Diluvia

Our last rehearsal at Flood Studios in the depths of Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Lily couldn't make it so it was just:

• Ethan on his 5-string fretless going through a Small Stone (I think) flanger and another thing that was noisy which he eventually unplugged directly into the high impedance input on a Neve 1272 
• Greg going through his regular rig through his Deluxe into a Lindell preamp 
• Lou playing mostly replaced drums but the overheads were Ear Trumpet Edwina's going through the Tascam preamps (I know). 
• And me playing through the JCM 800 combo into a Neve 1272.

This is, surprisingly, one of the best recordings we've made. Remember when I said I wanted to steal that Annie Clark riff? Well we did that. Check out the Wooly Mammoth song above.

I've been a tad stressed about not being at the rehearsal studio because I feel that I'm getting something special out of that Marshall JCM 800 combo amp they have. I'm probably the only guitar player in the world who likes the 800 for its clean sound. But it's a very nice clean sound.
I especially dig that groovy way the low E sings when I play sort of "cowboy" riffs. The P-90's on my SG give me the best of single and double-coil sound when I do that and I've been afraid I won't be able to get that sound again. Which is silly because I do have an excellent custom JTM-45 clone and a custom Deluxe/Champ amplifier. I can get most any sound between those two amps that isn't one of those silly high-gain modern rock sounds.
But I've discovered other odd things. I have a Joyo "American" pedal which emulates a bunch of Fender-like sounds. And the joke is that the pedal is vastly more touch sensitive than the JCM 800. With the 800 pretty much any sound you dial in is going to be the sound it makes whether you're wailing away or picking very lightly. But this little solid-state (and extremely cheap) guitar pedal lets you roll from very lightly-picked chime to laying-down-the-law rock sounds simply by playing harder.
So, you know, maybe the JCM 800 isn't the only way to go. No. Not at all. But it does sound nice (my guitar is on the right). ;-)

Saint Vincent

What do Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and Annie Clark of St. Vincent have in common?
If you said "They both play a fingerpicking style with rings on their middle fingers" you would be correct.

Annie Clark is the only example of a guitar-player's guitar player in modern alt rock I can think of. I am not a fan of the Lower East-Side noise-rock tone she goes for. She tends to play in a very staccato style. But she's really quite a fine player.
But there are a couple other things she does in this video which I want to steal. At 8 minutes there a nice funk riff which might could use some interesting variations applied to it. At 10 minutes there's an interesting harp-like thing which totally sounds like Pleasure for the Empire to me.

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They're also both from Texas. Could be a coincidence.

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.

Post Antediluvia

We had a Diatomaceous Earth rehearsal without Ethan. It went like this:
I played with a distortion box and the HOG2 and a Strymon Leslie. I know. Right? Not all the time though. When I'm playing it I don't hear it being like a Hammond organ so much but in the mix it can fool one for a while.
The overheads are recorded with Lindell preamps. The rest of the drum kit, intending to be replaced, is just the Tascam preamps in the US2000. Last week I was digging the snare sound we were getting but this week the snare wasn't really doing anything for me. And since Lou can pretty much bring the sound of any drumkit up to the best it can do, I have to blame the kit and not my engineering.
I'm enjoying the JCM 800. I plug into the high-gain input but then turn the gain and the master way down. All the EQ's and the presence are set to about 1 or 2 o'clock. With those P90 pickups I can get a pretty nice chime out of the instrument.
The bass in this recording is going directly into a Neve 1272 high-impedance input.
Greg's guitar (left) is using the Tascam preamp.

Sequis Motherload Elemental

The Sequis Motherload is a possible answer to my volume problems. The newest version of it is about five hundred US dollars.


Another option is just to build an isolation cabinet. It has occurred to me that actually building the box is not something I'm either terribly good at or have room to do. It might be cheaper and simpler to start with a shipping crate.
If I did start with a shipping crate I'd still have to punch holes in it for the 1/4" speaker jack and the XLR cable for a microphone. Then I'd have to silicone the joints and then figure out a way to make the top come on and off yet still create an air seal when closed. The inside would need to be lined with some sort of noise-dampening foam.
Oof. The Elemental looks better and better from that standpoint.
But I would be able to record my very nice Celestion Alnico Blues if I had an isolation cabinet. Or I could just do those recordings at my studio.

Ampulation

We're going to be leaving our home at Flood Studios soon. It's just begun to cost too much. And you know it's not that nice a place. It's called Flood because it's right on the Gowanus Canal so it's just a couple feet above sea level.

I have been really enjoying the Marshall JCM 800 combo amp at the rehearsal studio though. I get an amazing clean sound out of that amp. I know. You're not supposed to be able to use Marshall's for their clean sound. Well I do not do many things on guitar well, but you cannot fault my tone.

If we're to do things like record music at my apartment we simply can't have loud amps. Options include moving the Whisperroom to my apartment, building an iso cabinet for guitar amplifiers, or using software plugins.
I think we kind of like having the Whisperroom in our studio rather than the apartment.
Building a cabinet seems like a lot of work. But possible.
I have been more than disappointed with the sound quality of guitar amplifier emulators when doing a "clean" sound.
But LePou Plugins makes some amp emulators (free, VST) which are quite interesting and can actually sound pretty good clean. Amplitube by IK Multimedia might very well be the holy grail at $200.
But I'm also interested in what the SansAmp by Tech 21 -- but the bass guitar version -- could do for a good clean guitar amp sound. Maybe. Just maybe.

Antediluvia

I mixed this album on my laptop. Which surprised me.
The drums were intended to be replaced. But I thought the snare sounded okay. The tom sounds are nothing to write home about and before we release this album they still might be replaced. But the snare sound was perfectly decent.

The kick? Well we were never thinking we'd keep the kick but... I mean I just threw a mic inside the kick drum to use as a trigger. So after a bit of EQ and a bit of compression I... I may have shifted the pitch down a fourth to make it sound better.


We improvised the entire thing from start to finish but we were thinking "this is the first movement, this will be the second movement" etc. and we decided on keys and (sometimes) tempos and time signatures. I was very happy with my own guitar sound thank-you-very-much.
I did another thing -- I did quite a bit of editing. Actually, I made exactly zero structural edits (so far) but I did do things like cut out instruments selectively.

All the unedited sections are drums. That's kick, snare, tom1, tom2, a track which is blank, overheads, another blank track, Greg, Ethan (the Stick on just one track), Lily's bass (we went through a Neve preamp after her own preamp), and my guitar (the bottom "track" is just a submix buss for the stereo overheads.)

To add some discipline to this we could most certainly make it shorter. Take out some sections. That sort of thing. But if you want to just sit back and groove to some Diatomaceous Earth, I think it's pretty cool.

Axis of Thrones

The beater angle set screw on the Axis pedal I have is probably 3/32 allen.

Here is the Game of Thrones theme on wine glasses.

Nova Social

Nova Social is a sweet band with an 80's-retro vibe. Their lyrics can be amusingly hostile. You'll love them.
They started their set with a song called "Laptop Rock" which cracked me up. Especially because they are ultimately, you know, a 9-piece with two violins, a cello, keyboardist and backup/descant singer.

I've seen them twice now at Joe's Pub.

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They are related to the band Balthrop Alabama which I recorded once on a Sunday (I believe) at Manhattan Theatre Source for my buddy Blair Johnson. Very different music. Also very groovy.

Boom

My very exciting journey to discover a kick drum pedal that works for me is, possibly, at an end. The single biggest thing of importance was keeping it acoustically quiet so I don't irk anyone downstairs. And I think that the direct-drive Axis pedals have the answer.

New (used) Axis longboard with EKIT trigger.

The beater bangs away on the pedal itself (there's a missing stopper -- I got the pedal used and I suspect it had been used on a real kick drum so the stopper got lost). The direct-drive pedal feels very much to me like a piano key. It has that same kind of "mechanical" feel of the "switches" that are piano keys. I believe this is one of the reasons so many drummers do not like the direct-drive pedals. But I kind of groove to the feel of it. And the built-in trigger makes things much easier.

Antedeluvia

Diatomaceous Earth rehearsal. Wednesday April 16th at Flood Rehearsal Studios.
I played drums on the first piece. Believe me, you can tell.
But that's not the part of this where I'm really not proud of myself. Nope.
Just before we started I noticed that for some reason the record-arm light on track one was off. So I re-armed it. And we played.
Then Lou showed up and I switched over to guitar and for some reason I didn't have the window sized such that I could actually see every track and yup -- track 1 had become unarmed again. I noticed this the next day when I was looking at the tracks and saying to myself "Why is track 1 so much shorter than the other tracks?"
That's the kick drum track. Oof.
The soloed snare drum track had practically no kick drum in it at all (nobody thinks great things about the kick drum at the studio here). So I had to duplicate the "overhead" track and EQ the heck out of it and then slam it with limiting just to get a good kick "trigger" to then use on a Steven Slate replacement kick.
Anyway, not my proudest moment. But we played some good songs.

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Lessee, what else did I learn? Oh. Right. I found the limit on those wonderful Ear Trumpet Labs microphones -- close-miking electric guitar cabinets. Nope and nope. The mics break up at the high SPL range of a close-miked Marshall amp. Oh well. It was worth a try. An SM58 draped over the side of the cabinet sounds great.