Guitars:
Josh has a very specific approach to guitar tones. It is basically use anything no one else is using. If it said Marshall, Vox, Fender or Gibson on it… it was strictly of limits. He had been using mostly Ampeg bass amps (V4B) for guitar leading up to the making of this record. He wanted to add a new element to this record and was excited about trying some solid state amps. I suggested that we go to Black Market music because they always had stacks of crappy cheap solid state guitar amps sitting around there. We went there and bought several old Peavy solid state amps (various versions of the ‘Musician’ series). Those amps got incorporated into the setups. His thinking was if everyone is using these expensive vintage tube amps than I will use cheap shitty solid state amps. The main guitar sound on “No One Knows” was a combination of 3 amps. It was one of the Peavy solid state amps, an Ampeg VT40 and this crazy Tube Works amp that he pulled out of storage. The guitar sounds were challenging. Sometimes the sound coming out of the amps was not particularly musical and at the very least intensely unconventional. I would put a lot of mics in front of the amps and in the room so there would be a lot to choose from in the control room. I would just start playing with combinations of mics and amps until something would fall into place. One thing that was pretty consistent with micing is that we tended to use off axis positions for the mics. The amps were so scratchy and gritty sounding that it just didn’t work to put a mic anywhere near the cone of the speaker. His main guitar at the time was an Ovation electric guitar. It had a somewhat dull sound that worked well for the tuned down fuzzy sound. The only fuzz pedal used was a Foxx octave fuzz of some sort. It belonged to Alain Johannes. I have to say the guitar sounds were difficult. It took a lot of patience and experimentation to get the sounds that ended up on the record. Here is a pic from one of the guitar tracking setups. you can see one of my over zealous efforts to find a mic that would compliment the sound coming out of the Ampeg V4B.
There were not a lot of pedals being used. The only other pedal I remember Josh using occasionally was a Super Hard On pedal to push the amps harder.
We started out using the V4B while we were tracking basics but ultimately didn’t use it much on the record. There was an Ampeg VT-40 that was used much more. For example the guitar on ‘First It Giveth’ was all VT40. The VT-40 had more gain in the amp and yes the volume was typically all the way up. He also used a Super Hard On pedal for extra gain when it was needed.
I tried about a billion different mics and positions through the course of that record. I definitely started to settle on the further back pointed at the center of the 4 speakers type approach. That mic position emphasizes a really cool part of the mid range. Josh likes a lot of 600hz in his guitar sound. This micing style made it so we didn’t have to use EQ to get that mid range quality. I was having the best luck with condensers (U87, C37A). The picture in this thread was from the week or so we spent at a different studio (The Site) in Marin, CA. I moved the session to The Site because I felt there were too many distractions in LA. The Site is a live in studio out in the woods. There is very little to do there other than record music. They have a large sound room, but I believe the sounds that people seem to be the most fond of (No One Knows, First It Giveth, Go With The Flow) were recorded at my place in the same small iso booth that the drums were recorded in.
DRUMS:
For all of the heavier dry stuff we used my Sonor Phonic Plus kit. The snare was either the Tama Bell Brass or the Pearl Export I mentioned in another thread. All these really dry sounding drums were recorded in the iso booth at my studio. The booth is somewhat unique because it is a small room but with a high ceiling. I didn’t want the drums to just sound like close mics but it still needed to sound really dry. That drum booth has a really great boxy claustrophobic sound to it. On the SFTD album you can really hear that the drums are in an identifiable acoustic space but still dry. The drum micing was pretty minimal. There was a kick mic RE20, an NS10, a Left Kit mic (C12A), Center mic CMV-3, Right Kit Mic (C12A), snare close mic (633A salt shaker), a small speaker set up as a mic on the snr, a pair of C37As for room mics. There were other setups for different songs. some of the stuff had more room sound that we recorded out in the big room. Although, the big room at that time still had carpet on the floor and was quite dead. there were no samples used on the drums. The sample-esque quality is most likely due to the super human consistency of Dave Grohl’s playing.
Because the plan on this project was to do the cymbal overdub thing for the entire album, we used a special set up to help make the tracking of the basics a little more tolerable. We set up electronic V-drum cymbal pads for Dave to play while playing the main drum pass. This way every one could at least hear the sound of cymbals while the band was playing. It worked pretty good. It would have been to weird/disorientating to play all of those songs without hearing any cymbals.
After all the drums were tracked and comp’d (with a razor blade) for the whole album we set up to overdub all the cymbals. The cymbals were printed on the same 16 track master as the drums. They were on 4 tracks. There was a stereo pair that was either just the over heads (KM84s) or the overheads with some room mics (C37As) blended in. There was a close mic on the hihat (M582) and the ride cymbal (M582). I am not 100% sure about the mic choices… pretty sure though. We set up a dummy snare and toms for Dave to make it easier for him to duplicate the performances.
Dave has unlimited energy and endurance for playing drums and is pretty much always excited to play more drums. About half way through overdubbing these cymbal parts was the only time I have ever seen him get a little flustered. At one point he shouted “Who’s f***ing idea was this anyway!!!”. He quickly regained his composure and continued playing the shit out of the cymbals.
The benefit of overdubbing cymbals is that you have way more flexibility in how you can mic and mix the drums. There is no problem of the cymbals taking over the room mics, or getting into the snare mic too much etc. The downside is that it can be seriously disorientating for the drummer and make hard for him to feel the parts the way he/she normally would. I actually don’t do it very often. The decision to do it on almost everything on this record was really more Josh’s thing. He has a serious aversion to cymbals.
there are 2 songs that didn’t do the separate cymbal thing ‘Another Love Song’ and ‘Song For The Dead’
There are few things I use for damping drums. I use moon gel, tape/tissue and on snares I really like these levered damper type things (I’ve never had to describe this before so I am not sure what to call it). At some point I cut up a leather guitar strap. It has enough weight to it that it does a good job of dampening over tones on a snare drum if it is just sitting on the head. It is light enough that it would probably fly off of the drum after 10 hits or so. I take one piece of tape to secure the leather piece to the rim of the drum to prevent it from moving around but doesn’t stop it from bouncing up a little when the drum is hit. It makes the drum sound almost gated without have a gate on it. When the drum is hit the damper bounces up and lets drum ring open for an instant and then it falls back down to keep it from ringing uncontrollably. I started doing this because I whenever I got the damping enough to control the ringing the drum hit itself was getting to muted sounding. this style of damping makes it so you get the full sound of the drum when you hit it and the dampening only affects the sustained ring.
Dave is definitely not picky about drums, tuning or setups. I usually recommend to drummers to bring their own kick pedal and drum sticks. He didn’t care about any of that shit. He will sit down on what ever is set up with whatever drum sticks and play the shit out of it.
I have been very lucky to have had opportunities to record many really really talented drummers from Dave Grohl to Dennis Chambers. It is my experience that the really really gifted players are not picky about what they play. This is a generalization and there are exceptions, but it seems like the pickier the drummer, the less confident they are about their ability to play.
The LCR technique is more possible on this record because of the cymbals being overdubbed. There are basically no close mics on the recording. There is no need for it because I am not battling cymbal bleed. The L and R mics were my C12As and the C mic was a Neumann CMV-3. I did have a close mic on the snare but I wasn’t using it in any of the rough mixes working on the record. The L mic hovers over the left side of the kit and gets more of the rack tom. The C is pointed directly at the snare and the R hovers over the right side of the kit and gets more of the Floor Tom. They are all placed to be equal distances from the snare, about 3 feet away.
The entire record was recorded with Quad 8 mic pres. I had bought a vintage Quad 8 console that had come from Oral Roberts tv studio. It also had Quad 8 444 EQs as well. I decided to use those pres and EQs for pretty much everything through out to give the record a distinct sound.
Guidance/ His role as producer:
The vision for QOTSA/SFTD was definitely driven by Josh. He had a very strong sense of what he wanted to do with the music and the sound. I think the biggest difference on the record I did was that I was more willing to indulge any and all of the very contrarian approaches that Josh loves. I think the SFTD album was the closest Josh ever got to exactly what he was hearing in his head. The challenge was interpreting some of the very abstract ideas and descriptions and getting them to come out of the speakers. The main thing I pushed for on the production side of things was to keep the arrangements concise. I wanted this record to be a bit more distilled than some of the previous stuff. QOTSA has never been short on cool ideas, I just wanted to get straight to the cool stuff and not linger on the in between stuff.
Tape:
(How much was done on tape?) Pretty much all of it. The couple of exceptions are: some of the cymbal overdubs and the segue bits in between the songs.
There was a point when doing the cymbal overdubs when Dave was getting a little frustrated about half way through. It was tedious. There was a lot of punching and trying things over and over to make sure the cymbals matched the drum parts accurately and were really tight. I switched over to tracking directly to the computer about half way through because I could feel that it needed move faster. i also felt like this was one place where human looseness was not benefiting things (human looseness being a quality that is highly regarded in the QOTSA camp). It is not normal to have a drummer break up the kit that way and when the cymbals are out of sync with the drums it causes a disconnect in the feel. I did do a quite a bit of editing on the cymbals simply to make them sound like the same performance as the drums.
My favorite tape formulations in the past were 3M 996 (for high level) and Ampex 456 (for a more vintage sound). We used Ampex 456 on the QOTSA record. There are only 2 choices at this point either ATR Magnetics or RMG. ATR only has one formulation which is a high level style tape. RMG has 900 (high level) and 911 (vintage style) formulations. They all have some issues for some reason and don’t seem to be as reliable as the old stuff. I have been using the ATR tape for mixing and it has been doing pretty good. I am going to try the ATR tape for multitrack this fall. We will see how it does!
I did not work on the whole record. That was part of the plan from the beginning. Josh had some specific people he had in mind for mixing. The project took an unexpectedly long time. There was a point towards the end of the process when Josh decided he wanted to do a month of playing shows in Europe with Masters Of Reality. That month long break pushed the schedule back far enough for it to run into other things for me. They went to Conway to mix the record with Adam Kasper. They ended up adding another song “The SKy Is Falling” and rerecorded “Do It Again”. The rerecord of Do It Again was unfortunate. I think the version we had of that song had the same kind of magic as “No One Knows”, “Go For The Flow”, “Millionaire” etc.
Overall Adam did a brilliant job of mixing the record. He took some approaches that were different than what I would have done that were a cool surprise when I heard the final thing.
(found on
Gearslutz.com)
