Tim Blood Recording Vol. 2

Eye by controlforce

Drums are done.

Emmy helped with trumpet. It sounds great.

Figuring it out. Problem solving. Friendly.

Tim Blood Recording

So we're 8 drums tracks into our album.

We decided to record drums in our front room

We called in favors and got some nice mics this time.
We took a couple days to get everything set up and sounding how we wanted. This has been the most laid back recording yet.

If all goes to plan we'll start recording some guitar this weekend. And also some horns for one song. So it'll probably be out in May sometime.

I'm not gonna go into detail about the setup but if you want to know leave a comment and I'd be happy to explain.

VIPE for real for real day 2

We finished bass and guitar yesterday. Everyone is very excited. This is the first recording in years where we've given ourself the time to take our time, but everything is still going quickly. I think all the rushed recording we've done this year have payed off. It's just gonna take longer to mixmaster than usual. It's nice to kinda know what you're doing.

Here's a pic of the guitar setup:

We put the wide EV mic on bottom and the Nady on top. We also tried putting the other EV farther back but it didn't sound good . We didn't end up using the room mic for bass either. I don't think we know how to place them and our living room is really still sounding so it just sounds shitty and indistinct and muddies up the sound.

We did two tracks of guitar for each song panned left and right. I used to think that was cheating but then i realized recording is cheating and that's the best way to sound good.

Also, it took me years but here's the key to killer distortion, at least on the Sunn Concert Lead:

So now it's just vocals and then getting everything to sound right. It looks like this will be out in May sometime maybe on tape, but I'll put up a track when it all comes together.

Next up is Tim Blood which this recording is kind of a trial run for. Expect new recordings every month till the end of summer. My plan is to stop writing new songs and have every song that we've written recorded by my birthday in August.

Also, really looking forward to recording Cat Massacre, Downsided and maybe more in the coming month. If anyone else wants help recording get in touch and maybe we could do it.

VIPE recording for real

So we tried twice to record VIPE before the tour but it just didn't come together. I think it all worked out cause we got a lot tighter playing them so much live, but I don't think we would have learned them well enough if we hadn't tried to record. Also, now we get to release it as a split instead.

So now we're finally on day two of of the real recording. We got all the drums done yesterday. Hopefully we'll get guitar, bass and maybe vocals too finished today. I go back and forth on multi tracking. Everything we've done besides the second Christwrong (and Sybok) have had all live instruments. I like to record everything we do differently so this will probably be our most clear recording yet, or at least our most mic'd recording yet.

Check out these clamped on tom mics:

We had one overhead in the back (EV wide angle mic), a bass drum mic pretty far in (shitty Nady bass drum mic), snare mic on bottom (cheap-o Nady, I think it's the starpower!), one mic for the mid toms (our other identical EV), and one for the floor tom (other Nady).

Here's the bass setup:

I'm not sure how much of this we'll use but I've got the Nady bass drum mic on the bottom, the other Nady on top, the EV a few feet back, and a chord running out of the preamp.

It's all 1's and 0's.

So I'll take some more pictures and write a bit more tomorrow. Leave a comment if you've got any questions.

VIPE ON TOUR VIPE ON TOUR VIPE ON TOUR

Recommended listening: Christwrong (completely unnecessary)

This ended up being way longer than I thought, feel free to not even start reading it. I'm writing this early in the morning after we played a ridiculously fun show in Spokane (thanks again to everyone there). I think I'm too pumped on fun to sleep.

I was gonna write something about the stuff we were listening to and thinking about when writing the songs from the Vipe/Christwrong split, because I like to ramble about music, but I didn't have anything to do with the writing of the first two Vipe songs so here's what I was into during the making of each Christwrong release and a little about the recordings because that was the fun part before we played in Spokane the first time. D-Beat stuff is so derivative. It's all in how you mix it, maybe, so here's whose styles I was biting. I can't speak for everyone though.

CW1 was done because I'd wanted to do an Anti-Cimex rip off band for awhile, and then Ian showed me Shitlickers and it had to happen. Also we wanted something fun to do while taking a break from a grind bind we'd been working on that still hasn't come together. Someday, hopefully. Before I heard the Shitlickers we were going to make the recording sound similar to Raped Ass by Anti-Cimex but instead we went for a totally blown out bassy sound.

Not enough bands bite Shitlickers style, especially the way their recording sounds. Including us on later recordings. http://vxpxzine.blogspot.com/2008/05/shitlickers-interview.html here's a really good interview done years after. It's interesting to me how thought out the sound was.

CW2 was done because we had a show in Spokane and I decided that we would record something before every show we played. At first I wanted it to sound like GISM and I think that's still there a bit, especially in the first song and perhaps the lyrics. I'm not sure I can say anything eloquent about them right now but they're very interesting, and of course goofy:

Punks is Hippies!

The idea with the recording was a more polished version of the first one. I think I like it but I'm not quite sure what to think of it. We did it track by track for all but the last song which most of us had never done before.

Also I was listening to these albums a lot when I'd go on walks.

CW3 was gonna be more Tragedy influenced stuff like the last song on CW2 but Ian and I were listening to too much really rock 'n roll Scandinavian D-Beat stuff for that to happen. Also it's just two songs so who knows how it would have been had it been longer. Skitkids have been what I put on when I can't think of anything else for a while now. They goes down easy in an almost guilty pleasure way, which is kind of what the songwriting in Christwrong is like. Ian got me really into Herätys and the newest Totalitär albums too.

We wanted the recording to sound scummy, kinda like the last track on CW2. That song and the two new ones are the only ones I haven't used a DOD Classic Fuzz pedal for the main guitar sound.

I might write about Vipe sometime after there's more recorded stuff to show but for now this band is a huge inspiration and definitely worth checking out:

You can listen to and download the Vipe/Christwrong split here: http://controlforce.bandcamp.com/album/vipe-christwrong-split

or just download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?r287adzqqw3u7gw