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Tweeker Chic
'Corpse Smell'
Tweeker Chic is a band in the style of early 80's hardcore bands, like Circlejerks, Black Flag, and Minor Threat. So, I went for a very aggressive, in your face sound.
The band rehearses in an interesting room at their house, it's a den, with a solarium type room at one end, where the drums are set up, facing into the den. The smaller drum room had shelves on both walls, loaded with vinyl albums and books, both of which are great diffusors.
Unlike most sessions, I had the band leave their gear right where it was, with the bass and guitar amps facing towards the drums. Both amps were pretty small, so I mic'd them using a combination of SM57 and condensers. I find that small 10" or less amps sound really good when mic'd with condenser mics, sometimes sounding even bigger than 4x12 cabs!
The drums were mic'd in my usual fashion, with a 57 and Mk012 on the snare, e604s on the toms, and a D112 inside the kick. The overheads were my GT44s, brought in from the front, to reduce bleed from the amps out front. There was a room mic, in a hallway at the other end of the house, a Studio Projects B1, placed in a spot that I thought sounded good. You can hear this room mic in the intro to 'Corpse Smell', and it's used in most of the mixes.
The vocals were recorded with an RE20, the only overdubs in an otherwise live tracking session. In fact, the vocals for at least one song were tracked live, with the band. No headphones were used, outside of the overdubs. Preamps were Onyx 800r for the drums, and my Yamaha GF16/12 for everything else. I didn't use a bass di, as I liked the mic'd sound a lot.
Mixing went quickly, once we had a basic mix we liked, there weren't any big changes from track to track. I used a bit of eq and tape saturation-type clipping to give the sound a fat, analogue type feel. A touch of reverb is in there, to glue things together a bit, but it's a basic, fast mix. The entire project took about 8 hours to track and mix, but came out great!
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