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Tweeker
Chic Session Notes
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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