Brian lets get some good info about this track and if he who shall not be named can partake in this too i'd really like to get some info about it because straight up these vocals are straight up beast
if you don't like brians or whats his names work, don't post in this
so brian what was the vocal chain?
Joey used a sm7b to track the vocals. I'm not sure what preamp he used, but i'm pretty sure there was no outboard processing on the way in(so just raw).
My vocal chain was this:
-Waves C1 with -35db threshold, 20:1 ratio, .01 attack, 30 release, and 30db makeup.
-EQ with a high pass at 90hz and a -4db dip at 160hz
- Waves DeEsser set on "split" at 7100hz with a threshold of -16.7.
-On the vocal bus, i had L2 just to even out levels(on top of all the volume automation i did).
I did all of the vocal editing(alignment, fades, and pitch correction), so i just edited the vocals in a way where a gate wasn't necessary.
I really love this album.
Glad to know that Hood reamped the guitars. Bass tone sounds like a punch in the face for serious. The only thing i don't like, its the drum tone on "The Jealous Wings" track. It would have been awesome a slightly diferent approach.
Love the stereo spread and the clarity in the low end too.
My 2 cents
I just used the drum samples joey sent. The band helped pick out what samples were used on this record, and Joey spent a ton of time making the velocities extremely natural sounding(imo), so i saw no reason to change anything. I'm sure i could have processed the drums on "The Jealous Wings" differently than i did, but it sounded fine to me at the time, and that song is not exactly the genre of music i'm familiar with in terms of mixing.
I know Brian said the guitars were 5150 through Mesa OS. I'm curious about mics and their positions. Every time I hear something like this I wish I could afford a 5150. I definitely prefer how these guitars fit compared to the previous Plea album.
The bass seems to fill things out nicely, not really defined, but works great. Makes the guitars heavier. I wish more bands I worked with would dig this as they always want it to be like a bass solo instead of some good meat.
The clean vocals are absolutely awesome.
I don't think the mix is lacking too much mids.
My only complaint is that the toms seem like nothing but high end ticks, no real body. This seems to be common place though, so it's probably my taste that differs.
The mic position i used on the record was around 2 inches from the grill cloth, bottom left speaker, and about 25% on the left side of the dust cap. It was an SM57 through my API A2D mic pre
The clean vocals were pretty much the same processing as mentioned above, except for a slightly different approach with compression. Most of the vocals either have delay, reverb, or both. Track 5 has a chorus effect on the clean vocal part.
The toms do have a lot of attack. I prefer toms where you can distinguish each individual hit, but it's all just a matter of taste.After looking back through a session, i did add quite a bit of highs on the toms(multiple high shelves through different busses, as well as a slight high shelf in the master bus)
Also, just a couple fun facts:
tack 4 has a my motorcycle revving up on it coming out of the distant sounding drums/lo fi part
track 7 has a fart hidden somewhere
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