As many of you will know we are currently in the process of recording our album. A few weeks ago we went into the studio to record Ben’s drum tracks, and he did a killer job, and next up was my guitars. I want to tell a quick story about where things are going and some challenges I have faced recently. Bear with me, I am going to be a little bit technical first, and then I will get to the point of this post, which I think is important for our community to know.
For the album we are using a technique called re-amping. The way this works is that Juan (our producer) gave me Ben’s recorded drums with a built-in click track and I have loaded them into my studio at home. There I am using a little box called a DI box that takes my guitar cable and has two outputs – one into my guitar amp and one which feeds the dry signal (the clean sound from the guitar itself) into the mixing desk. I then record both my guitar amp and the dry signal as I record each song. By recording the guitar amp I record a normal distorted guitar sound (which Ron can record bass along with later), and then in a week we will take the dry signal to Jaun’s studio (where we did the drums) and feed it into a perfectly set up and miced guitar amp and record it. This way I get to record my performances in my home studio, but the final sound is professionally recorded in Juan’s studio.
So…I started recording my guitars. When I do this I need to record four rhythm guitar tracks (two for me and two for Jim) for each song. When I record my goal is to get the perfect performance on each of the four guitar tracks. It takes time, a lot of perseverance, and practice, but it is worth it for an album we can all enjoy for years to come.
As I started ploughing through each of the tracks, I was most of the way through my guitars and then I noticed a glaring mistake. I had been using the click track (which is like a metronome) that Juan included with the drum recordings, but at times it was difficult to hear the click and as such in those parts it felt like my playing was less precise; particularly with the fast parts. The revelation I had, which I kicked myself about, was that I should have switched on my own click track synced with the one in Ben’s drums. This would make it much easier to play, and edit for that matter. Upon this realization later on a Wed night after three hours of recording, I laid on the floor in my wife’s office just saying fucking click track! over and over again to myself.
I knew this needed to be right though, so I blew away all of my work and started again. I switched on all the clicks and lo and behold delivered some much better performances. It was worth it.
Spin forward a week to tonight where I have pretty much all of my guitars done, and I am starting on Jim’s guitars. When I got into my studio to start recording, I noticed my guitar was way out of tune compared to my tuner. Interestingly, when we met on Saturday to rehearse before our show in Vallejo I also noticed that when I tuned to my guitar amp tuner my guitar was way out of tune too. It was as if my tuner in my home studio was tuning to a different pitch. Each of the strings were tuned correctly in relation to each other, but it seemed my low C string live was a lot deeper than my low C string when I was recording in the studio.
…and then I realized why, and I cracked open a beer to console myself.
For some ungodly reason my tuner in my studio has been set to 450hz and normal concert pitch is 440hz. In other words if you tune the bottom string on a guitar (in my case a C) to 450hz it will sound about a half-step higher in tone than if you tune it to the industry-standard-that-every-tuner-including-my-damn-tuner-despite-it-being-an-asshole pitch of 440hz…it sounds different.
Now I faced a dilemma. I had recorded pretty much everything again, but in 450hz instead of 440hz. While I could certainly record the album in this pitch, it would mean weirdly tuning all the other instruments, adjusting my vocals to this slightly different pitch, and it just didn’t sound as cool. My normal tuning sounded deep and fat; this sounded a little weaker. But there was another more important reason…
…”shit. I need to record it again” I grumbled into my Miller Lite.
When I started the Severed Fifth Recording Campaign and asked all of you wonderful folks to contribute your own hard-earned money to our recording fund, I based my platform on the premise of if we going to do this, we need to do it right. I promised all of you that I we will take your generosity and invest it wisely into the recording, and put out the best possible release that we can so we can bring change to an industry that is so broken. We had donations from over 70 people, from over 15 countries, and your generosity was clear statement of belief in Severed Fifth and what we are striving to achieve. Not only this, but this album is going to be at the heart of much of the work of our growing Street Team community – I owe Neil, Virgil, Adam, Zach, Che, Lyle, Mark and the many other people investing their effort in Severed Fifth the best possible performance I can deliver.
With this in mind I wiped my work and started again…in 440hz…with my click track loud and proud, and with a warmth that despite the frustration, if it wasn’t for the awesome Severed Fifth community believing in us, we wouldn’t be doing this in the first place. You all rock, and I will be damned if I don’t give you the absolute best I can give you. This is going to rock, friends… \m/
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