For Record Store Day this year, Golden Sound Records teamed up with The Record Machine to release a split compilation on 12” vinyl that we haphazardly titled Secret Handshakes. This was an awesome project to put together. The compilation is comprised of twelve unreleased songs from twelve bands; six from each label.

I had the pleasure of tracking/mixing four songs on the Golden Sound side, playing on three tracks, and mastering the whole collection of songs.

Recording/Mixing

If I remember correctly, the first song we tracked for the Golden Sound side was Everyday/Everynight’s Hot Bright Night. All the base tracks (drums, guitars, bass) were recorded live. The drums were captured with Audio-Technica 4041s as overheads, an AKG D112 on the kick, and a Sennheiser MD421 on the snare. Kick and snare got some compression from a couple dbx 163s on the way in.

I played bass on this track, running my Fender Musicmaster through my Gibson G-100B. I believe the amp was miked with a Cascade Fat Head with Lundahl transformer. Guitar amps were miked with the ineffable Shure SM57. Austin Lyon played drums on this track and it was new to both of us, so it was a lot of fun to sit in as “studio” musicians for a live track. We ended up tracking lead vocals with a Blue Dragonfly, which has become Jerad’s go-to vocal mic.

My band Fullbloods laid down our track Heavily Drugged during practice one Monday evening, shortly after we switched to monitoring ourselves via side-fills in the room. Careful enough positioning of mics and speakers yielded minimal monitor bleed. This was another live recording that we went back and overdubbed vocals on.

Bill played his white Rogers kit captured by a Cascade X-15 stereo ribbon as overheads, D112 on kick, 421 on snare, and 57s on toms. I played my Gretsch Duo Jet (DynaSonic) through a 60’s Gibson Scout, miked with a Cascade Fat Head. Glenn played his modded Gretsch Pro Jet through a Fender Deluxe Reverb miked with a 57. Alex played an 80’s Fender Bullet bass through the Gibson G-100B, miked with some cheap Nady dynamic mic. We did several takes, decided on one, and overdubbed vocals using one side of the X-15 through a JOEMEEK Twin Q with some slapback from a Roland RE-501. We achieved good base sounds, so mixing was a breeze.

Millions of Boys were in town for a weekend after a show they played, so we seized the opportunity to record one of their new songs. We tracked three or four songs in that session and landed on using this complete live take. The mic choices were pretty much identical to the Fullbloods session but it was mixed a lot differently. Ryan played Bill’s Roger’s kit with one of my snares, Sara played my Rickenbacker 325 through a Gibson Discoverer, and AVB played a Will’s Geddy Lee Jazz bass through the Gibson G-100B.

The Empty Spaces song on the compilation, The 1960’s Divorce Rate Blues, is a completely live recording. We did only a few takes and chose the best one. Instead of going to tape like we did with Low Noise, all tracks I recorded went to an Alesis HD24 ADAT machine. I can’t express how much I love that thing. Solid as a rock.

I played my Gretsch Catalina Club kit, captured with the same setup used for the Fullbloods track. Mat played his Epiphone hollow-body (not sure of the model) through his Peavey Classic 20… or 30 or 50, I don’t recall what it is exactly. Will commandeered his Geddy Lee signature Jazz Bass through the good ol’ Gibson G-100B. Mat sang through a Shure Beta 87 with some help from the JOEMEEK Twin Q.

Mastering

It was a joy and a challenge to work with the variety of recordings I received from everyone and try to make them sound good together. This is only the second thing I’ve mastered for vinyl specifically (the first being Competing For Your Love by Millions of Boys), so I treaded lightly and stuck to some guidelines I made for myself:

1. Leave dynamics intact. It was a breath of fresh air to know that no one would be listening to this in their car and I wouldn’t have to compete with road noise. I made the assumption that contemporary vinyl consumers care more about the ebb and flow of a record than the “radio readiness” of the songs. Some songs are quieter than others. That’s exciting to me.
2. Reign in the low end. I cut most low end below 40hz and reduced the stereo width of everything below 200hz or so, depending on how it sounded on the track. Low frequencies with wide stereo images can cause the needle to jump out of the groove, and although I’m sure the actual mastering process at URP takes care of it, I wanted to do everything I could for a consistent and efficient sound. Cuttertone from SKnote was a pretty good utility for addressing these issues. Combined with some gentle EQ and light compression, I was able to pull the tracks into the same universe.
3. Don’t change too much. These are mixes that the bands were probably happy with. It’s their sound and that’s important to broadcast on a compilation like this.
4. Remember… This was a learning experience like anything else, so I saved multiple versions of master sessions to look back over as reference later.

I made separate masters for the digital versions of the split (available via redemption code with the vinyl) that have more of the limiting and frequency range you’d expect from that type of media.

Distributing

We threw two shows to celebrate Record Store Day and to sell the split. One was a day party at Vinyl Renaissance on West 39th street and a night show at The Brick. Though Record Store Day is over, we will continue to sell the split on both Golden Sound’s website and The Record Machine’s website. Bands included on the split will probably be selling them at shows, too.

This was an incredibly satisfying project to be a part of and really got me excited about Kansas City’s music scene and its future. Both sides are fantastic, with great songs by Soft Reeds, Max Justus, La Guerre, Spirit Is The Spirit, Ad Astra Arkestra, Akkilles, Baby Teardrops, and The Caves.

Grab yourself a copy and support local music!

Recorded with a Cascade Fat Head I with Lundahl transformer through an Allen & Heath Mix Wizard pre and an ART Pro VLA II compressor to an Alesis HD24, then into the computer where extra dynamics processing from a UA 1176-esque plugin was applied.

I’ve been playing with Mat and Will for a while in a band called The Empty Spaces, morphing out of Mat’s solo project. We recently recorded a four song EP that is now available from Golden Sound Records. I played drums, engineered, and mastered it.

We recorded it live straight to an Otari 1/4” 2-track tape machine. It was my first real experience working with tape, but after a reel and a half of unspooled mess I started to get the hang of it. All tracks were mixed through an Allen & Heath Mixwizard WZ2 16:2 board. Mat’s vocals ran through a JOEMEEK TwinQ with some slap-back delay from a Roland RE-501.

I played my Gretsch Catalina club kit with my Tama Starclassic snare. All drums were fitted with Aquarian Modern Vintage heads except the kick drum, which sported a Remo Coated Ambassador on the batter side and a stock resonant head. I placed sheets of paper over the snare and floor tom heads for a little extra dampening and high frequency attack. The cymbals were a 21” Zildjan Sweet ride, an 18” Istanbul Mehmet Sultan Flat Ride, and 13” Zildjan K Custom Dark hats.

The kit was miked with a Cascade X-15 stereo ribbon mic overhead. I did have to boost some 12-15k for some high end (15k is as high as the MixWizard’s EQ goes) but I was really pleased with the self compression and beefiness of this mic. The kick drum was captured by an AKG D112, and the snare a good ol’ SM57, both running through dbx 163’s with a considerable amount of compression.

The bass was played through a Gibson G100-B 2x15” amp and miked with a Cascade Fat Head about a foot and a half away.

The stereo output of the mixer was routed to the ins of the Otari and we monitored from there, doing takes of the songs until we had ones we liked. The tape was hit pretty hard; you can really hear it on the snare. It made us a little nervous to throw down live takes straight to tape without someone actively listening to the mix in another room. There’s no mixing post 2-track, so we had to get it right before we recorded. I’m happy with what we ended up with, but it’s definitely one of those EPs where you can tell the drummer engineered it.

As a tribute to our experience, we laid out the packaging to look like the boxes the reels of Quantegy tape came in. The disc looks like a little reel of tape. It’s entertaining so the music doesn’t have to be.

We go on a week-long tour starting this weekend, hoping to sell copies and have some fun. It’s my goal to achieve at least one of those. Dates are up on the website. You can download a digital copy or order a CD from Golden Sound Records for $4/$5.

Everyday/Everynight’s new album etc. is now available on Golden Sound Records. I recorded and mixed the album and Josh Williams at BRC Audio Productions mastered it. It’s by far my favorite album of theirs to date. Still eclectic but very concise and flowing. Good and dreamy from start to finish.

I made heavy use of the ART Quadra/FX’s dynamic delay (check out the vocals on “Lolita”) and Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo.

I’m happy to announce the release of my band’s first album, The Perpetual Machine. It’s a project that was probably over two years in the making. I was fortunate enough to assemble the incredible band that is Fullbloods and make some great friends in the process. Mission accomplished.

This mic loves guitar amps, and I love my guitar and amp.

Gretsch Duo Jet > Fender Deluxe Reverb > Cascade Fat Head on Signal Chains

Download 16 bit 44.1 khz AIFF (986kb)

Recently I have been in the process of recording a 12-song album with my band, and we’ve been doing a lot of tinkering in the studio. I’m really happy with the drum sounds we got on a particular song and thought I’d share a perfectly remix-able loop.

Here’s a two-bar drum pattern I played which I’m naming the Lucky Chopsticks Break for reference. Recorded in Studio A at BRC Audio Productions and processed at home.

• 18” x 14” Mahogany kick drum with coated single-ply coated heads on each side - AKG D112 placed on the batter side, very close to where the beater hit
• 14” x 5.5” Tama Brass Starclassic Snare Drum with Aquarian medium weight Modern Vintage heads - Sennheiser MD421 with a ton of 4k boosted on the Trident 90 EQ
• 14” Zildjan CIE Hi-hats - SE Electronics SE3 as an overhead

High-pass, buss compression, and the new Ableton Amp on the “blues” setting was all I did with this thing.

• Native tempo is 85.88 bpm
• 16 bit 44.1 khz
• 
  Lucky Chopsticks Break by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
  Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

Everyday/Everynight’s new album, “Trust: A Trip To The Center Of My Head” comes out today.

I engineered the sessions in the band’s house. Most of the base tracks were done live within a weekend’s time.

⇓ Download mp3

⇓ Download 24bit AIFF

Everybody does a cover of this song at some point, I’ve heard. I did mine about a year ago and never did anything with it. I made it a rule to use no digital synthesizers in this recording. The bass is a Yamaha CP-30, the drums and percussion are acoustic, and the rest is guitars. The swelling pad sounds were achieved with electric guitars through a Multivox Multi Echo MX-312.

If I remember correctly, most of the instruments were tracked mono with a Cascade Fat Head. Electric guitars were a G&L ASAT Special Semi-Hollow (Tribute) and a Mirage Beram. I think I ran them through a Electro-Harmonix Stereo Pulsar into an early 90’s made in USA Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. Drums were recorded with two separate distant-miked full kit tracks (panned hard left and right) and one close-ish miked snare track, all hitting the Pro VLA II pretty hard. That’s about all I remember. Enjoy.

Update: I added a chain for one of the guitar sounds in this recording. Shows a little about how I got the sound.

Goodbye Horses by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:

The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?

The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.

The Pieces

Gear

The building blocks of Signal Chains. The tools that real engineers use to accomplish the sound they have in their head. Gear can be added by anyone, but and emphasis has been put on search in order to avoid duplicate entries. Gear can be added straight from the gear type page or on the fly during chain creation. When “browsing mics”:http://signalchains.com/mics, for example, I can select Condenser from “Type”. Doing this shows me only condenser mics in the database.

If I want to further narrow my search, I can enter AKG in “Make”. At the moment, there is only one AKG Condenser in the database (let’s change that!), so the C414 is listed. Alternatively, if I don’t find the AKG Condenser I’m looking for, I can add it by clicking the New Mic button. Doing this will over time build a large database of audio gear, with which we can take over the world.

Viewing a gear page gives you a list of chains that gear is involved in, allowing you to hear it in different scenarios.

As a side note, the whole concept for Signal Chains came from the amount of visits I get to my post about the Cascade Fat Head. I made a little song to test the mic out in different applications. Apparently lots of people want to know what this thing sounds like, so why not provide one central place for them to do so?

Chains

The heart of Signal Chains is, of course, the chain. A chain is involves the following:

• An input source – Microphone or Line Input
• A preamp
• Optional extra gear – Dynamics Processors, Equalizers, Effects Processors, and Converters
• A 30 second audio sample of the recorded audio
• Optional (but encouraged) notes about all gear used in the process.

The gear is displayed in a virtual rack where it can be reordered with drag-and-drop ease. Notes are displayed in the rack, and the individual gear’s pages can be accessed easily. Gear is added one item at a time to encourage thorough explanation of each piece. Chains can be tagged with terms for search purposes. At the moment, I’m using them to label “what instrument”:http://signalchains.com/tags/guitar is being recorded.

Users can Like and Comment on chains, hopefully fostering a community environment and further discussion about the process involved. Likes are virtual pats on the back, while Comments are a way to make it known to the public that you are far superior to the user who created the subject content. You know, just like anywhere else on the internet.

Audio

Arguably the most important piece of a chain is the audio. Nobody cares that you used all this expensive (or inexpensive) gear unless they can hear what it sounds like. This is why a chain requires an audio sample. Samples can be up to 30 seconds and need to be in some high-quality format (AIFF or WAV). Once you upload the sample, Signal Chains converts it down to MP3 and OGG formats and provides a nice little inline audio player for quick listening. The high quality audio is provided for more detailed analysis if someone chooses to download it.

Users

In order to take full advantage of Signal Chains, one is required to become a user. Users, as if by some magical super power acquisition, gain the ability to create chains and gear, comment on and like chains and gear, and follow other users. That’s right, we’re doing the whole Twitter relationship thing. A user has their own dashboard populated with activity from people they follow. It’s a quick and easy way to make sure your friends aren’t doing anything better than you.

The Nerdery

Signal Chains is a Ruby on Rails app developed by “Relatively Early Development”:http://relativelyearly.com (Matt and me). All the art and design was done by yours truly, while “Matt”:http://twitter.com/guitsaru made everything work wonderfully. If this thing takes off, we have big plans for it.

For now, you may want to follow @signalchains on Twitter for updates and all that jazz. If you’ve got some feedback for us, go crazy on our support site. If you’re interested in advertising on the site, contact us at info(at)relativelyearly.com.

⇓ Download the mp3

A remix I did of “Salt” by The Sailor Sequence. Enjoy the headroom.

I was planning on sharing the Live set as well, but it’s pretty large. I’m holding out to see if Ableton’s Share feature can handle stuff like this.

Salt Remix by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

⇓ Download the MP3

Disregarding audio quality, playing quality, singing quality, lyrical quality, and overall quality, I put this song together tonight.

Most of my gear is in several different places, so I’ve convinced myself it’s alright to make crummy recordings using the MacBook built-in microphone. The bass is the only exception, recorded straight through an FP10 pre, which I borrowed. Mixed in Ableton Live 7 without care. Enjoy.

Smile by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com.

This has been finished for a while but just recently released. It’s the debut release of a band several friends are in, Everyday/Everynight, and it’s called Moon Phases. I recorded, mixed, mastered, and played bass on this thing. I also painted the first moon on the cover art. All tracking was done within three days at my house. Mixing and mastering was done at The Punch in Lenexa, KS.

The main challenge throughout the whole process was not an uncommon one: retaining the dynamics of the songs without isolating you to a quiet room and an awesome stereo system. It’s definitely on average “quieter” than a lot of albums, but we all agreed it was an appropriate album for that sort of thing.

I co-mixed and mastered Matt Dill’s Lila Rasa, which is a beautiful and haunting album. It was a lot of fun to work on. Give it a listen.

⇓ Download the mp3

This will probably get remixed, but here’s what I’ve go so far. The idea, mostly: electronic instruments on the left, real instruments on the right. It sort of happened.

I recorded, mixed, and mastered the newest release from Doby Watson, Twenty Two. I also sang background vocals on a couple tracks. We went through several different sessions to arrive at the final result.

⇓ Download the mp3

Started this a while ago. Sort of finished it the other day. It’s a weak ending, but I like the rest of it. Plus, I got to overuse my new Pro VLA II

Banana Gun by Ross brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://rossisbrown.com/contact/.

⇓ Download the ALP

Original song is here.

This is an Ableton Live Pack (.alp) for use with Ableton Live. I created the set with Live 7 and I’m not sure if it’s backwards compatible. The set file should be, but I do make heavy use of some of the new features of 7:

• Gate Sidechaining
• Sampler ¹
• Drum Rack (awesome!)
• Analog (analog subtractive synth)
• Compressor ²

There are a few instances of Operator, too. I’m sure you can find viable alternatives ³ to these.

I’m also using a couple (free) third-party plugins:

• LiveCut from Smartelectronix
• mucoder’s wonderful hypercyclic

I’m having fun with my new copy of Live 7. I think it was definitely worth the student discounted price I paid for it, and I will surely use it -for educational purposes only-.

John Locke Syndrome by Ross Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

¹ I think this was introduced in Live 6, but I believe it got some tweaks for the new version.

² This replaces Compressor I and Compressor II from earlier versions and is way better.

³ Might I point you to studiotoolz?

⇓ Download the mp3

UPDATE: Hear more audio of the Cascade Fat Head on Signal Chains.

Here’s a little test song I did mainly with the Cascade Fat Head.

Drums: MS Stereo – MXL 991 as Mid and Fat Head as side. In front of and about two feet above kit. About a foot right (low tom side) of snare to try and stereo image the toms a bit more. My high tom is right above the snare, and MS accurately depicts that. SM57 on snare and some cheap Nady kick mic in front of the kick. I was more concerned with the overhead sound. No EQ on Fat Head, scooped out some high mids on the MXL.

Electric Guitar (both): Fat Head about 6” from speaker, on-axis.

Acoustic Guitar: MS Stereo with Fat Head and MXL 991.

Bass: Fat Head about 4” from speaker, on-axis. Rounded off low frequencies at 100hz.

Tambourine: Fat Head. Duhhhh.

There are no effects on any tracks, save for some EQing I talked about above and light compression on the drum bus and master track.