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TIC Diary Part IV – FINAL TOUCHES
The final story for this short diary is about mastering. Most folks don’t know it but the three main parts to recording are: Recording, Mixing and Mastering. Each part has a significant impact on the product you hear. Look at recording as the ingredients in the cake, mixing as making the cake, and master as the frosting on the cake. You can still have a great piece of plain cake, but the frosting really adds the final step to the taste buds. Mastering is called the “black art” of recording. They set the levels for radio, level all the sounds, raise base or other frequencies where required. The only thing you bring with you to the mastering studio is a hard drive with your mix. If you hear a side-by-side comparison of the same song well mixed, and then mastered it is very noticeable.
Since I believe mastering is very important to the final product I want to go with the best I could afford. As it turns out I could afford arguably the second best mastering engineer in the country. Ted Jensen works for Sterling Sound in New York City. That is a two-hour ride for me. I realized if I decided early on in mixing that I would go with him – it would also raise the mixing engineers expectations. I chose Greg Dicrosta to mix because I heard his mixing and liked the sounds he got. But he raised his game knowing his mixes were going to be handled by Ted Jensen.
For mastering you are allowed to sit in on the sessions for questions and comments. I decided to take Greg and Mike with me into the city to do this.
At the time Mike was growing a beard and at this time it was a cold fall. So he was wearing a black winter pull over hat. Combined with a camouflage jacket that looked like he had just gotten out of Vietnam, he literally looked like a homeless guy. We teased him mercilessly has we went through the city because even in New York he got a few looks.
We should up for 10am appointment at Sterling Sound and they have a gorgeous facility complete with a stocked kitchen with everything imaginable. We dropped our bags in Ted’s waiting room and noticed an plaque with thirteen or so CDs in there, each indicating platinum sales levels of the Eagles Hotel California album. This was Ted’s big start in the business. Ted’s most recent project was Metallica’s much-anticipated Death Magnetic. We were nervous, and I sure was –it was my music he was going to be hearing.
Ted comes out to the kitchen and grabs us. We go to his studio, which over looks the water and New Jersey shore. Amazing. The speaker system alone was valued at well over 100k. He asks for the drive and start working “What If”.
About half way through the song he pauses it and turns around to us sitting on the couch behind him and says “you know when I saw you guys out there I didn’t expect much”, of course Greg and I eye ‘homeless’ Mike. Ted continues “but this stuff sounds really good”. I was floored. He talked a little more about how he really like the sound of the acoustic guitars and he noted that the mix had the proper balance especially in the low end. Our heads were big when we left.
As it turned out Ted was from the same town in Connecticut that Greg and Mike were originally from. He also started by playing horns as Greg did before he got into audio engineering. We spent the day there, enjoy our previous months work with an ultra professional, lived with nice compliments. Speaking for myself at least – it was a pinnacle moment of the entire recording project. It was impossible not to feel auspicious.
TIC Diary Part III – HERE IS WHERE THE HARD PART STARTS
Most of my previous studio time was spent either recording someone else or doing just really rough demos on outdated equipment. I had taken for granted watching professionals record and was under the impression it would be a snap to follow suit since I had already seen this a hundred times before.
The truth is that recording basic guitars was the hardest part both physically and mentally for me throughout the whole process. I am not a professional guitar player – but I have been playing guitar for 20 years. Never did I feel like as much like a rookie as I did the first day we went to record the acoustic guitars. Every song has acoustic guitars and to me it’s the most key instrument other than the voice on the CD so it was pretty important to do right.
To get that true stereo image of the guitars I had recently (in the past 24 months) sold a bunch of guitars and bought two custom R. Taylors. (rtaylorguitars) (see Castor and Pollux blog/video). These guitars are identical in size, shape and configuration except the types of wood they are made of. They have very different sounds. One is brighter, the other more thick on the low end. The technique we picked to record a stereo image of the acoustic guitars ended up being a highlight of sound as far as I am concerned. We took one guitar at a time, put two microphones on the 12th fret in an XY pattern and put that guitar on the LEFT speaker. Then we recorded the exact same thing using the other guitar and put it on the RIGHT speaker. The trick to this was the difficulty in playing something EXACTLY the same every time. Every up stroke, every nuance, every rhythm had to be the same or it sticks out worse than a sore thumb. The first go around took me about 6-8 hours to record just the rhythm acoustic guitars. It was frustrating and humbling but by the end of the project I had that time cut down quite a bit.
All the guitars including leads are “doubled” and this challenge ended up being quite rewarding. Doing leads required the same skill but it is how that big full sound comes out. For the leads I primarily used two guitars – a custom Hembry guitar (www.hembryguitars.com) which allows me to mix a sound that is softer. The primary electric guitar is a trust Paul Reed Smith I bought used years ago that is the color of blue jeans. It is aptly named BJ for Blue Jean. This guitar is always in tune, has a sound that can’t be matched, is well intonated and plays like butter. Everyone that visits the studio that plays that guitar on a recording knows it has the “mojo”.
Vocals were done in a few weeks. They were done last – well actually background vocals are done very last but lead vocals are the part where everything comes together. One problem with me is I am not a full time singer. Meaning I don’t sing every day, I have atrocious habits, and my voice changes a lot depending on how much I sing or don’t. I took lessons for about a year some time ago and they really helped me get comfortable with my voice. Most folks spend all the time trying to sound like someone else, instead of getting their own voice. The human voice is an awesome instrument and to date is impossible to duplicate with computers. The dynamic range of any voice compared to any other instrument is amazing.
I really wanted to sing one song at a time and take a break of a week or so. But with independent productions and scheduling issues it came down to me having about 2-3 weeks to sing all the lead vocals. Mike enjoyed the part where my voice would break up after about two hours of singing. After about four hours into singing my voice would start to give but I could hit the high notes more easily. Each song had hundreds of takes throughout and we mixed and matched what we thought would get the song across the best.
I bought a new microphone the Telefunken U47 modeled after the most famous of all microphones –the U47 by Neumann. Since those are no longer made – Telefunken makes them, they are amazing microphones. If I am two feet away from the mic and rub my fingers together this microphone will pick up that noise. After talking with them I wished I had left the microphone on for weeks at a time because it sounds even better when its warmed up for days. The intro to Outside Looking Inside was sung after that mic was accidentally left on for a week. To my ears I hear a difference.
The learning curve continues and thankfully we humans can evolve…
TIC Diary Part II – GETTING STARTED
In my case just sitting down and recording was not an option. We needed to have a road map for where we were going. Ground zero was the songs. We needed to go over some songs, have some long talks about what sound I was looking for, and finally start getting our fingers dirty by actually recording.
TIC DIARY Part I – HOW IT ALL BEGAN
A lot of listeners have an idea of what it takes to make a CD but they don’t really know the details. Some could even say “the music is in the details” and they are not far off. Every stroke, every color and every shape is what makes a painting speak to you. With music, every note, every nuance, every choice is made so that your point is getting across. This series will discuss many of the details, starting from the beginning and finishing with the final product. You will find out how and why choices were made and you will see how even an independent production takes a significant amount of effort.