»Notes: Forgot About Dre

MP3

I've been messing around with the bass part to this for ages, throwing it into band practices, riffing on it for eighteen hours at home. It had also been on the cards as a candidate for recording for quite a while too. So, seeing as it's half term I decided to spend a day recording. This was the third song recorded in the day, and the only one finished and in a state worthy of putting up on here. If you know about the other recordings, and know where to find them, well done.

I tried to pay some attention to a book I recently bought whilst recording this, Guerilla Home Recording by Karl Coryat. It goes over various aspects of recording and is aimed at people who are presumably in a similar position to what I am with regard to gear and know-how, or the lack thereof. There's lots of useful stuff in this, it gets my (largely worthless) seal of recomendation.

The main drum pattern, the bass riff and the staccato guitar riff that plays in the verses were all recorded as loops in Cooledit. The process of recording loops isn't particularly intuitive despite the fact I've done it on a couple of occasions already. (see: Arsenic on the Rocks) As the recording progressed, I didn't use more of the loops despite the fact several of the guitar parts were repeated.

The song has a strong post metal sound to it, again, this was mostly deliberate. Maybe it's a direction I'm going in. I've talked about post metal before and my thoughts largely haven't changed. I have however got a couple of Isis single/EP things now though, and they do seem to be very good, they seem more concerned with making actual songs than other post metal bands. It's fun to record post metal, I'll say that much.

The only bits from the original song that I bothered to copy/use/learn were the bass part, one of the guitar riffs, and the lyrics. The rest of it all kind of fell together, I was particularly pleased with how the intro came out, considering it's just expanded from the two chords of the guitar riff.

The vocals were the most difficult part to nail down. From the very start, rapping was out of the question, ideally I'd have done some kind of drawn-out vocals like what Isis do. However, I can't do that for shit. I wasn't really able to sing the entire song powerfully, the note I settled on was probably F#, which is right at the top of my register. Equally, I didn't want to shout the entire thing. I had the idea of doing a Tool and whispering the verse and then the spoken-style vocals came along naturally after this.

For the lyrics, I would have to cut them down considerably from the original, lest I start singing very quickly and drift closer to rapping. Slow delivery was the way to go, I tried to pick the most metal-sounding parts from the song. I think what I ended up with could sound like a metal song in its own right, there's some very bleak imagery in there, 'Everybody wants to come to me like it's some disease, But you want get a crumb from me.' I trimmed out some of the swearing to cut down on syllables mostly, in some cases it wouldn't really have fit, 'If it was up to me, You *motherfuckers* would stop coming up to me,' would have sounded a bit silly with the slower delivery.

I found out after I'd recorded most of the song that the main bass riff was 'sampled' originally from a No Doubt song called 'The Climb'. I don't think 'sample' is very accurate, I'm guessing Dr. Dre just got a session musician to play the riff on bass seeing as he tends to do that rather than stick with original samples. I checked out the No Doubt song and it's pretty good, fortunately I didn't come full circle in any way and end up with something sounding like a No Doubt cover.

I played the drum part in the break after the second chorus 'live', i.e. without programming it into the drum machine first. Isn't that fascinating?

I wanted to put in a few synth parts, particularly a string part akin to the distinctive string part in the original. However, by the time I'd finished off the vocals, I wanted to mix it and get it over with. Plus, it might just have been unnecessary and just muddied the waters.

The sample is from The Wire, specifically season 3 episode 6, Homecoming. Amazing, huh?

The mixing and mastering trickery I attempted to employ on this song is as follows, but not limited to: Tweaking the EQ on individual tracks to bring out instruments, I'm not sure how successful this was, even if it is successful it's a pretty subtle effect. Moderating the volume of tracks, boosting the volume of new instruments/parts as they come in to give them more impact, I'm not sure how successful this was, even if it is successful it's a pretty subtle effect. Seeing how the track sounds loud or quiet on the monitors, listening to it on headphones, and comparing the sound to a similar band/song (Isis) that's been professionally mastered. I'm not sure how successful this was, even if it is successful it's a pretty subt

I was pleased by the fact that without the need for excessive padding the song clocked in at over seven minutes and the vocals only came in after two minutes.

Some of the guitar parts were recorded by actually miking up the guitar amp. This isn't radical or anything, it's pretty much the standard way of recording electric guitars. However, due to the legacy of previous shocking gear situation, I had ever tried miking up an amp once before and it sounded shit. A mixer and a mic that costs more than £15 make a big difference.

Another technique gleaned from Guerilla Home Recording book was using the low-pass filter on the mixer when recording the vocals. My condenser microphone has a low pass filter built in as well and I switched both on. Maybe the vocals sound better because of it, I don't know.

It's fortunately not noticeable on the MP3s thanks to the way MP3s deal with high frequencies, but the .wav mixdown for this song was for some reason plagued with seemingly immortal high frequencies that I had to repeatedly EQ from the distorted guitar parts. I think the noise was produced by the Emulated Line Out on my guitar amp (it was getting late, a miked amp was impractical) but I have no idea why Cooledit requiered me to save each file separately after I'd made the changes (I'm sure usually, if you 'save session' then it also saves any changes made to the source files as well.) I bet you found that really interesting

These are mostly here for my convenience.