Follow-up: Heavy guitars and attack, hating life less (NEVER delete your scratch tracks)

[ben_allison]

Heavy guitars and attack: I'm hating life. (http://thewombforums.com/showthread.php?t=12396)

Part one is in the thread linked above.

So, I'm working on this song. It's a decent song, and just wasn't coming together. Guitars needed to be heavy-ish, but too much gain and attack goes bye-bye. Too little, and they don't have balls.

I'm still dying to hear back from Slip (I imagine he's two, maybe three sheets to the wind at the moment), but in the mean time, I'm trying to see if I can beat this song into submission.

So, te drums had been bothering me. A lot. So, I went back to my original drum tracks, and re-comped them. NOW, I'm not really needing to RELY on samples, I'm just using them to give a bit more weight where needed. For example, instead of eq/compressing the shit out of the floor tom which has a bit too much cymbal bleed to make doing so practical, I'm tucking a sample underneath.

So, the kit's sounding decent.

Now, when I was browsing through the ORIGINAL Logic project to grab the drums, I noticed two rhythm guitar tracks.

So I listened to them.

It was like manna from heaven.

WTF? They're about 80-90% of the way there. Why I hadn't I just used them all along? Who knows. Newer is supposed to better. I guess?

So, I threw them in the current, working project and I'm not hating life as much! They fit the mix better, they relate to the vocal intensity better, and now that the DRUMS are working properly, I'm not counting on the guitars to provide PUNCH like I had been.

Compare for yourself:

Original
http://www.roestudios.com/dump/warzone_mix.wav

Extra Crispy
http://www.roestudios.com/dump/warzone_remixed.wav

Moral of the story: don't delete your scratch tracks.

[Brendo]

the question i think is more why did you feel you had to redo em in the first place?

[Holm]

the question i think is more why did you feel you had to redo em in the first place?
I'm not Ben but I can offer this. When you are inexperienced you have no real knowledge or experience to determine if anything you have laid down works or not. So you tend to measure the worth of particular input via secondary means - and the 'effort poured into something' creeps pretty high on the list. The amount of mics used, the more time you had spent swapping said mics, the more expensive gear used, that you spent the night before putting really good strings on your guitar.

It is similar as artists measure the worth of the engineer about how much time he spends for a task like putting up mics on a drumkit. If the engineer uses measuring tape on everything, swaps mics for every source 5 times and so on he is working really hard - meaning he is really good. If the old guy throws up less mics and won't swap them he is lazy and that is the reason why your best friends first ever studio recording turned out shit.

[ben_allison]

Good observations into the psyche of a n00b, Holm!

That's partly true.

The notion, "These were intended to be scratch tracks and only took me 5 minutes to record," can wreak havoc on your ability to hear what is actually going on.

"But I didn't move the mic around a bunch."

"I didn't try playing it a bunch of different ways."

Etc.

Also, and what was even more responsible: preconceptions.

"MAN! I really love the tones from the last Killswitch record... big and spongey... I want those. Hey! I also love the tones from the last Underoath record... maybe some of that."

The problem is:

- I don't play like them
- I don't write like them
- I don't have the same recording chains as them

So this was really a lesson in "Fitness for Purpose."

Being inspired is great, but you need to respect the songs and tools in front of you.

So I think both of those things (1, preconceptions of what constitutes due-diligence and 2, allowing inspiration to overtake approaching the elements on their own terms) resulted in a clusterfuck.