STRUMBUG PRODUCITON

STRUMBUG LOGO

Strumbug are a band I discovered while doing a live sound gig at the ‘Flaming Galah’ towards the beginning of the trimester. I was immediately interested in asking them if they wanted any music recorded because I enjoyed them so much and I was itching to record 4- or 5-piece rock band in the NEVE. After they agreed to come in, we planned on recording 3 tracks over a weekend simply because that’s all that they felt they were ready to do. It’s not necessarily for an EP or any kind of official release but the band were interested in recording some music as they haven’t done it in a professional environment before. I had to make a decision on whether to record the instruments separately and overdub everything or do the vast majority of the recording live at once. It was an easy one to make as the guys wanted to capture their music with more of a live feeling and since we only had one weekend to record three tracks it made sense.

DRUMS MIC'D

Now that we had a plan for the weekend, which was to record drums, bass and both guitars as beds on day one, then overdub vocals and guitars on day 2 I had to choose some microphones and make a production plan for the room. The drums were situated towards the back of the studio facing the control room with the two guitar amps in front facing the walls where the power sockets are. They were covered with blankets to isolate them a little but not too much, as I still wanted some bleed to add to the live sound. Bass guitar was DI’d. I chose to put a stereo pair of microphones on each of the guitar amps. The guitar which I assumed was playing most of the rhythm had a 57 and a Royer 121 right next to each other close mic’d to the amp face. I chose the 121 as its darker in tone and placed it slightly off center to the cone to reduce some of the brightness. I wanted more brightness out of the other guitar amp (which was playing more of the lead), so I used a 57 and an MD 421 close mic’d together and right up to the center of the cone. As an experiment, I popped up a U87 as a room mic facing the glass of the control room to see if I could get a mixable reflective room sound. The rest of the mics are listed here in the input list:

INPUT LIST AND MIC SELECTION

CHANNELS IN

On day 2, to record the vocals, I decided on a U87 with a pop filter as the singer has a nice high register and sits up there quite a lot. The pop filter was to try and get some of the sibilance out of his voice. Behind the U87, on the left and right, I put up a pair of Neuman KM184 and hard panned them left and right. Balancing them just up underneath the U87 in the center to create stereo width and to increase the perceptible size of the sound of his vocals.

VOCAL MIC TECHNIQUE

I’d also like to mention that on the first day of recording, Quinn came in a lent a hand with setting up the studio and helping throughout the day. The recording weekend was a great success, we got everything in that we wanted. Unfortunately, I only have a few days to get some mixes together before submission so I’ve just focused on the more important track and will roughly mix the other two to hand in.

The song I’ll be focusing on is titled Special K and was the first song we recorded on the day.

I started by getting levels and making panning choices. I mixed the drums from the drummer’s perspective this time just because I feels more natural to me to have the toms rolling from left to right. The snare and hats are positioned just to the left and overheads are hard panned left and right. I applied parallel compression to get the kit crack a bit more and in attempt to fatten up the kick drum, I created a mono AUX track and applied a signal generator at 60hz then gated and triggered this from one of my kick tracks to add some more low end punch. I levelled up the room mic only a little bit as it would get overpowering the higher I pushed it.

From the bed recordings, I panned one guitar track to the left and the other to the right then the overdubbed guitar just to the right of the center. Vocals sit right on top of everything with a decent high pass filter since he sings in quite a high register. On the vocal bus I have some hard compression as I didn’t want to spend too much time editing or automating balance, a slap back delay feeding into reverb to try and get kind of ‘washy’ psychedelic style vocal similar to Hendrix/ Clapton/ Robert Plant and a de-esser on the end in further attempt to attenuate the vocal sibilance. The guitars are all EQ’d differently to try and place them in their own space as they’re all sitting in a similar frequency band. I also added reverb to one of the tracks to get it to sit a bit further back. Across the board I applied a 3db EQ dip at 400Htz as I felt this was being a bit of a problem frequency adding unwanted muddiness. Finally, I applied a very subtle high pass on the bass guitar to remove unwanted rumble, slightly compressed and saturated for a bit of thickness (it sounded pretty good to begin with).

PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES

GATING (KICK AND SNARE)

A gate is a super helpful tool, it is a plugin or effect that will simply mute or attenuate a track when you want it to be. For example, when you have a kick drum, and you have all this kick drum bleed happening in between each hit, a gate will simply close or mute or gate off the unwanted noise and then only open the track when kick happens, so you hear the track when the kick is hitting. The bleed will be all sorts of muddy cymbal and snare noise that’s unwanted because the problem is, the moment you start processing, EQing, compression your nice kick drum track, you’re not just processing the kick drum, you’re also processing that microphone bleed which will bring up the overall noise in your mix. What you want to do is get rid of that with a gate.

“Imagine a multi-track drum recording: every microphone recorded the drum it was placed near to but also bleed from all the other elements of the kit.” (Stewart, 2017)

For the Kick:

I just used the stock Pro Tools Expander/ Gate. It looks very similar to the stock compressor with knobs like attack, threshold, release etc. What I did was set the ratio super high at 100:0:1 so when it kicks in it is really going to mute everything between the kick drum kits.

“The ratio affects how the gain reduction is applied to the signal when it’s below the threshold. For a simple gate ratio should be 100:1.” (Stewart, 2017)

After that press play and adjust the threshold from really low, until it’s only opening when the kick drum hits. This will get rid of ALL the bleed in between, but the problem is this now sounds unnatural. It’s closing off or gating back too quick and cutting off the end of the kick drum hit. That’s what the release control is for, you can fine tune this. Now you want to set a longer release, so it takes longer for the gate to close back to try and get it to sound more natural. When you play back the kick track it should sound a lot cleaner now.

“When the signal goes over the threshold, the attack determines how quickly the unit will stop reducing the gain. Hold is the time the gate will remain “open” (will not apply any gain reduction) even if the signal falls below the threshold.” (Stewart, 2017)

For the Snare:

Now I’m going to use the expander side of the plugin. An expander is just like a gate, only instead of muting it all the way, it reduces the volume significantly but not completely. This is ideal for snare drums. Snare drums have so many different nuances where the drummer will hit it lighter and harder at all different times so muting between each hit like on a kick won’t give you the best result. This time open the plugin and select the Snare Expander preset. You’ll see that it automatically choses to dial in a ratio of 1:4:1 meaning it’s not closing down nearly as hard as the 100:0:1 ratio. What I did next was adjust the threshold so it’s only affecting the snare then set the attack and release to where it sounded best. We now have a far tighter/ cleaner sounding drum kit that’s going to respond better to compression and processing in general.

MASTERING

I chose to do Mastering as a production technique simply because I’ve never done it before and want to hear the difference between a track mastered and unmastered with stock plugins as opposed to a track mastered in a mastering studio to get a better upstanding of what’s going on here.

First thing you want to do is create a new Pro Tools session all together and import your printed stereo track from the mix session. Create a stereo auxiliary track and title it SUBMIX (or whatever you want to call it). This is going to be the first place the print track will be routed to hit some effects. Select the output of the print track and chose a free stereo bus, then select that same stereo bus as your input on the aux track. We’re then going to set up a final print track (audio track) and route the SUBMIX output to the input of the new print track.

It might be a good thing to note at this point that before you print your audio track from your mix session, check your levels and ensure that it’s somewhere down around

-10db as there will be a lot of gaining up in the mastering process and you want to leave head room to do so.

Now, there’s a number of different things you can do in the mastering process but what I decided to do is apply a stock EQ on the SUBMIX channel and made some very very subtle cuts and boosts. Since this is affecting the overall track you don’t want to cut or boost any more than 3db.

“When mastering, subtlety and control are key. If you find yourself using an EQ and cutting 20 dB of something, you’ve got a problem in your mix. Every song will need a different approach, but it’s good to have a starting point. My typical starting point is EQ -> Compressor -> Limiter. Pro Tools has a wonderfully useful 7-band EQ and the stock presets for limiting on the D3 Compressor/Limiter are actually quite subtle.” (Vanacoro, 2014)

The EQing stage will be different for everyone but for me I added about a 2.4db boost right up on the very top end to give it a little more sparkle, dipped about 3db of around 200htz to clean up some muddiness and applied a subtle boost at 2k to let the guitars shine through. Next in the chain is the stock compressor with a clean limit preset and I lowered the threshold down to -11db in order to get the slightest bit of gain reduction. Next in the chain is the BF76 peak limiter to bring up levels slightly but then send this into another limiter (Maxim) and set the threshold to -6.5gb which is where it will be kicking in then adjust the ceiling to -3db.

“The concept of the brickwall limiter is simple. You have a volume point that you set just below ‘zero’ so that you don’t allow any clipping. The limiter will utilize an extremely high ratio to stop any audio that might ‘peak’ directly in its tracks. You then slowly raise the gain compensation to bring up the overall volume of the track to a higher point while the limiter prevents it from clipping.” (Vanacoro, 2014)

The reason why we’re using a compressor and two limiters is spread the workload across three plugins and compress/limit in stages so that no single plugin is doing all of the ‘heavy lifting’. We now have a nicely gained and EQ’d track that can be printed onto the final audio track and published with no concerns.

Take a listen to the mixed track here!

References

Vanacoro, M. (2014). 8 Essential Steps for Mastering in Pro Tools. Retrieved 23 August 2019, from https://ask.audio/articles/8-essential-steps-for-mastering-in-pro-tools

Stewart, G. (2017). Dynamic Processing: Using The Dyn3 Expander/ Gate. Retrieved 23 August 2019, from https://www.protoolsproduction.com/dynamic-processing-dyn3-expander-gate/