Recording #102

PART II: Using Different Guitars

Chris and I melded our collection of equipment, effects, and guitars all into our new BeatDOWN studio. It really was a beautiful sight to see so much awesome equipment at our disposal. We did not let anything go to waste either! Every guitar, every effect, and every amp was used in our quest to make the perfect album.

This is the list of soon-to-be-famous guitars that we've used on our HPF efforts:

The Fat Strat: Adam built this guitar from a spare neck off of one of Chris Sligh's guitars. It has rail-style humbuckers and a mid-boost active electronics. Adam used this guitar for most of his leads. You can really here this guitar in action on the song "Gone." Listen to the second chorus when the guitars go into a killer counterpoint with the vocals. To see the guitar check out HPF's first YouTube video.

Big Red: This is the guitar that Chris plays on the aforementioned YouTube video. It has a great look and an even better sound. It is a Michael Kelly designed guitar. Chris uses it for a lot of those huge sounding rhythm tracks.

The Les Paul: An Epiphone Les Paul; it isn't a Gibson, but it has the classic sound nonetheless. Adam uses this guitar for several leads. Listen to Tunnel Vision for the lead riffs in the intro and the choruses. Also, check out the crazy solos on Somewhere to hear how this guitar dominates for lead playing.

The Tradition: Sligh-dawg's second favorite guitar. This is supposedly built better than a Les Paul. The curves and lines are very similar with only a slightly different cut-away and different headstock. It has great pickups and gives out that huge rhtyhm sound on Closer.

The '72 Custom Tele: I used this guitar to play the Coldplay-esque / Mutemath-esque lead parts on Naïve. It has those vintage low-output pickups for those sweet slightly overdriven sounds from a cranked tube amp. One neat tidbit is that this guitar has a special bridge pickup to simulate an acoustic guitar sound. All you have to do is use a special stereo Y-cable with one end going to a d-box into the house PA for an acoustic sound.

Coleman's Blue Tele: As the title suggests, this is Cole's guitar. I really love it for it's lil '59 humbucker in the bridge position. I really dig the whole upgraded vibe on this guitar. It has a fat lead tone and a slick rhythm sound. I used this guitar for the awesome leads on Gone and the catchy lead riff on Need.

Recording #101

this is the first in a series of blogs about my own experiences in recording the new HPF album...

PART I: Recording Huge Guitars

To create huge sounding guitars is something is rarely attained unless you are Linkin Park or Nickelback. Those bands have tons of pro-level gear and lots of sound engineers working for them to get that perfectly 'huge' sound. As Chris and I have discovered through our own pain and suffering, this is not the route you must follow to get those sought after sounds.

When we got started, we first tried the stack method. This involved recording the same part over and over and then layering them all on top of each other to make a bigger guitar sound. At this point we were using smaller amps with small speakers. We actually got some big sounds with this technique (as you can hear in the HPF demos if you do a search on Stage.fm). The problem with it is that we ended up using tons of EQ's, limiters, compressors, and sample delays to make the small amps sound big. To a regular listener, this could possibly be good enough to pass as a good sound. For the guitarist and audiophiles out there, we had to make it better. I (and I'm sure many others) can hear how it had been 'effected.'

We went back to the drawing board for the actual album tracks. In order to achieve that golden, huge guitar sound we started reading up on the subject and learning what works and what doesn't. The first thing to make a difference was to start using the external speaker outs on our amps. The piddly 10" & 8" speakers are no match for a beastly 4x12 cabinet. Cole Edmonson(bass guitarist for HPF) was gracious enough to lend his 4x12 straight cab (he plays guitar on the side) to our studio project for recording purposes. The results were starting to pay off. The sound was bigger but we still had the problem with not being able to crank the amp up. We then solved this problem by purchasing a stage "snake." This is simply a collection of microphone cables all running together through a rubber tube from 50' away. This allowed us to setup up a studio control room downstairs from the wood-floored attic room where we had been recording everything up until this point. The huge benifit of running this setup is that we could have the amps all setup next to the computer in the control room and have them readily connectable to the 4x12 cab upstairs. We can crank the amp without killing our ears and our head phones (the head phones had to be turned up so loud to be heard over the loud amps).

The next part should proably be a secret, but I'm gonna share it for all you home-recording geeks out there like me. We actually used a pair of matched small-diaphram el-cheapo Nady CM88 condenser microphones. One mic was placed over the upper right speaker of the cab (not directly in the middle but about halfway from the outer edge of the speaker). The other mic was placed over the lower left speaker of the cab (halfway from the outer edge). The upper speakers in the cab have a distinct high range bias and the lower speakers in the cab have the bias towards the low range of sound. By combining both sounds (and using opposing sides of the cab and matched mics) you eliminate phasing issues and you also get the fullest range of sounds from the guitar.

We have a decent array of amps to choose from. We used that same 4x12 cab to record 95% of the album, however. The difference was in the amplifiers. Here is a list of the amps we've used:

The Univox: I don't know what year it's from, but it's got something like 4 preamp tubes and 4 big bottle power tubes. I'm guessing that it's probably around 100W. I used this head unit as my primary choice for recording leads because it has an extremely warm wintage feel to it. Not to mention it just looks freakin' awesome!

The Classic 30: This amp is a combo, but we unplugged the internal speaker and used the external output to run through the 4x12. It's a Peavey (I know.... run! Peavey's suck, right?) However, this amp has a killer power tube distortion (yes, power tube distortion, not preamp distortion, there's a difference... preamp distortion sounds like something you'd hear from Evanesence or Linkin Park or some such band... power tube distortion is much warmer and more full). Chris used this amp as his choice for the majority of his 'big' sounding rhythm guitars (think Somewhere or Closer as the best examples). I used this amp for some rhythm parts and a few lead riffs.

The Crate: It's called a Vintage Club 20 or VC20. For the most part it's a pretty crappy amp, but I used it for a few lead riffs because it has this nack of cutting through the mix just enough to give your guitar a pristine quality. You can hear what I'm talking about if you listen to Tunnel Vision. The lead part is all with this amp. Let's not forget that it is running through the 4x12 cab.

The Airline: This is a sweet vintage mass-production amp made by Montegomery Ward in the mid '60s. It has 2 preamp tubes and 2 power tubes. I'm guessing it puts out around 10 - 15W. Since it doesn't have as much power, you can crank it up and get great sounding distortion at lower volumes than the other amps. I used it heavily for leads on Cry Tonight. The trailing off feedback into the first verse is totally classic. I also used it for the clean guitar sound in the first part of the introduction and the build back into the last chorus. Classic.

The Mini-Vox: I only used it on one song, Know. It is a Brian May special edition mini Vox amp that only has solid-state distortion. Normally I wouldn't set foot in a studio with a solid-state amp after working with such greats as the Classic 30 and the Univox. For some reason, this amp filled out the sound of my guitars on Know. It gave it a cool feel and I kept it.

The Mini-Marhsall Stack: This is a mini version of a Marshall stack. It runs on batteries and sounds like I just threw up in my mouth. ;-) We didn't use it for recording, but it was sitting around on the desk as a good luck charm. So, it deserves an honorable mention!

The next installment will talk about the different analog and digital effects as well as our roster of guitars...