Metal Meltdown: Back in the studio again

I have been pretty and busy and haven’t been posting much on account of said business. Science is going like science goes (badly mostly), my parents have been moving and required help, my boss is sending me alone to a conference unrelated to my work as his delegate and at night time I have been in the studio.

I have a few things to write about the studio. Most non-musicians don’t realize how much work and time (and money) is spent in the recording studio to bang out just one song. To my plebian band mates, who thought that recording eight songs was a terrific idea, I can only blame their poor short-term memories for forgetting pour last more modest efforts. Thus far we have spent nearly every day of the last three weeks in studio. This means that my daily schedule looks something like this:

Wake-up 8am

Go to the lab 9-10am (sometimes later)

Take the BH to physio 4pm

Make/eat dinner 5-6pm

Go to the studio 6-7pm

Get home 12am

Pre-production/samples/lyric writing/going over material for the next day 12am-3am

Going insane (anytime)

Yes, you read it right. Waking up at 8am – SLACKER! But I’m also going to bed fairly late and to compound this I have (and have had for years) pretty sever insomnia – so sod off. But I digress.

The studio is not a place where one comes, plugs in one’s instruments and everyone jams out Kumbaya with a few microphones and then calls it Miller time.

First, there is no tape. With the advent of direct to disk recording, 95% of the world’s albums are recorded direct to a hard drive. Second, every instrument is recorded separately. Third, setting up the sound for an instrument can take hours (in the case of guitar) or even days (in the case of drums). To take an example from this recording, it took the engineers (there were two during the initial drum set-up day) eleven microphones and six hours to make our drummers drums sound like drums and not cardboard boxes. It took two days to record drums for eight songs, not including drum setup.

Part of our drummer's setup in the isolation room.

The reason one records all instruments separately is to preserve separation, prevent microphone bleed, and to ensure that everything is on separate tracks and can be mixed and edited separately. Edited you say? Yes, edited. I will return to this later.

Following drums, we took about a week to record guitars (putting us behind schedule). Each guitarist had to double track guitars (to make it sound thicker) meaning that each track had to be identically played. Following this, I recorded bass and have just recently completed vocals. I’ve always thought yelling into a microphone for four hours at a time was a good proposition – until one loses his voice.

Recording in parts like this means several things. One is having all the arrangements and tempos set out well in advance. In our case we had to program all the guitar arrangements by computer and create proper click tracks (tempo guide tracks) for the recording. It may sound trivial, but despite having so-called complete computer arrangements, it still took me nearly 20 hours of tweaking, testing, mixing and bouncing guide and click tracks for our drummer. That does not include the programming of the two keyboard parts nor the acquisition/arrangement of samples for the recording.

The benefit of recording to disk is myriad. Recording to HD allows for unlimited tracks (theoretically), high-bit digital recording (usually 24 bit), the use of digital effect plug-ins rather than the use of expensive outboard equipment, and the GUI allows for the visualization of waveforms for easy punch-ins (takes from the middle of song for example) and for editing¹. The disadvantage is that with old tube gear and analogue recording, there was always a bit of ‘give’ where everything didn’t have to be perfect. The finest mixing boards and vintage tube gear were forgiving. That said, nothing sucked more than having to redo take after take to get that perfect track on a given song. Digital recording picks up every little nuance, every little scratch and sound that one makes – even to the extent that one hears little things in playback that one would never catch on the original take. It’s this cold meticulous perfection and the fact that it’s relatively easy to edit songs visually that digital recording has run amok. Every recording that you have likely ever heard (with the exception of maybe most classical and some jazz) has been heavily edited and processed to the point where it’s just so clean and perfect that bands, just to keep up and to not sound like they recorded something in their basement also have to have everything digitally recorded, processed and then edited. One irony is that the Garage Rock bands (all the ‘The’ bands) have their sound tweaked digitally to make it sound like it was recorded on old crappy vintage gear after it’s been cleaned and polished to sound perfect.

In our case, following a number of guitar takes the engineer proceeded to edit some guitar tracks not because they were off time, but because they had to be ‘mechanically’ perfect and sound like they were played by a robot. The problem with modern pop-rock music is that there is increasingly less room for things to sound human and to have those little imperfections that make the music feel real. The question then is whether to go the human route or to have one’s recording perfect? An extreme case of this was a band that came through the studio recently. The producer insisted that the drums be recorded without cymbals (to prevent bleed) and then have the cymbals recorded later. Similarly each guitar chord was recorded separately and then composited together. Madness.

I’ll be glad to be out of the studio soon.

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1. Editing usually involves the ‘cleaning’ of certain tracks of noise, muddy fades, guitar string noise, and other extraneous sounds. Occasionally this involves actually digitally fixing mistakes made by musicians such as waveform nudges and in more extreme cases, pitch correction for singers. The caveat is, of course that if one really can’t play or sing, then the editing becomes obvious. Lindsey Lohan is a good example.

It should be noted that classical music rarely has any of this high tech trickery. One reason is the technical superiority of musicians trained for a decade and a half on a given instrument. The other reason is that the perfection of the arrangement of the modern orchestra and the amphitheaters in which they're situated has been ongoing for hundreds of years - possibly the longest studio mix in history. It is no coincidence that the instruments are situated where they are within the orchestra in order to sound their best.