top of it, but then again if I happened to kick it on and it sounded good, I would have left it, but I don’t think I did so here.
After the GT-500 is the Electro-Harmonix Memory Toy Analog Echo and Chorus, which I cranked up to give me a nice smooth tone with lots of sustain before finally running the signal into the ZT Lunchbox amplifier. Again, the Lunchbox does have a gain stage built in but it also has a great clarity at lower volumes, which is what I was looking for here: a clear representation of the distorted, overdriven, sustaining tone I was getting from the pedals. I miked up the Lunchbox with the V67G condenser mic at a distance of about a foot and a half (or 50cm, for those in the civilized world) using the Golden Age Project Pre-73 preamp, and came out at the end of the chain with a guitar tone consisting of almost organ-like timbres that inspired me in an entirely different direction for the lead guitar melodies and helped push the track up that one extra notch, at least in my mind.
Above: “It’s No Mystery” version history screenshot (click to fullsize)
Although admittedly “It’s No Mystery” did begin late in the tracking process, mixing was the main reason it was the last song done for the album. During the end stages of assembling YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK, I’d compile my album mixes (by this point track sequence was pretty much nailed down) load them into my ipod and take them outside the studio to see how they held up in the real world, or more specifically: 1. on the living room entertainment center speakers, 2. on the bookshelf-sized speakers in the bedroom, 3. in the car, and 4. on headphones (though not necessarily in that order). For some reason, “It’s No Mystery” just would not sound right in all locations; if the bass sounded good on the living room speakers, it’d be overpowering in the car, and then when I cut it back it’d be inaudible in headphones. It took a lot of tweaking to get the mix to a point I was reasonably satisfied with, but even there I was starting to get worried I was overworking the track to the point where I was losing perspective. Everything else for the album was finalized and ready to ship off for mastering, but I seriously considered delaying the album to give myself a week or two to walk away from the “It’s No Mystery” mix and come back to it with fresh ears — or maybe even start again with a entirely fresh, new mix!
In the end, I fell back on my anti-obsessive/compulsive mantra, “good enough is good enough,” and I settled for a mix that was about 95% of the way to where I’d have liked it to be rather than continue to drive myself nuts. Because really — in life in general as well as with music in specific — it’s incredibly easy to get obsessed with what are ultimately incredibly minor details in the larger picture. That’s why there’s never been another album by My Bloody Valentine or the La’s. Was the level of the lead guitar track going to make or break “It’s No Mystery”? Not really. Was it worth taking another week or two weeks to obsess over it? Not really. The mix was fine, it was just that after months of highly refined, detail-oriented listening getting everything in shape for the album my hearing was tuned into differences so minute I’d be surprised if anyone but experienced audio engineers would be able to hear them without me pointing them out.
Of course, the minute I made that decision I started worrying that after I got the mastered album back I’d decide that I’d fucked up the mix after all and have to redo it — possibly pay someone else to mix it, even! — as well as pay to have the mastering redone. And of course, when the finished album came back from mastering at Mr. Toad’s, “It’s No Mystery” sounded fine — but I’ll admit to holding my breath a bit before the track played when I was auditioning the master for the first time.
That’s one of the main reasons I’ve chosen to use professional mastering on my albums: when you’re doing everything yourself, it’s good for that last link in the chain to be someone who’s not locked into your perspective. A good mastering engineer can work wonders as far as getting tracks to gel, albums to sound consistent, and problems to sound less problematic, and especially as more and more music is home-recorded that last professional tweak can make a world of difference when it comes from someone who really knows their stuff. I don’t know what all Tardon Feathered uses in his mastering chain up at Mr. Toad’s and I don’t need to know: he’s done good work on both the projects I’ve had him work on and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend his services to anyone in need of a good mastering engineer. If not Mr. Toad’s, there are plentyofskilledmasteringengineersoutthere — I frequently scorn people who throw good money after bad in pursuit of their musical ambitions, but this is one area where I highly recommend refraining from cheaping out. Do your research, get some quotes, and don’t even think “I’ll just have my buddy who pirated the Ozone Mastering plugin do it” is a viable strategy.
To hear the results of our efforts, check out the album via the links below.
Above: “Naivete” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
As with “Spray Vandalism”, the basic tracks for “Naivete” were recorded by Mark Haemmerle at Haemmerle Productions with Ryan Tully-Doyle playing drums and Paul Szewcyzk playing bass. Unlike “Spray Vandalism”, “Naivete” required a bit more editing to the basic tracks – a fact I ascribe entirely to the fact I didn’t have the song fully written at the time of recording.
Where audio is concerned, it’s always a more direct path between two points when you know where you’re going, and while working new material out in the studio is a creative luxury it’s more difficult to pull off when you have four people working in the same space for a limited amount of time. At the time the instrumentation on this track was recorded, I had no lyrics and only the vaguest idea of how the vocal line might go but we’d played the music enough to at least give it a go in the studio and see how it worked out. If nothing else, I figured having the music recorded would give me something to write to, and with a rough mix of the basic tracks on hand I had about 90% of the lyrics written before too long — enough to get by when we played the song live, if not quite to the point where I felt satisfied enough with them to go back and record the vocals.
By the time the vocal lines were worked out, I found the original recorded music didn’t quite line up 100% with the direction the song had taken in the interim — unsurprisingly, as any piece of music is bound to evolve and change subtly as it’s played. In this case it was nothing too drastic, but it meant I definitely had to go back into the multitrack guitar-bass-drums recordings to edit and resequence the verses in order to make the recorded tracks line up with the written song structure. To be honest, I put this task off and let “Naivete” sit for a long time because I was really dreading this editing process, picturing a nightmare of imperfect crossfades, micro-edit audio surgery, and jolting nonmusical glitches that could easily consume an entire day. Plus, I still had the lyrics to finish, so what was the rush?
Above: “Naivete” version history screenshot (click to fullsize)
Eventually I geared myself up for the task, blocking out a whole evening and giving myself plenty of time to allow for mistakes, frustration, and hair-pulling stumbling blocks — but once I finally got started, I found that Studio One made the process so easy I completed resequencing the song seamlessly in less than an hour. All I had to do was identify the exact drumbeats before which I to place my cuts and by selecting multiple audio tracks before cutting the edit would propagate in the exact same place across all selected tracks. This allowed me to move and duplicate sections of the song at will, with final rendered edits so smooth that without looking at the screen I could hardly tell where the cut was placed.
With the proper structure finally in place, I crunched down and finally finished off the lyrics — the last bit that was giving me trouble was the ‘bridge’ section in the middle, where I wanted the vocals to follow a different melody but I’d previously had a really hard time coming up with something I could play and sing simultaneously — and laid down the vocals. Because of the extreme dynamics shifts in vocal level I had to record multiple vocal lines and edit them together: at the tracking level for the vocals in the first part of the song the loud vocals towards the end would overpower the preamp, and at the louder tracking level the quiet vocals would be inaudible. I could have tracked with a compressor in the signal chain to artificially force the levels to equalize, but given the live-in-a-room feel of the original instrumentation I wanted a similarly live-sounding vocal to make everything gel together as much as possible. To that end, I think I used the Shure SM58 dynamic mic for vocal tracking rather than a condenser, as more often than not the SM58 is the default ‘live rock vocal’ mic. (Seriously, if you know what an SM58 looks like and you start noting when you see them used in live performance you will never stop seeing them.)
Once I was satisfied with the vocal takes, I edited them together and proceeded to mix the song. The instrumentation from the original tracking session was solid enough to stand alone if a bit sparse, but overdubbing additional guitars or keyboards seemed like overkill. To help overcome this I doubled the guitar line, processed the two channels of guitar differently and panned them to the extreme left and right of the stereo spread; this helped give the guitar more heft and presence while allowing me to bring the bass and drums up as high as possible to hold down the center. The vocal line was similarly doubled (though not panned) to add some grit and texture and fit it to the sound of the instruments as much as possible, and that was pretty much it.
After that, it was mostly a matter of minor mix tweaks until I had a track I was happy with putting on the album. I went back and forth a few times — mostly boosting the drums, which sounded fine in the studio but seemed slightly diminished when I listened to the mix on headphones or in the car, and adjusting the levels of the various comped vocal sections for recorded dynamics — but having started with the instruments played together in the same room, the instrument tracks will generally tend to fit together better than if recorded separately, and I found that to be the case here: once the vocal sounded right with the instruments, the rest clicked into place fairly readily.
Check out the video for “Naivete” to hear the results of our efforts, or listen to the album via the links below.
Above: “Maybe Great Discoveries” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
“Maybe Great Discoveries” is another song that had been around for awhile without ever being satisfactorily recorded. I don’t recall ever trying to play this with an electric band — though it might be interesting to try in a sort of ’80s power ballad arrangement — but the delicacy of the song always seemed to demand a quieter treatment to bring out melody and dynamics. With a live electric band, melody and dynamics are the first things to go out the window, and frankly whether electric or acoustic no one really wants to hear long, slow songs they don’t know in a live setting, so if this one was going to exist in any form it was pretty much slated from the beginning for a studio recording .
Once the proper approach had been determined, recording the basic track was fairly straightforward: so much of the song was dependent on the interaction between the acoustic guitar and the vocals for tempo, dynamics, and rhythm that tracking instruments separately to a click killed it instantly. Without being able to record the guitar and vocal separately, the ability to punch-in and correct vocal problems is more limited, so in my mind the only way to properly represent the song was to capture a ‘live’ performance of the song played all the way through without major errors. Essentially, I needed just the right performance to justify recording the rest of the song.
There are two ways to come at this: first, you sit down and force yourself to play the song over and over until you get it ‘right’ or as close as you can within a certain timeframe; this is the way it’d have to be done in (for example) any record label-funded recording situation, for example. The other way to do it is to just play the song every so often and wait (hope) for the perfect combination of motivation, intoxication, and circumstance to result in an inspired-sounding take, which is what I did here. There were a lot of lousy, draggy, and just plain failed takes along the path, as well as with many that may have sounded more or less okay but suffered a flubbed lyric or missed chord change along the way. Of course, I could have probably fixed up many of these minor flaws and just gone with one of these had it been necessary, but as I was working without a deadline or other time constraint I was willing to wait.
Eventually — I believe I was testing out the MXL990 low-cost condenser mic on vocals while playing the Fender Catalina acoustic guitar — I managed to record a take that upon replay became apparent was the take, capturing a vocal quality head and shoulders above any of the others while remaining almost miraculously error-free. Having captured this take, though, I didn’t really know what to do with it. On early recordings of the song there had been violin accompaniment, but frankly it didn’t add anything other than mirroring the vocal melody in an unnecessary and occasionally obtrusive way. Still, the spare vocal/guitar arrangement seemed overly stark, so back into the box it went…
…to await (as it turned out) the additional inspiration of a keyboard instrument. I’d wanted a musical keyboard for some time, but after a false start buying a friend’s keyboard I’d finally begun hearing the possibilities open to me. I say “false start” because it turned out the second-hand keyboard had a malfunctioning audio output (which my friend legitimately did not know about, having only used the MIDI outs) and sadly the otherwise excellent instrument had to go back to its original owner. However, in the short time that keyboard had been in my possession my imagination had been inflamed: I used it to record “Palette Cleanser” on my first album THIS IS MY REVENGE and I believe the keyboard lines on the title song “This My Revenge” also came from this short timeframe before it had to be returned.
Fortunately not too long after a great deal on Yamaha YPG-635 digital pianos popped up at Guitar Center — well over a hundred dollars cheaper than the closest price, so I assume it had to be some sort of inventory clearing or overstock dump. (This is how I’ve gotten most of my musical equipment: I identify what I really need/want to accomplish my musical goals, I prioritize by importance/availability of funds, and I keep an eye out for deals too good to be passed up — probably well over half of my equipment was clearance/closeout merchandise. Buying the latest and greatest is a sucker’s game.)
Even having the digital piano and its array of wonderful synthesized sounds didn’t solve the problem for me though, as I was not confident my rudimentary keyboard abilities would allow me to perform appropriate embellishment for such a fragile song. Better, I thought, to wait until I’d worked my keyboard abilities up from “appallingly clumsy” at least to “fumbling amateur” before attempting it, so back into the box “Maybe Great Discoveries” went…
…until an April weekend in 2011, when Jeanette Moradi and I were jamming around in the studio — her on piano, me on guitar — and I started playing back bits of various tracks I had in various stages of completion. After the “Maybe Great Discoveries” basic track came on Jeanette immediately keyed into the vocal, asking “What’s that?” — confirming my feeling that its quality would make it the take of the song that would end up being the final version.
After setting up the YPG-635 for recording, I wrote out the chords to the song for Jeanette’s reference, set the the basic guitar & vocal recording playing, and then just let her improvise away for awhile using first a synth string pad patch and then a more traditional piano sound. We were both really getting into the results so we went all out and pulled out Jeanette’s lever harp, which I’d always wanted to use on a track but didn’t want to just force in somewhere as a gimmick. I set up the MXL V67G condenser mic on a boom tripod above and in front of the harp, angled downward toward the instrument’s soundboard. After very little time, it became clear that “Maybe Great Discoveries” was a good fit for the instrument: the percussive, classical timbre of the harp combined perfectly with the synth strings and piano to fill out the sound of the song without steamrollering the vocal the way the violin had. Good stuff!
Above: “Maybe Great Discoveries” version history (click to fullsize)
As the version history above shows, from the point of recording Jeanette’s overdubs all the pieces of the track were basically in place; I did add a couple of additional guitar tracks the next day using the Ovation 2078TC Elite T acoustic, but I eventually ended up pulling them out of the final mix almost entirely as they just ended up getting in the way of the raw original guitar recording. After that, it was mostly a matter of editing and rearranging Jeanette’s improvised accompaniment to sound more ‘composed’ within the contours of the song. It didn’t take long for me to come up with an arrangement I was more than pleased with, particularly given the trouble this song had caused me over the years.
Once it came time to finalize the track for the YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK album it was mostly a matter of slightly tweaking the mix, primarily to remove the majority of the aforementioned guitar overdubs and to pump the keyboard and harp accompaniment higher — but very carefully, as this was the rare track where I felt like we’d really captured something unique and I didn’t want to lose that by overworking the life out of it. Mostly I was just happy to finally put “Maybe Great Discoveries” behind me, content to have realized the song in a form that surpassed my hopes.
“Naivete”, the fourth music video from my new album YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK is now available for viewing on Youtube — this one is a lot different from the first three and features Paul Szewczyk on bass and Ryan Tully-Doyle on drums, with video culled from live performances at the Skybox. Probably the closest thing we’re going to come to a ‘performance’ video for YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK; I really pushed my iMovie skills to the limit making this one!
Every detail of this album cover is awesome. You know they must have had a serious argument over whether the album should be titled “Rock and Roll” or simply “Crystal Image II” to arrive as such an unwieldy result.
Above: “An Accident Of Birth” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
“An Accident Of Birth” is really one of the tracks that make YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK the album it became, at least in my mind. It was during the recording of this song that a lot of my working methods for this album really began to crystallize in such a way that I started to realize I could get a number of songs down in such a way that I was happy with the results without making myself completely crazy in the process.
This has not always been the case. Despite admitted nostalgia for the days of tape-based recording, the limitations of home multitrack tape recording always inflicted unacceptable (in my mind, anyway) levels of hiss and distortion in the process for me to be pleased with the results. Yes, my old Vestax four-track taught me a lot about recording that I still use today, and yes, I think a lot of people would benefit from a non-digital recording environment, and yes, there’s something funky and cool about the vibe of analog, but every time I think about that 4-track I instantly recall the godawful hum that filled my head every second of every session using that cursed machine. Granted, no recording ever lives up the one’s image of what it could be, but when every song comes out a disappointing shadow buried under blankets of hiss, hum, and crackle, eventually one just stops trying.
The early days of computer-based recording were unappealing to me in a different way: it was great for experimentation, or for making music that sounded electronic — dance music was made for computers — making something that sounded remotely like a band was basically impossible. Even today, load up any ‘electric guitar’ patch on any synthesizer and I guarantee what you will hear sounds like complete shit, and nothing like an actual electric guitar. And while Pro Tools and other hard-drive based recording systems inarguably took over recording studios insanely quickly, it took a long time for consumer (read: inexpensive) computers to catch up to the point where one could effectively perform anything other than basic recording and editing without going broke, insane, or both.
Frankly, for a long period I simply didn’t have either the money or the time to fool with it — real life and all that. And again, as above when one has no reason to expect tolerable results it tends to inhibit expenditure or time and effort . I never really stopped making music, but for quite some time I had higher priorities that took precedence and the idea of doing any serious recording was so far on the backburner it wasn’t even really on the stove anymore, to stretch the analogy past the breaking point. Occasionally I’d poke my head back in check out the newest digital audio workstation (DAW) software and keep tabs on the progression of recording technology, and working in fits and starts I very gradually ramped up my involvement with recording to the point that I couldn’t deny anymore that I was well back into it — several recordings from this period went on my first album, THIS IS MY REVENGE, including “Not So Naive (Here We Go Again)”, “Home To You”, “It’s Coming”, and “Game Of Life”.
However, two impediments to my creative process remained: Cubase and Windows. Let me say up front that these are both fine products and it’s no one’s fault but my own that I couldn’t make them work for me better than I did, but the fact remained that both the Cubase DAW work environment and the Windows operating system caused me enough inspiration-erasing workflow interruptions that I resolved that they had to be be replaced.
First, spurred by an enthusiastic review in Tape Op magazine I switched my DAW software from Cubase to Presonus Studio One v1. Studio One was claimed to have been developed with “ease of use” and “facilitation of workflow” as paramount considerations, which sounded right up my alley, and while some “professional” (cough) producers and engineers might have chosen to eschew the software simply because Pro Tools and Cubase were already accepted and installed in all major pro studios, I had no such qualms.
After using Studio One for a week, I never went back to Cubase except to transfer my in-progress projects into Studio One. In this manner, I finished most of the other songs on THIS IS MY REVENGE, including “If It Should Show Up On Its Own”, “Caution On The Wing”, and title track “This Is My Revenge”. However, I was still getting unpredictable recording glitches that couldn’t be traced either to my digital interface (TASCAM US-1641) or the DAW, so the computer had to go.
Now, I’m far from a total Apple fanboy — in fact, I hadn’t used a Mac for anything more substantial than reading email for well over a decade — but the company’s products have a long history within creative industries for many reasons and I cannot argue with results: I tried literally dozens of tweaks and configurations over a period of 18 months to two years trying to get two separate Windows machines (one desktop, one laptop) to record properly without glitches or interruptions, and neither would do the job. After purchasing a new Macbook Pro and installing a properly updated version of the drivers for my audio interface, the problem went away and has not recurred since.
With this setup in place, I finished “Watch Yourself Disappear” and created “No Compromise”, the last recorded tracks on REVENGE, but “An Accident Of Birth” was really the first test to see if I could utilize my setup to realize already-extant material in a satisfying way. In many ways creating new material is nearly always easier because I have no preconceptions or expectations of the work, but in this case, I was trying to lay down a song that had eluded proper recording with both full electric bands and stripped-down acoustic arrangements in the past.
Above: “An Accident Of Birth” version history (click to fullsize)
In the end, I was almost shocked at how easily it came together. First, I sequenced some appropriate drumbeats to play against, then laid down a couple of tracks of acoustic guitar to delineate the structure and contours of the song. Then I sequenced the drum parts against the guitar tracks to frame the song, taking the time to place all parts properly so I wouldn’t have to come back and do it again later. This was possible because I already had a very clear vision how the song should go, so I could easily piece the drum part together simply by imagining the structure of the song and placing fills and accents appropriately without any guidance other than acoustic guitar .
Once the drums were in place, I let the track sit for a few days and then came back and did the rest of the recording in a couple of bursts: first, I went ahead and did all the vocals to just the acoustic guitar and drums, which seemed to work out well. Typically I like to have more of the instrumentation down before doing vocals, but here again I knew ahead of time how I wanted the vocals to go and I figured having a simpler arrangement to sing against might make pitching the vocals easier than trying to pick the notes out of a full arrangement. (It worked well enough that I might want to remember this and try stripping down difficult arrangements when I’m having trouble recording acceptable vocals in the future.)
The next day I edited and arranged the vocals, then laid down the rest of the instrumentation in short order: first playing the bass against the drums and acoustic, then adding some keyboards — organ sounds played on the Yamaha YPG-635, don’t recall which specific patch – and finally, layering in some electric guitars, which I think were probably the Gibson Explorer played through the Line 6 POD’s ‘Crunch’ setting. With these parts, besides simple accompaniment I was specifically trying to expand and emphasize the track’s dynamic range — the proper emphasis of which always seemed to be a sticking point when trying to play this song live with other people for some reason.
I do recall I wasn’t even totally sure I was going to keep the electric guitars and considered keeping the song in a strummier acoustic rock arrangement, but I was on a roll with recording that day and figured what the hell, I’d plug in and play because playing the electric guitar is one of the most fun things about the process. Later, when I came back to do a little editing, arranging, and rough mixdown, I heard the way the song lifts off when the electric crunch hits in the prechorus and well, that was that for any thoughts of strummy acoustic rock!
Outside of the above, there’s just not much detail to provide on the recording of “An Accident Of Birth” simply because it went so quickly and was so troublefree I barely remember what I did at any given step other than to go with the simplest path between two points, just finally putting down what had been floating around in my head for years. One day’s recording for drums and acoustic guitars, one for vocals, and one for bass, keyboards, and electric guitars, and that was it.
After a few mixes to dial in the track, I was satisfied the end result did what a good recording should — elevate the song and bring out its strengths — and I was able to combine parts of what I liked about both the acoustic and electric arrangements of the song while retaining more of a live band feel than I had ever previously been able to achieve recording on my own. Finishing “An Accident Of Birth” gave me renewed confidence to plunge into further recording knowing that I would be able to actually realize some of my ambitions rather than simply chasing phantoms or tilting at windmills. Amazing what a difference having the proper tools for the job can make!
To hear the results of my efforts, check out the video for “An Accident Of Birth” now and if you enjoyed this YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK track breakdown, be sure to join me next time when I’ll be looking behind the scenes at the making of “Maybe Great Discoveries”.
The third music video from my new album YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK is now available for viewing on Youtube — watch it below, and check out the videos for “Spray Vandalism” and “An Accident Of Birth”.
The second music video from my new album YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK is now available for viewing on Youtube — watch it below, then check out the first video (for “Spray Vandalism”) here.
Above: “Spray Vandalism” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
Although most of the material comprising YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK was recorded by me, “Spray Vandalism” is one of two songs from the album that originated elsewhere. The basic tracks were recorded by Mark Haemmerle at Haemmerle Productions and feature the rhythm section of Paul Szewcyzk on bass and Ryan Tully-Doyle playing the drum kit, with me on guitar and vocals.
In this case, all three of us played live together in Mark’s studio. Even the vocals were recorded live along with the band, which in general no one except Neil Young does due to mic leakage. This song was written to be played live, though, and rather than possibly leach the vitality from a track I always prefer to capture the feel of people playing together in a room when appropriate — rock should rock, and it simply doesn’t when everything is tweaked and ‘fixed’ to the nth degree.
Lyrically, while writing I was thinking here about the monotonous nature of the chest-beating threats often found in hip-hop music, which are plenty scary occurrences in real life but as lyrical devices were worn out a long long time ago. I like a lot of hip-hop music but it gets disappointing when you get past the beats and realize someone really has nothing to say beyond making dubious boasts and pop culture references. (Just to be clear, I’m not making a call for ‘positive’ or ‘uplifting’ or ‘conscious’ rap here either, that preachy shit gets tedious fast. If anything, I’m making a call for good writing and cliche avoidance across the board.)
Anyway, the idea here was to try to up the stakes and the scale of the lyrical threat by inflating it beyond all rational proportions and giving it a credible real-life setting. The end result could be taken by the listener either as a more frightening threat or a parody of lyrical braggadocio exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness; either interpretation seems equally valid to me. Of course, none of this is really crucial or even important for listening to the song — I see little evidence that intent makes a huge impact on end results, and I often think authorial intent should be discarded straightaway in interpretation of any text — but that’s what was running through my mind when penning the words.
I believe the vocal mic here was a Shure SM-57, which I generally eschew in favor of the 58 largely because the cylindrical shape feels weird to sing into, but it works fine in this case particularly because I knew beforehand I was going to go for a compressed, telephonic feel to the vocals in post-production. The guitar and bass amps were acoustically separated via isolation booths to minimize drum leakage; while this worked well for the bass, giving it a nice airy presence that’s difficult to obtain recording bass direct, the guitar came out a bit flat and dry for my taste. The basic tracks were recorded in Pro Tools, which I don’t really like to use when I can avoid it, but these days one DAW is pretty much the same as the next as far as the basics of capturing audio.
Later I brought the tracks back to Clairemont Mobile Garage and transferred them into Presonus Studio One, my DAW of choice, and did some slight tweaking here and there to the basic tracks. Fortunately, the basic performances were strong enough to require very little editing or correction, but as expected there was a good amount of drum leakage on the vocal track. Judicious editing removed the majority of it easily (which you can see by enlarging the “Spray Vandalism” project file screenshot above) and once the appropriate vocal effects were applied I was happy enough with the results to proceed.
To fill out the guitar sound I overdubbed two additional guitar lines, using the same Gibson Explorer through Dunlop 95Q Cry Baby Wah pedal signal path as the basic tracking session to maximize consistency and continuity. In order to maintain the live rock feel, the overdubbed guitars were played straight through with very little editing done on the tracks after the fact, but I think I might have recorded them direct through the Line 6 POD rather than micing up the amp in this case. The POD has the same distortion as the Line 6 Spider II amp used on the live guitar track though, and in any case most of the guitar tone here comes from manipulation of the Cry Baby.
Finally I mixed the whole thing down, which here was mostly a matter of adjusting the levels of the vocals and the overdubbed guitar tracks relative to the full-band basic tracks. One benefit of having a group of people playing together in the same room is that good musicians modulate their volumes and performances to fit together — “mixing” the sound in the room, in effect — so a well-recorded live performance often requires a lot less twiddling and tweaking after the fact than one that’s been built up track by track. (This is also why a lot of pre-1980 jazz records sound so awesome). Fortunately that was the case here, and after relatively few back-and-forth tests (taking my mixes between the studio, my car, my ipod headphones, the living room, and the bookshelf speakers in the bedroom) I arrived at a happy medium — which was further enhanced by the great mastering job by Tardon Feathered at Mr. Toad’s.
From near the beginning of this project I was pretty sure “Spray Vandalism” would be at or near the top of the album, not only because it’s a strong performance with good rocking accompaniment by Paul and Ryan but also because it sets a tone and mood straight off. Just as it was written to be played live, it was also written to be a first song in several ways: there’s a sense of something impending in the lyrics and the intro really only has the proper impact when it’s placed as the first song — the track builds from the top to bring the listener into the song’s context. And frankly, this was one I was happy with as far as the track representing pretty much 90-95% of what I’d hoped for out of the recording, so while I kept myself open to different sequences during the later stages of assembling the album and tested out a few alternate sequences just to be sure, I don’t think at any point there was any serious consideration of “Spray Vandalism” not being the first song on the album (“CLMT Nightwalk” being an intro piece rather than a proper song).
Thanks for reading this breakdown of “Spray Vandalism” — I hope you found something of interest or relevance to you. To hear the end result of all this kerfuffle you can watch the “Spray Vandalism” music video now, buy or stream the album via the links directly below, and if you found any of this at all interesting be sure to join me next time for a breakdown of “An Accident Of Birth” as it’ll be something totally different!
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