Recording Doom

[louderthangod]

What do you guys use to record? Guitars, bass, drums, vocals...all of it? I'm mainly been recording my solo doom/drone project but now I'm recording jamming session at our studio and I'm looking for suggestions and ideas. For my home stuff I'm using a 421 at an angle and a Heil PR30 straight on but I'm not super happy with the PR30. I have both of these about 6" away from the grill cloth on an EV12L speaker or an EV15L depending on which amp/cab I'm using at the moment.
I've got an SM7B that I've never really used on guitars that I think I might try soon and in 2 days I should get my first ribbon mic (hopefully FedEx doesn't screw up like they have lately) in a Beyerdynamic M160.

Guitar: At the studio they're just jamming tracks but I'm using a pair of 57's (straight and 45 degree angle) which sounds fine (I'm not the biggest 57 but as a pair I like them vastly better than alone). I'm miking an EV12L in a 4x12 on my Matamp non-master 120

Kick: Sennheiser e602 which I like a lot
Snare (just top for now) Granelli right angled SM57
Toms (floor and rack): Sennheiser e604
Overheads: some cheapy CAD pencil condenser...these don't sound that great but in our room we get so much bleed from the guitars and bass that I really have no idea how they sound on their own
Hi-Hat: Rode m3. I literally got this for $1 in a package deal with the Rode NT1a (which I like on acoustic but I'm thinking of having modified by Oktavamod)

Bass: AKG D112 plus direct on a Matamp 4x15 cab (one of Al's old Green cabs) with whatever head is not blown up. My bassists has George Rice's (original High on Fire bassist) Matamp 200 but it keeps blowing so sometimes he uses a Trace Elliot V6 or my Sound City 120.

If we have a second guitarist there I have an Audix i5 which I like but I'll probably use the Heil PR30 on this once the m160 arrives

My singer is playing drums so we're not doing vocals right now but he's got a beta 58 and I've got an Audix om5

I've been thinking about getting a pair of those Cascade Fatheads for overheads

Doom has a lot of it's own unique issues with drop tunings, fuzz pedals, crazy volume and such so some of the classics don't quite apply or at least not in the same ways.

[Kacey Y]

Varies a little from project to project, but typically:

Kick In: Sennheiser e602 II
Kick Front: Solomon Lofreq (have used a Blue Kickball or AT4047 in the past)
Snare Top: Shure SM57
Snare Bottom: Varies, I've used a Shure SM57, EV 664, random SDC, Audix i5
Rack Toms: Sennheiser MD421 II
Floor Tom: Sometimes a MD421, sometimes an AT4047 or even a Shure SM7B at times
Overheads: Oktava MK012, have used different ribbons pairs in the past as well, depending on the space
Drum Room: Sage Bova Ball or sometimes a ribbon mic

Guitars: Shure SM7B is my go to, sometimes a SM57, MD421, ribbon mic (I have a Shinybox that I like) or i5. Usually a couple of those together.

Bass: SM7b or EV RE20, sometimes along with something else like an SM57, MD421 or maybe even an LDC. It can change a lot depending on the tone and the guitars.

Vocals: ADK Vienna is my fav I've been using for a long time, SM7B if the singer like to hold the mic and scream a lot.


I usually try to have a few alternates and options, because some mics just work better on certain instruments/speakers or maybe I'm tracking everything live and only have so many to go around and I pick and choose. I also have a bunch of random no name Dynamic and SDC style mics that work in a pinch for some things just fine.

[louderthangod]

What are your go to ways to record guitar?

[Kacey Y]

What are your go to ways to record guitar?

My go to recording method for guitar is what I do for my own stuff and demo recordings. Shure SM7B right on the grill, usually around where the cap meets the cone. I put on over ear headphones and move it around until I get a balanced sound I like. I dial in my preamp to peak around -12db to -10db max and then I double track with a different guitar, pedal and/or amp, sometimes all or a combination. When I'm doing my own stuff, I have a really clear idea of the tones I want, so I tend towards a very neutral approach to recording and dial in the sound on the actual gear, then craft the final bit in mixing. Since I'm a mixing engineer, I'm usually thinking ahead to what I want to do or at the very least leaving myself options to play with.

If I'm recording someone else, it's highly dependent on the situation. Especially if it's all live tracking, because then I need to get a variety of sounds to utilize in mixing later from ONE source. Then I usually try out different mics and play with positions to find something I like the sound of, then do the same with a contrasting sound. So I might use a 57 and a ribbon together or an MD421 and an LDC. If the guitarist is using two cabs with different speakers, then I might pick out a mic for each that exaggerates or captures that sound well. In these kinds of situations I'm thinking on my feet and making artistic choices, based on what I hear. I'll take my time to do some sample recordings and maybe whip up a quick test mix and if I don't like what I'm getting, I'll change it up and try something different. That's why my go to approach to guitars on my own stuff is much different, fairly set and also fairly neutral in character, because I have a strong opinion on the source tone and I will listen back and adjust THAT first, most of the time.

Most of my recording experience amounts to having a clear goal at the start, having a set of tools that I'm familiar with (what mics are dark, which are bright, mid scoop vs mid presence, etc.) and then using my ears to find the right combination and balance for what's required at the time. How inclined you are to mixing can radically change your approach to tracking. That's why some people put multiple close and room mics on a source sometimes, so they options to play with later. Same with DI on bass or guitar, which I almost never do, so that they can reamp or something similar later. My personal preference if it works for the project, is to be very opinionated about the tone from the gear, very neutral with the tracking and craft the mix carefully to get the final product.

[Kacey Y]

Not really doom, but I was messing around briefly last night with a heavy noise rock riff and recorded it at home. Everything tuned in B, distorted bass, though the guitars are meant to be more of a grindy high end Marshall type tone, rather than thick and heavy like I would do with doom guitar. I just wanted to share this little clip comparing the pretty much unmixed version, with the version I quickly mixed last night. Drums are Logic X Drummer, guitar was recorded with a single Shure SM7b (stereo spread for convenience and quickness) and bass recorded with a single EV RE20. Both are live tracked in a room, just at low volume through a small rig. I had a clear idea of the sound I wanted when I started, so I mixed this fairly quickly and did a few little tricks to kind of simulate sounds I would get with a lot more tracks/mics typically. So I wanted to showcase how things come together when using a simple tracking method and more involved mixing approach.

https://soundcloud.com/corey-y/mix-comparison-1

(I wish the forum platform would fix the Soundcloud embedding, follow the link)

[louderthangod]

Thanks for posting that clip. I'm going out of town for a week but I'm definitely going to try some the SM7B on guitars when I get back. Last night I was playing around with the 421 and m160 both about 12" away around the edge of the dust cap and that sounds pretty good but they're both fairly dark mikes but at high volume they seem to get more balanced sounding with less proximity effect when backed up a bit. I used the unison API vision preamps on my UAD (a little fuller sounding even with no eq compared to the unison 1073) but definitely some of the best tones I've ever gotten especially on the big,nasty fuzz but the clean, spacey reverb/delay heavy stuff I do also seemed to really clean up. So many options.

When I'm recording rehearsals it's tricky because there's a crazy amount of bleed in all of the drum mikes. I've got some extra cabs in the room so I try and use them asa gobos but it's just bouncing off of everywhere. I'm also very new at all of this but especially the full band thing and I'm getting a lot of bass buildup between 100-500hz and my heavy chords, the bass and the kick are getting really mushy. I know I'm not going to get studio quality separation but each part sounds good on their own but placing them in a cohesive mix is tricky and not something I feel I have a handle on yet even with plenty of hi/low passing, eq'ing and panning. It's getting better but still needs a lot of work. I don't plan on releasing any of that but it's good practice for my engineering skills.

[Kacey Y]

Live tracking in one room without some kind of physical separation is pretty tricky. There are a few little tricks with the cymbals and toms that can help mitigate some of the bleed, but they involve a lot of editing. Using high and low pass filters is a good place to start with getting a good separation in any mix. I generally start with cutting inaudible low and high frequencies on every track, ten move on to cut out everything that's not contributing the sound. Ducking the bass sidechained to the kick helps a lot as well. At some point you do kind of just have to figure out what the sound you've got is and embrace it.

[louderthangod]

Yeah, lots of hi and low pass has helped. I think I'll try moving the overheads a little lower next time to see if I get a stronger cymbal sound.

I'm away from home this week but thinking about stereo imaging for my solo project. I mainly record guitars fairly improvised so I don't go back and double anything. At home I just have my UAD Apollo which can only take two tracks at a time. I'm considering my usual two mics on 1 cab/amp and applying some stereo imaging. I've got the Eventide H910 plugin which can do. Ice stereo doubling with some micro pitch. The Nugen Stereoizer and the UAD bx_saturator seem cool because I can do mid-side stuff with the lows in mono and the mids/highs off to the side which is good because I runa lot of delay and reverb and that sounds great spread but I have a lot of baritone lows which sound better up the middle. I can also record in stereo with one mic on each amp out of a stereo H9 but if I use -an them then I'm getting all of those lows hard panned as well and that gets messy sounding. I figure I'll try several things but what would you recommend I try first? Starting in stereo and maybe bussing the bass to mono or starting in mono and using plugins to spread it out?

[Kacey Y]

There's lots of ways to approach that. I think your instinct is correct, to try everything in as many combinations as possible and listen back to find out which works best for you. That's a frustrating answer to get, because it involves a lot of work and no definite course of action, but I honestly really do believe that's how you become good at mixing. I will often just do experiments from scratch or on old projects just to try out a lot of different ideas. Typically with just a really short phrase or something that I can loop over and over and quickly audition different sounds back to back. Sometimes I setup a few different parallel tracks and have them go back and forth for comparison.

As for my personal preferences, I don't like the whole detuned doubling thing very much. Using multiple mics can be good, but I tend to prefer that for depth in a mix, rather than width. If they're very radically different sounding mics, it can work pretty well for stereo imaging, but my preference is to have two different rigs or two different performances with slightly different settings (or pedals, whatever). Either way, you already hit upon a crucial mixing issue, which is that even if you have some very different sounding left and right tracks of the same or similar sources, it doesn't necessarily give you the ideal stereo image or separation you want. I like the stereo imaging plugins that utilize EQ dependent panning to get their effect, because you can use them on a single source, which is what I did on the mix comparison clip I posted above, or you actually use it on a stereo group of multiple hard panned tracks, to get that EQ dependent panning for a subtle but noticeable effect. So you can bring the lows towards the center a bit and spread the highs out. There are some really amazingly good standalone aftermarket plugins for that, but the stock ones usually work pretty well. I use Logic X's Stereo Spread frequently, even though I think they consider it a mastering style plugin I'll use it on single sources and stereo groups.

You can get into the whole parallel processing thing, especially if you're going to use the double mic technique. I did a mono version of this for the bass track on the mix comparison clip above. I took the pre-fader feed of my bass track and sent it to 2 different sends. One I high passed above ~350 Hz and the other I low passed around the same frequency (I actually left a bit of a gap, about where I knew I wanted to cut some low mids). I heavily compressed the low passed track and on the high passed track I enhanced the highs and mids with some eq and a character plugin (SoundToys Radiator) to give it a harsh sound. Then I fed them both into the Bass stereo group I was routing the original bass track to and mixed them together until I got a sound I liked. You can do something similar that's panning based. You can set up two sends for each guitar track, one low and one high, process and pan them separately and even then still add some stereo imaging to just the high end or the whole stereo buss if you like. In that case I'd probably just not send the original track to any output and just use it as a source.

Split and/or parallel processing is a great mixing tool. It just requires planning and some creativity. I could put together a little sample idea of this with clips and screenshot if you're interested and want a little guidance. Personally, as I mentioned before, I love just diving into technique and experimenting with recording and mixing techniques. It's how I got good in the first place.

[ricks.pics]

Regarding recording in a rehearsal space, using cabs as gobo's is definitely a good move. I'm not sure how you've set it up previously, but if you put your gobo cabs around the drums set in a semi circle and then place the cabs you are using on the other side of the gobo's (maybe a couple inches away) pointed away from the drums you might have better results with the bleed you end up getting in your drum mics. Having your cabs closer to the drums any bleed you get in the drum mics will in theory have a lesser chance of causing phase cancellation. Depending on the size of the room it could reduce bleed quite a bit. The times I've done this in practice spaces they were pretty good sized rooms and actually got quite a bit of isolation for the drums.

For recording guitar I'm partial to using md 421's, akg 414's, sm7b's, and sm57's; especially with 12" speakers. Have had luck with m160's in combination with those as well. A ribbon and a 414 on 12's can be pretty choice, but with doom amps the possibility of bottoming out a ribbon I'll usually go with something that can take more punishment.
Also huge fan of 15" speakers for guitar, sm7b and Josephson e22 are weapons of choice for that. I'll have the diaphragms about 2 inches from the grill, on either side of the dust cab where it meets the cone.
For bass depending on the desired sound and cab I'll use sm7bs, re20's, md421, or beta 52's. But my fav set up is recording 15" speakers with a beta 52 on the dust cap and a 421 on the spot between dust cap and cone.

Trying to widen a single guitar take can definitively be tricky. I'd say Corey's idea of frequency splitting and panning those is likely your best bet. I'd probably also try delaying some of the panned tracks just a little bit to see if that adds anything interesting. However, frequency splitting and delaying different panned channels will likely cause some phase cancelling if your stereo mix is summed to mono. But from what you've said so far about these recording you might not care too much about that.
Another option might di'ing your initial guitar take so that you could reamp the guitar through multiple set ups with different mics.

[louderthangod]

Tried the SM7B in place of my 421 on a Sound City into a Thiele 1x15 cab with an EV15L and it sounds great. I found that backing it up about 10" (from grill to capsule) really got the low end to bloom on especially on deep fuzz. I played around with the Brainworx v3 m-s EQ. A little tricky and I'm sure I've got a long way to go before I really get it but it sounds really cool so far. I'm still trying to make the low end sound big but the highs sound so airy and clear. I spent hours with a light, reveby part and then a super thick fuzz on look while I moved mics around but I'm really digging my sound so far. The UAD unison preamps really sound cool and saves me cpu when I'm mixing since my guitar tone is pretty much done during tracking.

[bigbadbeach]

Hey I also had a few questions for the guru's on here... i'm working on recording an album for the first time. I'm getting very inconsistant sounding recordings. The playing is solid, but i can really seem to find a volume or mic placement that wont make my guitar sound really thin and fake... Im using a SM57 place one inch from the mesh just off the cone, on a 4x12 mesa cab, and a PG27 placed about 4 inches back from the mesh on a 4x12 sunn cab. The recordings just dont sound very good. I have my Eq's on my amps with treble 7, mids 8, bass 5, gain 7... I generally record at high volume with two stacks running at the same time... I use overdrive pedals, Fuzz, and delay pedals on and off in the recordings aswell. JJust does not sound good... Any advice would be appreciated. Cheers

[ricks.pics]

Hey bbb, sounds like you are probably getting some phase cancellation when you combine the two mics. Since you have the mics different distances from the speakers they are going to be picking up the low frequency waves at different points in their cycle. This is going to cause destructive interference in the low frequency content of your recording. You can easily check this with what you have recorded so far by using pretty much any plug-in on one guitar track and hitting the phase flip button, this will reverse the phase of the sound wave and in most cases if you have a thin recording with two out of phase mics this will bring back your low end. As far as good ways to combat this while recording you've got a few options. A) continue using the two cabs but try to make sure the capsules of the mics are the same distance from the speakers you are trying to record, or B) track one cab at a time with both mics on the same speaker with the capsules lined up. Also keep in mind that the closer to the cab you are the more low end you'll get due to proximity effect.

[Kacey Y]

Hey I also had a few questions for the guru's on here... i'm working on recording an album for the first time. I'm getting very inconsistant sounding recordings. The playing is solid, but i can really seem to find a volume or mic placement that wont make my guitar sound really thin and fake... Im using a SM57 place one inch from the mesh just off the cone, on a 4x12 mesa cab, and a PG27 placed about 4 inches back from the mesh on a 4x12 sunn cab. The recordings just dont sound very good. I have my Eq's on my amps with treble 7, mids 8, bass 5, gain 7... I generally record at high volume with two stacks running at the same time... I use overdrive pedals, Fuzz, and delay pedals on and off in the recordings aswell. JJust does not sound good... Any advice would be appreciated. Cheers

I agree with some of what ricks.pics is saying about phase issues and proximity effect. Whenever you're having issues of something not sounding recorded like you think it sounds in the room, it requires a pause and reassessment. Pick one microphone and start from scratch with your placement experiments. If you can't find a placement that sounds good (and really, move it in 3 dimensions, take nothing for granted), you may want to try a different mic or change your gear settings. Having multiple mics on one source can get confusing and complicated if you're not very sure about what you're doing and why you're doing it, phase relation issues aside. What are you trying to get out of a two mic setup? Is it just a stereo sound, it is depth (room sound), is it variety of tones? You may find you actually don't like what you're getting out of a certain mic by itself, but it may work in context with a very different mic in a double setup. What you hear in the room isn't usually accurate, unless your ear is at speaker level. Even then, the recording is the result you're actually getting, so change things to make that sound the way you want.

If you find you ARE having phase issues and just want to sort that out, using a polarity/phase flip button is useful. Sometimes flipping it can help, but if it's not 180 degrees out of phase it might just change what sort of weirdness you're getting, not fix the issue. The easiest way to check phase relation when tracking is to put on some over ear headphones, flip the polarity on one mic/channel (sometimes you can do this in the DAW, mixing console, preamp or interface, use whatever means you have easily available) and move that mic around until you hear the sound cancelling out (or a major tone suck or some sort), then flip it back to normal and you'll be in phase. As ricks.pics mentioned, if you're not trying to get different levels of room ambiance (one mic being farther back), you can just align the capsules of each mic so they're the same distance from the speaker/grill. Some mics have bigger enclosures around the capsule, so that might not necessarily mean lining up the grills of the microphones.

As for proximity effect, play around with distance and just see what you like. I prefer to get pretty close up most of the time, some people like to back up a few inches. Trust your ears, if it sounds good it is good. Like I said previously, if you do all these types of things and you just aren't getting the sound you want, your gear/settings doesn't sound how you want. The human ear and brain are tricky and very subjective. What you think you hear in the room may not be accurate and/or your brain might be filtering out a lot of things it doesn't like or want to hear. If you get a fairly neutral or pleasant sound out of a certain mic/position, start playing around with your gear settings until it sounds good. Don't take for granted the idea that your sound is good, but you're just failing to capture it. That's not always the case and it's better to be realistic about what's happening and use it as an opportunity to learn about tone and what you like and don't like about it. You may find out some assumptions about your taste in tone or gear aren't as true as you thought...or you might find the right mic and position and totally nail it with what you're doing now. I try not to make assumptions when recording, it takes a lot of practice to get into that mindset.

[tremolo3]

Does anybody know details about Earth 2's recording process?