We recorded this at Greaseland Studios located in San Jose CA engineered by Chris Anderson. His studio has tons of old microphones and guitar amps and he recorded our record to hard disk using Pro Tools. We recorded 11 songs live and mixed in two 9 hour days. A true budget success! After listening back to the final mixes, the only things which stood out to me were more mid-range on the guitar than I prefer and drum levels were a tad lower than I desired. Now the thought was; does this go back to the mixing engineer to pull some of the mid range frequencies off the guitar track only or see if I can smooth this out in the mastering process knowing that doing this in mastering will affect all of the instruments and vocal frequencies. I opted to go the mastering route first and was able to identify the offending frequency and pull it back slightly which gave me the desired result. The next question was should I use compression or not. After listening to the mixes without compression then listening to them with a analog compression plug-in I felt the compression helped bring out the drums a bit and overall glued the sound together without compromising our tones and the overall rawness we wanted. I opted not to use any reverb or delay during mastering as I felt this did not enhance the sound and took away from some of the natural room sound we captured. Plus the reverb and delay would take away from that loud in your face sound we were going after. Also using an analog compressor / limiter plug-in I was able to push the levels up for even more rawness without clipping/distorting the recording. I think of it similar to when your tubes have a nice glow to them when they’re being pushed.
The result is an album which we feel captures the essences of the band.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
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