»Night of the Vampire

Night of the Vampire

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I'm a big fan of Entombed. One of my favourite song of theirs is a cover of the Roky Erickson song 'Night of the Vampire'. Thanks to that, I am now also a fan of Roky Erickson (see: neglected 'side project' Two Headed Dogs). It was only a matter of time before I put another Entombed cover, or a Roky Erickson cover onto here, and now that time has come.

Is it a cover of Roky Erickson, or a cover of Entombed covering Roky Erickson? This is why I usually try to avoid 'covers of covers'. Anyway, hopefully it turned out reasonably well. I actually started recording this before 'Out of View', but was unhappy with it at the time and left it unfinished. So here it is, finished off. Sadly, there aren't any Vincent Price samples in this.

Roky Erickson doesn't seem to print lyrics, and there are some terrible attempts at transcriptions available online. One particularly attrocious one just stuck 'Charlie Manson' into one of the verses where Roky doesn't even sing anything and where it wouldn't fit anyway. I tried to pick the most accurate lyrics I could and the ones which I thought sounded the best.

This guitars in this were tuned to C again. It's a pretty low tuning, but it makes the 'way too high for me' vocal line actually manageable and naturally boosts up the heaviness. Of course, it also means that the strings on the bass are so slack that any proper tuning is almost impossible. I need heavier gauge strings.

Edit: tuning the guitars to C was pretty stupid without much heavier gauge strings or some kind of seven-string guitar. The guitar tone was an absolute nightmare to set up both initially and before the revision thanks mainly to the lack of tension in the strings.

Some of the lead parts have some pretty heavy chorus and (if I remember correctly) phaser effects layered on to evoke more of the psychedelia of the original. Pretty much everything else on the song is Entombed via Nine Inch Nails.

I did that drum thing again, with the tube drive setting on the Pod. Also, totally ripped off Nine Inch Nails 'Home' with the way the drums close the song. That keyboard solo near the end is probably massively Portishead again as well. What are you going to do?

Edit: I think I screwed up the recording of the drums somehow because they came out very muffled. I went back and tweaked the drum parts slightly and then re-recorded with a brighter sound. Sticking a bandpass filter on the drums (as well as every other track) helped to clear up the mix somewhat and make everything sound tighter and brighter.

There's actually a load of subtle keyboard parts and what sound like samples present in the Erickson original. Yeah, I totally couldn't sort that out.

I was so bored of trying to get the guitar parts right on the first recording session for this. Most of the rhythm parts ended up being re-done anyway. The lengthy outro was wholly the product of the second recording session.

Some of the clean guitar parts, the lengthy outro and the drums sound very similar to 'Forgot About Dre'.

I can't remember where I got the thumbnail from.

I made a big deal out of getting straight into the action with this song. I've done a few too many songs lately which had annoying intros. Most likely due to the long periods of time between recordings, and wanting to make each recording pull all the stops out (also with the little jingles after each song has ended). I actually ditched the rather dramatic and cool introduction from the original, as well as the Entombed version, in favour of going straight into the similarly awesome bridge section. I copied this from a live recording of the song by Erickson which is included on the 2nd disc to the version of 'The Evil One' I have, which features a bunch of clips and recordings from a radio show he must have done some time after the album's release. It's a great recording, I mean Roky Erickson is a pretty weird guy to begin with, but the people who called into the radio show sound fucking nuts, and all the song recordings have a really bleak, sparse sound to them. What happened to cool bonus content like this?

Boring Mixing Notes

Seriously, the only reason I type up these mix notes is so I have something to refer to on subsequent recordings. Having said that, if you do actually know about mixing, feel free to tell me everything I'm doing wrong, I need the help.

I had a really hard time with the mixing on this song. I'm still not particularly happy with a lot of it. It's the heaviest song I've done in a while, so maybe I'm out of practice with getting a heavy sound, or it could just be some other uncontrollable factor.

Much of this is irrelevant since I'm so unhappy with the mix that after I've wrote this I'm going to go in and try to mix it for a third time.

I read some more of the 'Guerilla Home Recording' book that I've mentioned on previous song notes. This time I made an effort to do what are hopefully a series of sensible and relatively successful mixing/mastering processes:

There are probably some other things I did for the first time which I forgot to mention.

Despite the ease of use of the Pod. I'm still finding it very hard to get really 'fat' sounding recordings with it. I mean there's no longer the tinny and throaty sound I was suffering under before with the previous gear regime, but it's still far from perfect. I find it very difficult setting up a really good guitar tone.

The bass was done entirely through the Pod using the 'Tweed Blues' setting which is some Fender amp that was initially intended as a bass amp but later got appropriated by surf rockers. Turns out it's still a pretty good bass amp too. I'm pretty happy with the bass sound throughout the song. It almost makes up for the duff notes that I can hear in there. I'm not sure I'd be able to re-record the bass part again without a full-scale war from the neighbours.

Edit: the bass was re-recorded using the awesome Bass Pod that I got hold of via Ebay and it sounds much better for it. Again, bandpass filters help alleviate mud.

To illustrate how terrible the first mix is. Here is the first mix. It's worth noting that those vocals were only intended as placeholders/experimentation.

More Mixing Notes

So after a fourth and (hopefully) final attempt at mixing I have tinkered even more. There should be an increase in the quality of the recording, but it still manages to sound garbage once I play it on something that isn't my monitor speakers on my recording PC.

I read up on mixing guitars, bass and drums and had to dive into the parametric equalizer for the first time (I don't think I've used it before, anyway). The guitars supposedly have high pass and low pass filters on them now (though it's not particularly clear in Cooledit where the high pass/low pass filters actually are) which should hopefully clear the guitars from frequencies where they really shouldn't be, that is, above about 13KHz and below 100Khz. They were also boosted at around 3KHz and 400Hz, hopefully to give them a bit more presence and punch... Can you hear the difference?

The bass and drums were mixed to hopefully be more complementary to each other. The bass got a boost below 250Hz (I think) and were pulled down at 100Hz, which is where the drums got a slight dB boost, to hopefully give the kick drum a little more clarity.

I can't seem to get the FFT or Scientific filters to work in multi-track, I don't know whether this is a limitation of Cooledit. This means that I would have liked to put everything that wasn't drums and bass on some sort of high pass filter to get them out of the way of the low frequencies, so drums and bass would cut through better. Maybe I'll be able to do that on the next recording (I'm hoping I don't have to do a fifth mix of this bloody song.)

[...]

So I did end up doing a fifth mix after my tinkering rendered the guitars unlistenable due to cumulative parametric EQs making a giant frequency spike. I also made a more concerted effort to EQ the drums properly. All that work, hopefully I won't forget all this for the next recording and have to relearn it all on the recording after that.

These are mostly here for my convenience.