Anomaly Production Trivia #3 - Guitars
June 5, 2019
The guitar track was recorded at Brendan's house. Its a simple bedroom setup like most recording setups these days. The basic signal chain for the recording was not just a simple amp to mic setup like normal. The approach taken is what some refer to as the Clayman Tone. Glenn Fricker of the Youtube channel, Spectre Sound Studios created a video on how this tone was created so we decided to use the similar technique; and boy was it a REVELATION! The tone created from this was much better than we expected!
Basically you use two microphones, one ON axis and the other OFF axis and then blend them in a small 2 or more channel mixer. Each mic has a different capture purpose, like one mic is a dark mic and the other is a brighter microphone. You can then blend them using the mixing desk to get the tone you want and then record just that tone! The idea is to settle on a sound you like to begin with and stay with. We did just that with guitar tracking and the result was spectacular!
We also recorded the clean tone tracks of the guitars to use to blend with some digital amps but a decision was made to not use them in the final mix.
Signal Chain
In Order
- Ibanez RG560
- Radial Engineering J48 DI Box
- Pedal board
- Tuner / Buffer
- Custom 2 Channel A/B box
- HBE Detox EQ pedal
- BMC Guitar FX xCF-1 pedal (experimental distortion pedal)
- BMC Guitar FX Lithium Overdrive pedal
- Orange Dual Terror amp
- Tiny Terror channel with the Gain on 2 o'clock position
- Sunn T412 cabinet
- Sennheiser E609 microphone (ON speaker axis - WGS ET65 speaker)
- Cheapo electronics store vocal microphone (OFF speaker axis - Celestion G12 T75 speaker)
- Carillon X-6 mixer
- Secondhand MAudio BOX2
- Reaper DAW
In 99% of the tracks, the guitar was recorded twice on two different tracks but was NOT mixed the same way as your general run of the mill Left Right guitar tracking. The guitar were mixed in a such a way that one guitar presents as the mono, centre signal and the other presents as the side, stereo signal.
The idea for the guitar mixing was to present a guitar sound that sounds like ONE guitar and not two different guitars. The band only has one guitar player and we wanted present a mix that sounded like one guitarist not more. This method also allows the music to sound good in both mono (phone speakers etc..) and stereo as well.
The overdriven guitar were mixed quite subtly. The flabby bottom end was rolled off to open up room in the tail to the drums and bass. The mids and highs added to bring a bit more sparkle to the top end. Normally the Dual Terror is quite a honky sounding amp but the two mic / mixing desk method give much better handling on the tone.
Clean Tones
The same overdrive tone was used to create the clean tones but this was achieved using the HBE Detox EQ pedal. This pedal is a fantastic tool for cleaning up a distorted tone to give a nice clean tone with a slight amount of tube / pedal overdrive "hair" on the note.
Lead tones
The xCF-1 pedal was used in conjunction with the Lithium overdrive and amplifier overdriven tubes to create a nice creamy sounds. This is how the tone is played live as well. Delays and FX were added on after the recording.
Acoustic guitar
An acoustic was used for some solos and clean work on Transverse. Recorded directly into the DAW via the J48 DI box.
Anomaly Production Trivia #2 - Drum Recording
June 5, 2019
We recorded the drums on the 1st of September 2018. This was done by Mr Marvellous himself, Brent Henshaw of Bertofsky Production Services. They were recorded using ProTools at The Bassment Studio in Belmont Queensland.
Nothing special was done with the recording of the drums. They werent running through some magical, overpriced preamps nor was any addition tweaking done on the day, mostly due to time constraints on the day. The tracks were EQ'd and compressed in post.
We recorded a sub kick as well but this was not used in the final mix. We used a home made trigger using a piezo pickup that Brendan made for Ty so that he could hear his kick at rehearsal through his foldback.
The trigger was invaluable for setting a fast side chain to a gate on Franks bass tracks. Each time the kick triggered, this forced a gate on the track to close for roughly the length of the trigger transient in order to allow the kick to stand out better and stop the bass guitar from taking all the bottom end.
Ty used three snare drums on the Anomaly album; his normal snare drum, an older spongy "high school drummer" sounding snare (which turned out better than we thought) and a small firecracker snare for that poppy/funky *snap* of sound.
Here is a drum play through of the Anomaly track.
Anomaly Recording Trivia
June 3, 2019
Each album that we do, we produce a series of short blurbs and articles sharing the details on how we recorded and produced the album. The idea is to share some of the behind the scenes stuff, some of the nerdier parts of our music and how it was made and what we did. Some of you might like this and garner something from it for yourself; or you might be just into the hows and whys of music.
So without further ado, here we go!
Most of the musical basis for the Anomaly guitar part and main melodic structure were written without an instrument. All the guitar parts were written using a music writing program called Power Tab. Brendan wrote the parts into the program using a random selection of notes that adhered to a preset of rules and conditions. The idea was to create a song without using an instrument to bias the creative process and creative thought and to see what would come out without trying to jam out a song the old fashioned way.
The song itself is very odd meter heavy. Lots of time signature changes through out and contains very little four four (4/4) time signatures. This was one of the limitations in the writing; to keep the standard time signatures like 4/4 to a minimum and keep the music interesting without sounding too disjointed.
As you can see above, the guitar part for the intro is quite over the top with time signatures. The music written down for Anomaly was only arranged in segments like the figure below. Note that these are just notes and are incomplete in some parts.
Each segment was altered once the band got onto learning how the piece moved and eventually evolved into the final track! Here is a guitar play through video demonstrating the guitar part for Anomaly
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