This time we'll detail my righteous recording experience at North Point Studio with head engineer Doug
Colosio. At an earlier session we went about capturing a solid rhythm bed to build our tracks on.
This was accomplished by isolating the drums in a separate room and recording the bass direct to tape. Our initial focus was getting these two instruments to sound fat and clear with a good performance and complete separation.
Once Doug dialed those tones in, the band performed the songs live with the vocals and guitar supplying temporary guide tracks . I used a preamp direct to the board with a little chorus and short delay. This way I could avoid assaulting the drum mikes and the control room environment with a blasting guitar amp at this critical stage of the session. Nothing good can come from a loss of separation, increased noise or a confused listening environment. The preamp helped me avoid all these hassles and delivered a tone worthy of inclusion on the final tracks. These clean tones would lay the foundation for the distortion smorgasbord that was yet to come.
It's important to mention at this point that we were well-rehearsed on the material and had complete trust in the engineer and each other.
Each of the beds was nailed in anywhere from one to three takes. Sometimes you just get it right the first time, which is very gratifying, but sometimes a little warm-up is needed. Small mistakes can be punched in later but the track has to have a certain integrity to be a valid foundation.
Once we finished the beds, I was inspired, so I went home and made a list of the tones to be used on each song. I carefully planned my attack over the next month which really helped me to develop the tracks and orchestrate my guitar.
Finally I came in to do my guitar tracks, again quite prepared and ready to unload after working the main structure out in advance. I always leave room to improvise, though, because there is a certain beauty in letting go that I crave.
I brought an arsenal of tone toys , but settled on a Strat, my Mesa Boogie and my Ibanez 808 tube screamer to do my bidding. This combination, along with Doug's engineering skills yielded quite a variety of killer distortion tones. First we printed any tones that were similar for each of the three songs, starting with medium crunch, doubled rhythm parts, wah-wah parts or secondary lead fills, in that order. Most of these were recorded at lower volume with a single mike up close. The main lead tones were done with the Boogie's distortion channel and/or the tube screamer with the amp cranked up a bit. For these tracks an additional room mike was added to give a bit more ambiance and a different tone.
It's important when layering multiple guitars not to overload the same frequency range and make all the parts sound the same. They have to fit together with each other and the rest of the track. It's also very important to eliminate as much noise as possible. To achieve this, Doug punched each part in and out to avoid unnecessary hi-gain amp noise when the guitars weren't playing. One really neat trick that we did was a three part harmony solo. We put the melody in the center of the stereo spectrum with the cranked-amp/room mic set up for that track. Then I recorded the two harmony parts with the Boogie on a low-volume, high-gain sound. These two parts were then placed hard left and right in the stereo field. It was quite a sweet sound indeed. It can be very effective panning parts hard right and left as long as they are reasonably identical. If they are too different, the hard panning will make them stand out in a distracting way.
Considering the overall picture is very important in recording. The Tone Ranger considers Doug Colosio the man in this regard. His ability to hear frequencies comes from many years of experience in the trenches of live sound reinforcement. He gets the Tone Ranger's "Golden Ear" award and best wishes in his career as an engineer and studio musician.
'Till next time, have fun searching for killer tone.