The Porcupine's Dream (Part I)

Tyrannosaurus Mouse and our recording of The Porcupine's Dream.
This is actually the last take we did. The slate stopped working and the cameras ended up being... er... not in sync. But this slower version of the song is my favorite.
I'm very happy with my guitar sound. Ethan's bass sound is the best bass sound I've ever personally recorded. I especially dig Greg's slide guitar. Lou is playing an electronic kit with Native Instruments Studio Drummer sounds. The Studio Drummer kit mixes so easily. The hi hats are so smooth and the kick just sounds great without any work.

I've been cheating in a variety of ways. The compressors are mostly (emulated) LA2A's but I'm also putting many or most channels through (emulated) Pultec EQ's using that trick of boosting and attenuating the same frequencies. To me it makes the low end more... well more, but without being muddy.
Most of the channels are hitting multiple compressors before they even get to the master buss. At the master buss I have three limiters: a Samplitude "Ammunition" M/S compressor/limiter, and two Fairchild (emulation) stereo limiters set very very lightly -- one being stereo and the other being in M/S mode.
Oh, and another limiter on the master buss is the Samplitude "advanced dynamics" mostly lifting up the bottom part of the dynamics which is function that's almost impossible to explain but which I've discovered recently and sounds freaking noice.

Hedonic Treadmill

Diatomaceous Earth. This is a mix from our last recording (March 4th, 2016). Lou Clark on drums, Ethan Rosenblatt on bass guitar, Greg Bartus and me (Andrew Bellware) on guitars.

Hedonic Treadmill was just an end-of-the-night jam. Could it be shorter? Probably. Will it be? I... I don't know.

I could make a guess about what we're all playing through. Greg through his preamp rack and then into... hmm... Maybe the ART tube preamp? Probably. Ethan is certainly going direct into the ART tube preamp (the other channel). I'm going through a Kemper profiler amp and then into a Lindell mic preamp. Lou is playing sounds from the Abbey Road late 60's kit.
The bass is going through a GK amp simulator. And everybody's getting hit with noise reduction and a wide variety of compression.

Session prep

I list some songs for the Diatomaceous Earth combo video/album here.

You'd think the Lehle volume pedal would be the active volume pedal to beat, wouldn't you? Of course, it's almost $300.

Greg pointed out that this session, Diluvia, has some very interesting things on it. Meaning the first two tunes.

An Album's Worth

Greg Bartus sent me some stuff to listen to before we play together next week. I'm kinda digging this stuff which was all recorded one or two years ago. Maybe three years ago. Anyway, I think we should totally release the unreleased stuff. Dark Star First Jam Loosely Regarded by the Cat Asleep by the Door is actually already on an album. So is, ironically, Diatomaceous Earth part II The Porcupines Dream is on that same album Measuring the Invisible is also on In the Vast Iteration But Sapphire Road Tractors? Totally an unreleased song And The Wooley Mammoth's Last Dance is actually a Diatomaceous Earth song

The Updating

I've been uploading new mixes from Wednesday night's Diatomaceous Earth rehearsal.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about my guitar sound. I'm using guitar-amp emulators and maybe that's cool, but maybe it feels different? I don't know. Maybe I'm just questioning it because I know intellectually I'm not going through a nice expensive tube amplifier?

Signal path is like Hebrew, it goes from right-to-left. MXR delay, Joyo American and British pedals, Dunlop MXR Uni-Vibe, and an ADA speaker emulator.

You'll notice I feed the "American" pedal into the "British" pedal. Sometimes I turn them both on. You might notice that I use extremely conservative settings on each of them. For me the Uni-Vibe works best when you don't really hear it.
Other thoughts: the ADA cabinet simulator mostly just takes out the very low end and very high end. But it adds some other things too. At first I didn't like it but I think that's the result of playing the guitar out-of-context (the "it sounds great when I do this alone in my garage" effect). I feel like it adds a bit of "wood" to the guitar sound. Which is basically what I think of good guitar cabinets.

I wasn't sure I was aesthetically pleased with the spacing of the guitars on this wall. Ethan said he knew what the problem was -- I don't have enough guitars.

One thing which we'd all experienced was that we were able to hear better -- and distinguish the low part of the Stick from the bass guitar. Thing is, I feel like that comes out in the mixes too.

The treble side of the Stick hits a Electro Harmonix HOG2 and then a Lex Strymon "Leslie" pedal. So yeah, these pedals are set up left-to-right. The thing on the far right is the remote headphone monitor station.

Double Bunny Time

Diatomaceous Earth had a full rehearsal in Jersey City last night.
The post-mortem was everyone agreed we could hear much more clearly than we could at the rehearsal studio. This may be because we're all on headphones and, using electronic drums, the levels were much quieter. I don't know.
Personally I felt we played with a kind of delicacy unique to the Jersey City environment. I don't know. Ethan's Stick actually went through the Tascam preamps (I made a routing mistake.) Ooh. And Alice the 5-string Squire Jazz bass got a setup by Ethan too! It played well before, it plays very very nice now. (I still haven't found the 1.5mm Allen wrench we dropped on the floor somewhere. I even walked all over the place in bare feet!)
Lily played that self-same Jazz bass directly into the ART tube preamp's DI. Greg went from his preamp into the other side of the ART (also DI). My guitar hit the JOYO British and American boxes to make a kind of sound (I'll have to explain that later)and then went into a Neve DI input. The drums are Abbey Road "Late 60's" drums. In this first mix I've done almost nothing to them -- a little LA2 emulated compression and a little reverb. The other instruments have the same LA2 compression on them and the mix buss has one also. 
We didn't play a single thing we actually knew. So we made this all up as we went along. You can probably tell. I'll be adding more mixes to this album in the coming days.

After the Flood

I was going to name this album "Drums by Lou Clark" because he didn't show up at rehearsal and I had to play drums.
I do not play drums well.

We're all capable of facing the reality that no part of this album is "releasable" in any way. It's a learning experience.

This was the first rehearsal at my apartment in Jersey City. Ethan was recovering from Polish-level jet lag so he didn't come out. Lou didn't come at all. I suppose the excuse is that he's a drummer.
I was really hoping people would like it and be comfortable at my place.
Greg played through his preamps and rack-mounted effect box and then my tube preamp. Lily went through her preamp and then the other channel of my ART Pro MPA II tube preamp. I think that's pretty well the way to go. By the end of the session Lily was just plugged right into the high impedance input of the ART. I felt it was very groovy.
Drums were coming in via MIDI to a track. What we were monitoring was the sound off the sound module but what we're mixing here is some Abbey Road drums which sound much better.
We also added a microphone in the room because otherwise we were too isolated (and yelling at one another because we couldn't hear).
The first weird thing was people wanting to turn up the drums in their headphones. With an acoustic kit you really don't need to add more drums to your headphones if you're in the room. But with an all electronic kit you sure do.
I feel like I've gotten close to the best sounds I've gotten from Greg's guitar. I think the tube preamp does a lot for his sound.
Even though we're all playing together there is by definition no bleed (except for the mic in the room which hears the strings being played and drumsticks hitting pads) and so I felt the sound was a bit "sterile" or something. So I added more tube distortion to the tracks. I even put a bit of chorusing on the whole of the drum track. It's very subtle.

Monitoring totally works though. I gotta get some lava lamps.

Antedeluvian Conflagration

Another Wednesday another album.


This one is just me, Greg, Ethan, and Lou. No Lily.
Greg and I are hitting Neve 1272 preamps, Ethan is going through a Lindell, and Lou's drums are all replaced except for overheads which actually were Tascam preamps but then thrown through some non-linear-summing emulation which presumably sounds like the old EMI console Dark Side of the Moon was mixed on.
The mix is kittywhumped with compression. Mostly LA-2 emulation. Is that good? Bad? I don't know.
Oh. I did another thing. Uh. I did this without permission from the rest of the band. I added some Hammond organ to the tracks. I was hearing that in my head the whole time we were playing. It just help fills us out a bit. We'll see how that goes.

Weeping Baby Elephant

Full band rehearsal with Diatomaceous Earth. Lily is playing her Schecter through the Alembic preamp. The Stick is split left and right with the bass going through the Badfinger and the "melody" side going through the Philosopher King and the Organizer. I can't figure out how to make this sound like a Hammond B3. Boy, all the YouTube videos make it seem like it's easy.
So I dunno. We make a lot of music. Now we seem to be able to make waltzes. That's cool.

UPDATE: from Ethan "By the way...  that pedal is a Black Finger, not a Badfinger.  A Badfinger is a 70's band featuring a young Paul McCartney.  A Black Finger is a funky compressor made by E-H.  I believe they also made a White Finger, but I don't remember what it did.  After a 12-year Hiatus, George Clinton once released an album called "Hey, Man, Smell My Finger".

Elephant Mixing

I believe that Wednesday's Diatomaceous Earth rehearsal was the first one where the entire band of miscreants everyone was there. We had Greg, Lily on her Schecter playing through an Alembic preamp (directly into a Tascam hi-impedance input), Ethan on his Chapman Stick going through Countryman direct boxes (one of his and one of mine) into Lindell preamps (with just a hint of EQ added to them), Lou on drums, and me (Andrew) on guitar (recording chain is an SM58 going into a Neve 1272).


I'm going to go ahead and admit that the drums are almost entirely replaced. I think those are a DW kick, and DW Edge snare, and Yamaha toms. But the overheads are Ear Trumpet Edwina microphones going into Neve 1272's. I'm not sure how much better you could record them. I think they sound great.
And, for me, I'm finally able to set the cymbals appropriately for the rest of the kit. This is partly due to the kit replacement therapy but also because I've discovered the LA-2 emulator plugins. I can't get the Fairchild emulators to do anything I want. The LA-2 and the 1176 however... those I can get to glue me some drum kits, make basses sound fantastic, etc and so forth.
Note that I'm replacing all four drums in the kit and that I simultaneously think that Lou is the best at getting less-than-par drum kits to sound fantastic. Even so, we're just not getting that million-dollar sound out of the kit at the rehearsal studio without a little help from The Box. 
I'm mixing very dry for me. For most of these mixes there's no reverb on the snare and the rest of the kit is completely dry. Um. I mean except for the kick. I usually put a kiss of reverb on the kick. The overheads are limited with one LA2 (oh, I'm sorry Ethan, I mean compressed. There. Happy now? ;-) and the rest of the kit is in another group.
I'm not using any mixing board non-linear-type emulation on this mix. When I A/B the emulators of the EMI board, the SSL board, and the Neve board against the natural 2-mix buss in Samplitude I invariably choose the less "collapsed" nature of the Samplitude 2-mix buss. So much so that if someone told me it was in and of itself an emulation of the old EMI tube board I'd be all like "Yeah, this is the only way to mix."

Porcupine Part Dream

Tonight we played two chords for two hours. That's an hour of Dm and another hour of Em.

Still, Lou wanted something he could listen to at home in order to make up a part.
Here is that thing:


We had no Lily tonight as she was a bit tired and under the weather. So this is just Ethan on Stick, Greg and Me on Guitars. The piece "for Lou" has no drums on it. 

Ed's Message

Are you sure? Are you really sure? You know this can't be undone, right? Do you really want to go through with this? Do you want to think about it first?

The Uninformed Aardvark

Here's a rehearsal album. I'm always surprised at how well these things come out. Nobody, I mean nobody, had any idea what we were going to do until we were doing it.
We have two bassists and two guitar players. We suffer from having too many good ideas and too much fun. Which is a good thing to suffer from. We could sit down and take (say) one rehearsal and work and edit them all down into single coherent songs (you know, with changes and such which are, er, planned).
But so much of what we do is an experiment. I mean who would have thought two bassists would have worked? But it does. This sort of experimentation is fantastically and critically necessary.
For me, I mean I've been in bands where I pretty much wrote everything and had to have all the arrangements down. And being in a band where we can just experiment with the writing process for... hours... is a hugely euphoric and euphonic experience.
That last song there, A Mere Resplendence,  is only divided up into two parts because when we played it it was over an hour long. So I had to split it in half to get it onto bandcamp.
If you have the willpower, see for yourself how many times one of us tried to play Darkstar by the Grateful Dead. It's gotta be 4.
I'm gonna bet that we're going to think of some specific sections to go to at some point in the many hours of rehearsal we're going to do on Wednesday.

Diatomaceous Earth's First Album

The new album by Diatomaceous Earth, "In The Vast Iteration" is now available. We recorded this album inadvertently. Ha! I do really like it. It's quite avant weird yet melodic.

Ermines of Love

Diatomaceous Earth had a rehearsal last night. Ethan Rosenblatt was there so we had two, count 'em TWO, bass players.
 
One thing this caused was us playing one jam for over an hour. Seriously folks, we have zero preconceived notions about where these things are going when we start out. You're asking yourself: "What's the difference between The Effortless Ermine and The Enumerated Ermine?"
The difference is that I put a bit heavier compression on Lily's bass in The Enumerated Ermine just to try to bring it out a bit more because I was afraid the two basses were running into one another. They may still be. I can't always tell the difference between the two basses.
I did actually pan Ethan a bit to the right and Lily to the left. Note that my guitar is on the right and Greg's is on the left. Actually, all the panning is as though you're right where I'm standing in rehearsal. It's like I'm emulating me or something. Odd.

So we had an input from Ethan's bass to a Countryman DI and right into the Tascam US 2000 preamp number 4.
Inputs 5 and 6 were kick and snare. Yeah. Using the cheapo Tascam preamps. The mics are Equation Audio.  Now the kick may or may not have been replaced. But the snare actually sounds pretty good.
Greg's guitar (from a Shure SM58) and Lily's bass are also both straight into the Tascam -- Lily actually goes through Ethan's FatMan limiter and into one of the high impedance inputs on the Tascam.
The two toms are now going into the Lindell preamps with a couple Equation tom mics. I think the toms sound pretty dynamite although honestly that's mostly because Lou can make drums sound really good.
The overheads are Ear Trumpet labs Edwina microphones going into Neve 1272's. So yeah, that's signal path is pretty much book.
There's a "center" mic which is a Rode NT1 going into a Neve 1272. This mic just gives a bit more beef to the drum kit overall. It's in front of the kit aimed center and is about as far away as the overheads.
My guitar is the last track -- Shure SM 58 hitting a Neve 1272.

The Bastille of the Comforted Milieux

Above (if you click through) is our newest "album". Yup. Only two songs. We of The Diatomaceous Earth, found a thing we do and are happy with -- space rock which goes into funk and other sections. This is a "laptop mix" -- fairly quick and dirty. But honestly with the tom and snare (and extra kick) microphones it's much and vastly easier to mix. The bass was Lily playing Ethan's fretless Jazz bass through that lovely little Fatman tube compressor. (Set to... "Bass 2" maybe?)

Tom Tom Notes

So I'll admit it. I failed. I tried a 3-microphone setup on drums. And I just couldn't quite get the sound I've been looking for all this time.
The only things I know about recording drums are what Eric Rachel at Trax East has told me. One thing he pointed out is that recording toms and making them sound good is relatively easy. And to rely on the overheads and room mics.
We're not using room mics because the room isn't that awesome sounding anyway. But just putting microphones on the toms makes mixing the drums so much vastly easier because I'm not over-compressing everything just to get the toms to sing. Instead the cymbals can sit where they need to (most of their sound comes from the overheads) and the toms will go boom when they're played.
This is an improvised rehearsal. There were some songs or song-like things which some of us knew but others didn't. All the mixes were done on my laptop with an archaic version of Samplitude. This is because my main mixing computer lost its power supply and I'm waiting on the new supply to show up. So we're using the Tascam US-2000. The overheads are a pair of very sweet-sounding Ear Trumpet Labs mics going into Neve 1272 preamps.
There's a "distance" kick mic which is a RODE NT1 feeding a 1272.
The bass goes direct into the US-2000's DI input. The guitars are both recorded with SM58's. Mine goes into the last channel of my 1272. Greg's (in this recording at least) is preamped with the Tascam's internal preamps. Which sound surprisingly good.
The snare goes through an Equation Audio hypercardioid. And then it hits a Lindell 500-series preamp.
There's no close kick-drum mic on this recording. That'll be different next time. Also, my listening to the mix makes me want to do, er, things with the drum sound. And before we go and release an album with this material I want to actually mix it -- bring some instruments up and down rather than just setting the faders and letting it run all the way out.

Invaded Their Home With Myself

We recorded a new Diatomaceous Earth rehearsal.

This was the first experiment with close-miking the toms and snare (and, theoretically, the kick). I had been under the impression that everyone hated the way I'd been recording the drums so I went to all this trouble to set up a system where the drums could be recorded a tad more conventionally. As it turns out, apparently the other band members claim happiness with the drum sound up until now.
To which I say "feh".


So. Some things.
The Equation Audio kick drum microphone was DOA. But we slapped a pair of mics on the toms and one on the snare. We continued to use the distant "kick drum microphone" which is a Rode NT1 about a meter from the front of the kit.
The other thing that happened was that the Aphex dual-channel microphone preamp which we were using on Greg's guitar and Lily's bass pretty much just crapped out. The signal just faded in and out and started crackling and so we gave up. Instead we used inputs 7 and 8 on the Tascam US-2000. The preamps on the Tascam sound pretty good actually.
One issue is that we'd got very used to the soft limiting on the Aphex and in order to give Lily the headroom she needs on her Schecter bass we have to turn the preamp down pretty low and then turn up the monitor output on our headphone system. Which does make the whole thing noisier to listen to.
Next week we hope to use Ethan's compressor as a limiter on the bass just to control the "funk". And that will help us keep the levels up a bit.
Me? I'm under the impression that the close mic of the toms and the snare does in fact help betterize things. Not in the manner that I was thinking though. We have bleed through all the mics like crazy. And sometimes the cymbals sound pretty good on the off-axis tom and snare mics. I know. It's weird. I believe the mixes you hear above have pretty heavily compressed toms and snare (and maybe even kick) but the overheads are left wide open without much (or possibly any) processing.
The effect of the snare drum mic is that we put a bit of plate reverb on that channel but it's not super-duper loud in the mix. Most of the snare sound (I think) is coming from those overheads and the "kick drum mic". Right? I know.
+++++ 
If you want to know anything about Afton, here's a view. I mean, the concert business is rough anyway. I'm not really one of those "the musicians deserve to get paid" folks just because, it seems impractical. As long as the sound mixer is paid it's all right with me.

Diatomaceous Earth

We've come to an agreement to name the new band Diatomaceous Earth. Because our commercial instincts are so well honed.

As it turns out, diatoms are psychedelic.

This week we played a 40-minute jam I named "Chimerical Weathervane". Yes, this will have to be edited down considerably. And mixed (because right now it's all over the place). But basically this is what we sound like.