Inside The Belly Of The Whale: Session 3

Session 3:   Good Tone and Click Tracks

Getting Tone

Drum and bass tracking began on saturday... if you live with the blast radius of Scott's kick drum, you already knew that.    We started by getting a bass guitar tone.  This is generally a pretty easy proposition: 

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Good Bass Tone

prep time - years

cook time - abo

ut 5 minutes

1 part awesome bass player (make to separate the hacks from the talent)

1 part good tube preamp

3 cables

salt & peppa (I mean, seriously, i use them on everything i cook up)

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We also built the cue mixes for Tyler and Scott.  This is the first project in 10 years of The Whale where i'm actually building cue mixes the way they should be built.  I'm so proud of me :).   Tyler's mix station is unique to the others, and probably looks most like a big-kid recording studio.   He's got a small mixer running between me and his headphones.  To the mixer is whatever he needs from the recorder (Click, vocals, scratch instruments) and a feed from the input-thru of the direct box.  This gives him increased co

ntrol over the amount of bass he hears in his phones.  Bass is hard to monitor in headphones if you're used to hearing yourself through an amp, in that it doesn't carry the low end information the same way, and you can't 'feel' it, like you can with a bass amp.  It's very easy to loose the bass in a cue mix, which leads to the bassist playing the strings harder than he normally does and sending a very plunky sound to tape.   This new monitoring setup seems to work very well for tyler, which is excellent!

The Tyranny of the Click

Tracking to a click is also a challenge if one is not used to hearing "BEEP, boop, boop, boop" over and over a

gain in your ears for five minutes while playing.   In general, having the click allows us to maintain an even tempo and serves as a marker when sections of songs where the drums are not playing.   The click is a evil taskmaster as well... and points out those places within the song that one naturally speeds up or slows down.   Sometimes those ebs and flows of tempo are good things and provide emotion to the track.   But often, when listening to a studio recording, those fluctuations sound more like amateur hour than polished, as it's much harder to make a tight recording when the tempos ride a wave.   When you play live, you can see each other, you can feed off of each other... tracking with overdubs doesn't always afford that luxury.... what you gain in limitless possibilities you sometimes have to sacrifice in spontaneity.  

Here are two songs we cut to the click and cut mixes.   The drums and bass are real tracks, the rest are scratch (like underpainting on a canvas) and will be covered over.   You may notice the keeper tracks deviate slightly from the scratch tracks.  In these cases, the deviation is minor.  Remember, the scratch tracks will be covered over with keeper tracks of their own, and those tracks will be recorded to the real drums and bass.   

Leviathan    &    Long Dark Night  

Scott & Tyler Screwing around to YYZ

Change of Plans

The third track we recorded in this session was "Three Over Four".  This is a track that I wrote up in the vein of "Bell Bottom Blues" (Clapton) or "Sometimes Salvation" (Black Crowes).   It's more typical blues, and was dying at the hand of the click and cue mixes.   It felt very sterile in tracking.   So, we've decided to track that tune live with the full band.   This friday, we'll go into the studio together.  Cranfill will man the board, and the rest of the band will track the tune together: old school... everyone live.

Hopefully this will yield a more passionate performance.