Immediately after the session I went out and started scouring eBay for one. (Jesse) Benny had me try out one of their house snares, a Pearl Steve Ferrone Signature 6.5″ Black Beauty style drum, and I fell in love with it. I’m pretty psyched about this technique, because it moved the tracking along very quickly, and gave me an opportunity to branch out and try some different sounds without burning too much studio time. This was accomplished by routing the guitars’ DI signals back into a few different amps a technique called “reamping.” We were able to layer in some AC30, Ampeg Gemini and Jet, and some Fender combos. Once we’d gotten takes of everything, I did some experimenting running different sections of tunes to different amps to create some tonal variety. This gave us a pretty badass “club” kind of drum sound, plus it afforded me a bit of extra control over which elements of the kit were loudest in the room. In addition to the acoustic sound in the room, I set up a PA being fed by the individual close mics of the kit, and used a stereo pair of mics near the back of the room to capture the combined sound of the kit itself, as well as the reinforced amplified sound coming from the PA. The most interesting was probably the distant room mics. Given the band’s eclecticism and aesthetic demands, I set up a few different sets of room mics to reflect that. (Benny) One of the major clues to the time period a record was made is the use of ambience on the drum kit ’70s records tended to be dry, ’80s records had the huge (and often gated) stadium ambience, ’90s records tended towards a naturalistic, roomy-but-not-too-roomy sound. I didn’t want to bog the band down in endless studio experimentation when they were feeling inspired to play.ĭid you use any special gear or recording techniques on this one? I set up more mics on the drums than usual – in particular, ambient mics to capture different “pictures” of the acoustic space – and split the guitar signals off to give me a raw amp tone along with a DI signal I could later reamp to create a wider variety of tones. Because the schedule was pretty tight, I decided it would be best to set them up in a manner that would let us focus first on the musical performances, and then worry about the tones later. (Benny) The band came to me describing an eclectic sound: modern production mixed with ’80s stadium aesthetics. (Rish) Big arena rock is always at the root of what we’re doing, so we can branch out into whatever genre we want and still feel like us. It’s the first record we’ve made with three different band members singing lead vocals, and our first bringing keyboards into the mix. (Adam) We have modern rock, high and lonesome Americana, a power ballad, British glam, arena rock and soul. What kind of sound were you looking for and how did you achieve it? The time you put into pre-production not only makes the performances better, it also saves money once you’re on the studio’s clock. The final step was running the songs over and over to the final tempos, without lead vocals, to make sure we were playing them confidently. With the help of an iPhone app called “iLift,” we were able to adjust the tempos up or down in real-time, without changing pitch. ![]() ![]() Next, we started playing to a metronome, to hone in on the right tempos. (Jesse) We started with a set of rehearsal recordings, and listened for sections that needed tightening. ![]() What was your pre-production like on this project?
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