Anatomy of a ZomBOOsical
Part Two: Recording From Afar
Sadly, I live in a different place to John, Moe and Hilden. Very different, over 4,000 miles away different actually. I really wanted to keep an active involvement with the ZomBOOsical after heading home and we’d already tried musical collaboration over the internet before with the Shmopera and it worked surprisingly well.
So how does it work? Well more often than not I’d get a mail or something from Hilden with an mp3 of a rough track that they were working on with some vague ideas of what they need on the guitar and what bpm the track would be set to. As luck would have it, Hilden and I both use Logic Pro on the Mac so our process for recording and mixing is very similar, which made the process a little smoother. On top of the direct emails, I’d be chatting with John on a pretty much daily basis via Skype, MSN, Email and Facebook chat to keep up to date with what’s going on and input the occasional idea here and there.
My thought process for recording was to provide Hilden with as dry and raw a sound file as I could so that he could easily edit and mix later on to fit with the other things he had. This can be quite a difficult thing to achieve, you want to provide enough EQ to give direction to how you think it should sound but not enough that it limits or forces the mix in a particular direction. Electric guitar is also fun given that you’re generally talking about adding a truck load of different effects to get ‘that sound’ so another balance to hit for example was ‘how much delay and reverb’.
The way I approached these issues was to create a rough mix with all instruments included as a reference point to a) where my parts should be time-wise and b) a rough idea of how I’d mix it. That’s mainly where things sit in the stereo mix, how much effects I’d go with a rough EQ pass. Following that file I’d send each separate audio track with a small amount of EQ, minimal effects and no stereo mix.
One of the things that I wanted to make sure that I captured with the actual performances when recording was the ‘recorded on the spot with minimal thought process’ feel that we had from the first session. Thankfully, the way I approach recording guitar melody/lead work is to set the section I’m working on into a loop, hit record and improvise for a few runs. From there I’ll either find one of the performances that I already love or listen through them all and pick out the bits that I think worked and record what I call a Frankenstein Track, all the bits I like stitched together.
As a treat, here’s some of the guitar work that I did that didn’t make it into the final tracks…
Safe House Rendezvous:
This was a really hard track, the initial roughs that I was sent were great but seemed a little hollow and needed something to thicken out the sound. We weren’t sure exactly what was needed so I spent a week just playing around and experimenting with every kind of amp and effect.
All told there were 3 tracks here on guitar, a rhythm, a melody/rhythm and a solo at the end. The solo came out of nowhere, one of those one-take improv wonders that I just loved first time.
Unfortunately, in the meantime Hilden had recorded some additional parts and tidied up the mix and it just worked better without guitars. I still have a place for the guitar mix ton my iPod – it definitely has a very different feel to it!
Safe House Rendezvous – Guitar Mix
Finale:
The finale was a fun track to record; I had all sorts of crazy ideas for this one but very little time to do them. One of my first ideas was to have a very delayed guitar picking the root note of each chord in a triplet pattern – think David Gilmour’s work on Run Like Hell/Another Brick in the Wall. It always sounded good in my head whilst I was playing it but as soon as I listened back it just didn’t sound how I’d hoped. Moving on from that I simply went with some distorted power chords for the first half.
The second half gave me loads of ideas, all told I recorded 6 guitar tracks with an understated solo at the end. There was a wah-wah porn guitar style harmony, some chunky Drop-D chords and some clean arpeggio work on a double Drop-D tuned guitar. Maybe I went a little overboard… unfortunately I didn’t get this stuff over to Hilden in time to make the release date and get mixed so it didn’t make the cut.
ZomBOOSical Finale – Guitar Version
I get asked a lot about what gear I’m using, so I’ll give a quick rundown. For the tracks recorded in the US, I was using Hilden’s Squire Stratocaster and Fender Jazz Bass hooked up directly to Logic using some of the software amp/effect combo’s – I was really surprised at how good it sounded without any major hardware!
My own gear at home is pretty basic; for the most part I’m taking the guitar direct into a Line 6 XT Live with some amp/effect/tones that I usually use for my own stuff. This is then plugged directly into my Mac and into Logic for recording.
Guitars:
Ibanez JEM DNA
PRS 513
PRS Custom 24
I have a couple of settings that I tend to use in Logic when recording guitar as a default. First I’ll apply an expander dynamic but only have it very low in the mix, I’ll have a basic EQ to slightly increase the 3-5k frequencies, which is a bit of a sweet spot for lead guitar. Depending on the tone I’ll also apply a little compressor into the mix, usually for rhythm parts.
In summary, I really enjoyed working on this. Working with these guys is so much fun, so natural and incredibly productive. I know we’re all really proud of what we wrote and recorded here, the lack of time it happened in and that we can share it with you awesome folk. Personally, I can’t wait to get started on the next project and see if we can top ourselves again, and laugh half as much at the ridiculous lyrics.
Phil
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Tags: guitar, phil haymes, zomboosical
November 9th, 2009 at 12:05 am
I love the riff at 2:50ish of the final track. It’s really cool to get a behind the scenes peak at these outtakes–thanks for sharing Phil!
November 11th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
No one else has anything to say to Mr. Haymes? FOR SHAME.
November 15th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Thanks man, glad you liked the stuff ^_^