Harry and Melissa Becker are a husband and wife team who are, along with a drummer Josh and bassist Ken, known collectively as the band “Filthy Rags”. Hailing from Fort Wayne, IN, they are a working band who plays in every kind of setting you can imagine, and rocks every one of them.

This is yet another ‘hybrid’ project, with some songs recorded elsewhere and finished here, and other songs completely recorded, mixed, and mastered here. The other weird thing is that some of the previously recorded songs were played in an idiosyncratic “A-432” tuning (which made overdubs a pain!), and if you really want a mind-bending trip down conspiracy lane, just do a search—you’ll be glad when you’re finished with that little excursion.

Tracking the band "live" is my favorite method.

I first met Harry back in the mid-2000′s, when he was playing bass for the band “Lathe”. I thought then that his timing was excellent, and he really played with confidence and aggression. Hard rock and metal music absolutely need to be approached with a sense of passion and aggression, given the dramatic topics that are usually being sung about, and “Filthy Rags” has this down, I believe in most part due to Harry’s riff-centered songwriting style.

Multi-layered guitar parts provide the soundscape, and propel the music forward. Metal has always been about the mighty riff, and the punch, but without emotive, capable, and searing vocals, it’s just instrumental background (no offense to instrumental groups—you’re cool, too—I’m talking about melodic song-oriented stuff here).

"Drop just ONE MORE NOTE...!"

And this girl can sing! It’s not all that often that I get someone in here who can just belt it out on a consistent basis, but Melissa Becker is just the one. And from a whisper to a roar, too—with (listen closely, DAW users) no pitch correction. No auto-tune. No Antares, no Pitch Doctor, no Melodyne—zip, zero, nada.

Not quite sure why Shawn's kid is filtering the air...?

The rhythm guitar parts on the previously recorded material were a little fizzy-sounding for my tastes, and after EQ-ing my mouse-hand right off, I turned to an old and trusted free plug-in from Voxengo—the mighty Boogex—after a car-listen epiphany hit like a “coulda had a V-8” moment. I used it solely as a cabinet emulator, and it really enriched the existing tones.

For the guitar stuff that we recorded here, I used the combination of a Zack Wilde MXR Overdrive/Marshall 2150 combo/Peavey 4×12/MXL Ribbon/Joe Meek pre…

Old, ratty, and dependable gear

…and then for the 2^nd pass it was the 5150 head/Fender 2×12 cab

(w/Celestions)/ADK51 and Shure 57/Spirit 328. Harry liked the Marshall tone so much that he wanted exclusive rights to it! I totally understand, man—totally…

Prepare to mix...

Harry Becker in mid-attack...

A little chillin' with Tim and Ken...

Josh slammin' the house kit

I wish them every success, and hope to see a live performance this summer.

Nonetheless, advances in technology make my work as a recording engineer a lot easier than is was, say, 15 years ago.

In the context of this post, I’m referring to the arduous task of backing-up sound data. Way back in the late 20^th century, audio back-up was done in *gasp* real time. Those of us who fondly remember the first advent of affordable digital recorders (the Alesis ADAT, and Tascam’s DA-88) also remember that in order to back-up your project you needed at least two machines, and after digitally connecting the two, you slapped a blank tape in the receiving machine, armed all the tracks, and hit ‘record’. The result was that an exact duplicate of the material was recorded. Pretty cool, huh? One problem—it took a lot of time.

With the next generation of digital audio, that being DAW’s (digital audio workstation) and computers, backing-up became a lot easier. The reliability of CD burners increased, and their price decreased, enabling back-up times to be based on the burn speed, rather than real-time transfers of data.

But, as 16-bit increased to 24-bit, and projects increased in size, DVD-back-up became the norm. I remember when I switched from CD’s, with a full 700 Mb of space (wow) to DVD’s, with their consumer-based product maxing out at around 4.7 gigs—nirvana!

Which brings me to my point: I had received an email a fews weeks ago from an old friend who wanted ‘drum-less’ tracks of something that had been recorded back in June of 2001. Most studios have an ‘expiration date’ for their clients’ data, but I just happen to be a bit exacting when it comes to backing up projects. I recall an article by Craig Anderton a while back where he was recommending that if you have projects where there were very specific parts that are being played by software synths, you should render those parts as .wav files, since it’s likely that you will eventually move to a different OS or even a different DAW, and won’t be able to access the synth or to reproduce the settings on it. Great advice, and it applies to DAW’s in general as well.

The 2001 project had been recorded in Logic 4.8 on Windows ME, which is by now about as obsolete as a floppy disc. Once the backed-up CD’s were located, I only had to load everything up on my system, which runs a newer version of Logic on Windows XP, and the songs all came up beautifully.

CD-R's at the ready, sir!

With the price of computing coming down, it usually makes sense to hang on to your old tower (rather than constantly changing out motherboards, CPU, and hard drives) just in case you need to have access to older projects. Another method is to render or bounce everything as continuous wav’s or aiff’s before backing-up, but that can be time-consuming.

NOT gonna be firing any of these up, though...

These days I no longer use DVD’s (let alone CD’s) for backing up files—I use a SATA docking station and swap out between a few 2-terabyte drives—just select and drag, baby!

Either way, I thought it was really cool that with very little fuss I could totally recall an old project and satisfy a client’s wishes.

Look, Ma—I'm backing up Tim's valuable data!

15 year's worth of DAT's, CD's, and DVD's.

It was 18 months in the making, but well worth the extra effort—Sunny Taylor’s latest full-length CD, Map to the Fire, was officially released Friday night, November 7, 2014, at ‘The Phoenix’ in Fort Wayne, Indiana to a overly-packed house. All the cool kids were there!

Rockhill Records‘ owner Jon Swerens was there manning the merchandise table, and trying to sell the hotcakes, er, CD’s that had arrived from the Discmakers manufacturing plant. He is also responsible for the layout of the CD, which is stellar and unique and creative, if I may say so myself. He also came up with the title of the project, which is a line from Sunny’s song “Getting Lost”.

Sunny regards this release as representing her finest songwriting to date, and I agree—it’s mature, introspective without any juvenile pretensions (sorry juveniles—it’s true!), and the arrangements are just plain cool, executed in the deep pocket of groove that is the result of many performances by her band, Ben Porter (guitar), Dan Willig (drums), and Peter Jacobs (bass). Here Sunny gives us some more insight into her creative processes as she is interviewed on local NPR station WBOI by Julia Meek.

Peter Jacobs

Dan Willig

Ben Porter

As I had mentioned last year, this record was recorded in an old-school, bare-bones style, reminiscent of the way we all used to record, with lots of mics bleeding into each other, and that can create a sense of ‘gluing together’ of the parts. We ended up not putting any B3 on it, let alone any extra guitar tracks, and so it’s pretty much exactly what you will hear in a “live” setting—what you hear is what you get.

Sunny recording her vocals

Here’s a little sample from the song “Alright Child”: This is the room mic, the overhead mics, and the guitar mic solo’d. I was telling Peter (bass) that on a few songs I ended up using about 40% room mic for the overall drum tones.

What???

Oh—now I see...

All in all I am so happy to have been a part of this project—best of blessings to you, Sunny, and keep writing those songs…

Sunny and I with our cool Discmakers' plaque

Bassist Dan Tanner and co. rolled into town back in the end of May to begin recording their new album. Now, I can’t play any samples (yet), but I’ll just say that it’s some swampy, stompy, down-to-earth country goodness from a bunch of ex-rockers.

Big Bass

Here’s the deal: sometimes you play the songs of your favorite bands, and in your own personal favorite style, only to find out that it’s a small paycheck at the end of the night. That’s kind of what happened with Southern Straightaway—they spent years playing ‘Godsmack’ covers in bars, only to emerge as a modern, rockin’, and up-and-coming popular country band. I first met these guys about 12 or so years ago, when I went to their hometown of Plymouth to help dial in their sound system.

We approached the studio session using the old-school, let’s-track-everyone-at-once method. These days that’s known as a “Nashville” session, although it has little to do with the particular style of music being recorded. I find that if the band has its chops together, and can do the live thing in the studio, so much the better—it’s just a bit more real than starting with a “click, scratch guitar, then drums” approach.

As usual, we took the bass direct, and Ryan and Rick each had a guitar cabinet out in my cluttered “isolation barn”. Tony Tallarita, the drummer, has a fairly unique kit, definitely set-up for live gigs, but still really big-sounding in the drum room. We also D.I.’d Dave Tanner’s keyboards, and his son, vocalist Jon Tanner sang in the control room through a good ol’ Shure 58—and yes, those were the only scratch tracks we used.

Live band—live recording session—just the way I like it! We’ll see how the next session goes, but we’re booked to record about 3 songs for each session—release date is sometime this winter. Get yer boots out…

This year almost every band’s performance was captured live on an HD24 Alesis 24-track digital recorder, and the tracks then came to your truly for mixing and mastering.

It was a lot of fun and a good challenge, as mixing live, unadulterated tracks really puts a band’s groove and skills on display—there’s no room to hide on stage! Stay tuned to the Pinestock website for future release dates…

Like a scene from 'Andy Griffith', Tim and Nick on the front porch.

The 328—she lives! Thanks to Max DeHaven, Stanford-edumacated electrical engineer/designer from Middlebury, the power supply is back online. It’s way better than it was for the last few months, and everything is stellar-sounding, but we’re even gonna go in again and swap out all of the funky caps next month. He had contacted me via Facebook (one of the practical uses that it has), and so I drove it on up.

Thank you, Max!

Me and Max, with the 328 tucked in the back seat...

Original post: You would think that a simple power supply would be relatively easy to replace, right? No—not in the case of my trusty old Spirit Digital 328 console. These great little boards have one fatal flaw: A chintzy and yet complicated power supply. It has to do with the timed sequencing while powering on and off, and other highly technical aspects of running analog and digital together that I don’t know enough about to address competently, but the upshot is that she just won’t boot up anymore.

Everyone who owns one of these sweet babies has very similar views of it: “Love it! Sounds great! Intuitive workflow! Like an analog board!” And: “It’s 12 years old and it’s dying because of its cheesy power supply!” You can read similar comments here, and here, and here.

Why couldn't you be a simple PS like your other computer buddies?

I am able to record tracks via my collection of mic preamps, utilizing the analog inputs of the MOTU, and I’ve been mixing some other stuff “in-the-box” anyway, but right now the best option is to either have the old power supply repaired, or replace the entire board with an upgraded model- but for the same price. I did have a few hissy mic inputs, a dodgy insert or three, and totally unusable auxiliary inputs. If money were no object, I would maybe think about this one, but money is an object, so there. Anyone care to donate? Kidding…

Maybe the next Tim desk?

I am really used to having the ability to record up to 20 tracks simultaneously, and also having the other advantages of a tactile board right in front of me (like an instant “mono” button, the -20db switch, and quick “grab the faders” approach). Thanks to Jon Townsend for giving the ol’ college try by replacing some of the caps…

Here she is in action, literally on the last project to be mixed on her:

Look at the pretty lights!

I look skeptical...

We had recorded the basic tracks for 12 songs (drums, bass, and some rhythm guitars) back in January of 2012, then Chad took stems home with him and overdubbed everything else: vocals, guitars, keys, percussion—everything. He has a cool little PT rig that he could bring to the studio, too.

So I started getting tracks uploaded in the summer of 2012 and began mixing. Then I would get an email saying “No, I’ve changed that, and here are the new tracks for that songs.” This happened a few times, but hey—it’s his record, and I’m just happy to mix (he said that I got more ‘attached’ to the songs than he did!)

Then, in July he started talking about changing some drum and bass parts. “You’re crazy, Chad—no way!” was my first thought, but there were 2 songs where playing a simpler pattern on the chorus would be a better fit, and yet we didn’t want to re-record the entire song. Dilemma? A bit.

So here’s how we did it: Since there was really no way to capture the exact same snare and kick sounds 18 months after the fact, I decided that the Drumagog plug-in was the best approach. I grabbed various kick and snare drum samples from the original recordings and loaded them into the Drumagog. Drumagog lets you to load in a LOT of different hits into one application, and this is so it doesn’t sound too mechanical (like an old drum machine), and allows for more nuance—it’s really cool.

We got the overheads and toms sounding as close as possible to the original, and away we went! You can see below- the gray tracks are the new drum tracks, plus channel 12 has the new bass recording punched-in.

Punching-in the bass was easier—since I had ended up using only the D.I. on the final mix, that’s what we recorded Jon with—fairly easy!

Jon Hill-and his six strings.

Since the snare was being completely replaced on the punch-ins, I cloned the raw new snare track, rolled-off the lows and the ‘crack’ frequency, and thereby retained the natural bleed of the high-hats.

There's the new snare on #37

Also, since there is a slight bit of latency on my system between the Gog and the actual audio, I used Voxengo’s VST Latency Delay to on the non-sampled tracks to compensate, and it “snaps” together all very nicely.

The end result was, if I do say so myself, practically seamless. In one song we even punched in 2 guitar chords that sustained (instead of playing through as in the original version), but we used the same amp/speaker/mic/pre combination, and got it as close as we could. All in all, it was worth the effort, and was a challenging bit of audio engineering.

Yes--you do sing into this end...

Next project: Replace an entire orchestra with guitar-playing baboons. Much more challenging…

Lee Holderman on some massive keys:

Lee on my good ol' Hammond M3

Trying to find the perfect Fender Rhodes

No pics yet of Shawn or the banjo player, but Nate and I went outdoors to record hand claps. We over dubbed like crazy, but I made sure to end up with an odd number of “people” when it totaled up–there’s a weird, psychoacoustic rule that dictates an odd number of people for claps. Don’t ask me how it works–it just does.

A Nice Day to Clap Your Hands!

The reason that we went ‘out’ is so that there is absolutely no acoustic artifacts present in the claps. My room has a bit of a 400 hz ‘bump’ that would be magnified by multiple overdubs. This is the 3rd time I’ve gone outside to record:
1. Recorded a chain saw for the Grand Rapids-based “Defiant Nature” (you can also hear Hannah screaming in the background–it was kind of a tribute to the character from “Army of Darkness).
2. Recorded Alan Plickerd’s Harley coming up the drive for “Fallen’s” Big Bad Harley.
3. And now–hand claps.

My soupy old MXR analog delay pedal--Nate loves it!

Jack's room at Ocean Way in LA

Well- here’s my report from a very enjoyable evening at Sweetwater, with producer/engineer Jack Joseph Puig speaking about life in the music biz, and promoting his new line of Waves plug-ins:

As you may know, JJP has developed some really interesting plug-ins with Waves, and was just tickled with how they came out. He took some less-than-stellar (tone-wise, that is) vocal takes from Mick J., Lady Gaga, Bono, etc… and demonstrated how his new plug-ins affected each one. You gotta love a slider that’s labeled “Magic”! It was a great demonstration by a great producer.

Then, he and Mitch Gallagher sat down (in the comfy chairs) and talked about Jack’s philosophy of music, production, and “chasing the song”. After that they opened it up for Q&A. Now, I’m no genius, but when you have an opportunity to ask JJP questions about music, you really shouldn’t worry about questions like “will these plug-ins work with Reason?”, or, “Can we get these for Windows?”.

But Jack was very gracious with everyone, and yes- the topic eventually turned to Spilt Milk and Ro Shambo!

The real kicker for us was after the presentation, when my precocious friend Anthony actually got Jack to listen to the stuff we were mixing that day in my studio. Talk about nervous; I walked back into the theater, and there’s Mitch Gallagher looking at Anthony and Jack, and they’re both fishing around for some headphones. They then popped the disc into the CD player and Jack stood there and listened to about a minute or so of one song. I’m now feeling like a chef looking on while somebody licks the spoon and ponders…

He was so cool- he told my friend how everything was sitting nice in the mix– the bass is right “up there”, kick and snare in the good space, vocals (he made the “hand-cage in front of your nose” motion) nice and fat. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then Anthony asked him what he would do differently for that song. “Here it comes”, thought I, but he stood there kind of shaking his head a bit and said, “I really couldn’t give you an answer to that–pick any mix guy or producer and it’s gonna sound like him, or (pointing to me) him”. Wow- I had to think to myself: “How many of us would have started right in and started a critique of the mix” (I probably would have!), but he didn’t.

My son Aaron asked him a few questions about John Mayer’s production, and how much he totally loved “The Grays”- Jack just kept talking with us like he wasn’t in any hurry at all to get out of there. Got into the different aspects of the 60′s, 70′s, etc… and how each era has its own characteristics. Tonic Lemon Parade- example of ‘chasing the song’ and simply going for it. He is a really nice guy- and the whole experience made me appreciate again what a great business this is and how blessed anyone is to be able to do this for a living.

And–those new plug-ins are really cool…

Tim Bushong, Jack Puig, and Aaron Bushong

Then we recorded the bass, using my trusty SansAmp bass driver in combination with bassist Bryan Chris’ micro-sized Ampeg SVT head into a 15″ cabinet of mine. He plays a 70′s Fender Mustang,  and you can almost hear Carol Kaye’s Motown tones peeking through.

Bryan Chris on bass

Then we have Nate’s guitar–and here’s where it gets to be interesting (and fun!)

Nate Butler mugging with a borrowed Gretsch White Falcon

He has a cool rig of his own, incorporating a Line-6 pedalboard, Radial “ABY” box, a Traynor Dark Horse head, an teeny Orange amp encased in a stereo 2×12 cab loaded with vintage Jensens, and pushed into retro heaven via an Epiphone with a Bigsby on it. But that simply was not enough–we needed more (and more) amps and more options to get the stellar tones we were seeking!

So we are in the middle of guitar tracking as we speak, and there will, no doubt, be more to come on this project. Stay tuned…

LPB-1, anyone?

Grant Beachy's AC-30--cool...

Old 1948 Gretsch New Yorker with custon (homemade) pickup

Steve Harris's Fender Silverface

Nate's stereo rig

Someone's Fender Something-Or-Other

Nate on Venus with the White Falcon