Hell yeah! - SuperGiant was voted best band in Burque and we just we finished their new album up today! To celebrate this time of rock, I thought I'd share a little bit about the recording process (more about the technical side, and less about the, well, WWM) on their new album "Antares" scheduled to drop soon.

Recording:

We blocked out SFCS's Studio A to track drums, bass, scratch guitar, and scratch vocals. Our goal was to get the best drum sound we could, and hands down, the live room over there at SFCS rocks! It provides a huge, organic, maleable sound that can be mixed in many ways. Doug's drum mic'ing technique is really unique in a way that he mics up the kit as ONE instrument. He still puts 12-16 mics on the kit, but it's recorded as one beast... this proves very very nice in ambient and stereo positioning and the kit acts as an instrument in the mix (not as individual, isolated drums). Gary "first take" Chavez laid down the drums with authority and it was recorded as it was meant to be - natural, big, and boss!

If you've heard SuperGiant, you'll know that both bass and guitar are going through some killer amps and cabs. We wanted to capture the essence of this sound for both guitar and bass, so we put each rig in an iso chamber. For Jeremy's guitar, we put used both a fat ribbon mic and a condenser and ran two tracks. For Kyle's bass, we did the same, but added a DI, giving me 3 tracks on the bass to work with. (peeps usually just go DI on bass, but Kyle's distortion and harmonic content was REQUIRED for this album)

In a weekend lock-out session we captured bass and drums solid and took the sessions over to Tripl3Tone Studios for overdubs.

All instrument and vocal overdubs were recorded through a Midas Venice Console (for the lush, musical, British EQ's and direct outputs), a Presonus ADL-600 tube pre-amplifier and recorded to hard disc with a Digidesign BlackLion modded 002r. (if you got ProTools LE, I would seriously recommend BlackLion modification)

I recorded and mixed the tracks in ProTools using some sweet plugins including Sound Toys, Antares (AVOX and Harmony Engine, NOT Autotune cuz Joel don't need dat), FabFilter, KeyToSound's Production Pack (Vintage EQ & Dynamic EQ), A.I.R ReelTape Saturation, GRM Tools, and various other plugs.

There are some tasty treats on the album that I'm not going to discuss so that I don't give them away, but in the end, we sat pretty with 3-6 tracks deep on the vocals, and up to 12 tracks deep on the guitars. All in all, the sessions ranged from 40-48 channels.

Mastering:

For mastering, I bring my ProTools rig over to SFCS for transfer versus sending just the stereo stems. This gives me a lot more control of the audio going into the mastering signal chain and Doug and I fly together when working like this. This procedure saves time in the long run, just in case last minute tweaking is required, I can treat it right then and there. (Doug's room is very unforgiving and will expose everything in the mix - good or bad)

I usually mix vocals last so that they're sitting slightly above the mix before mastering to let the equipment do the work of massaging them into the overall mix. This helps overcome competition with Guitar and Snare tones.

At SFCS, my rig gets powered by custom power cables and the audio travels through oxygen-free-copper noiseless neoprene cables into the EQ chain. Cables do make a huge difference which is sometimes overlooked.

There are many mastering EQ's to choose from at Doug's and for SuperGiant, I went with the Focusrite Isomorphic Blue 315 parametric EQ. I don't apply any compression, "maximizing", or anything else when dumping the final mix down for mastering... just some fine EQ'ing. The EQ is applied only to bring out key elements, fix any notches in the mix, and condition the full frequency band to import into ProTools.

SFCS uses ProTools HD3, BUT they also have the coveted Apogee AD-8000 ADC's, which I choose every time I'm there. I love the Apogee clock and analog to digital conversion circuitry and the sound has that "big record" quality to them.

Once dumped into Protools, the stereo stems go through a 64bit signal internal signal processing chain which includes SSL Master Bus Compression (sounds just like the channel strip) followed by Ozone3 Multi-band Harmonic Exciter, Multi-band Dynamics, and Multi-band Stereo Imaging. At this point, EQ'ing and fine gain staging is done on frequency specific bands (4 nodes), so that tweaks on guitar leads can be done without blowing out the bass tone, etc. Multiband processing is a must for me in the mastering stage.

For critical listening, I like to have a few reference monitors to choose from as well to make sure the mix is translating well and will be "portable" outside the studio. We used Cizek custom built near field monitors, B&W 705 mid-field reference monitors, and Genelec custom loud-speakers. Also, having Doug's fresh ears to listen during the mastering is a must. I have tried to master tracks I've also recorded and mixed, and it's amazing how over time you become so familiar with the sound, that you can sometimes overlook obvious things in the mix. This is usually why people send their stuff away to get mastered and Doug is my go-to guy for this. He hears everything.

Anyways, I just thought I'd share the process on my end because I'm really proud of the way this album came out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think of it.

Congrats again SuperGiant it was an honor to have worked with you muthertruckers...

Wolf

Just listened to the CD again last night for the um-teenth million time..... YEP YEP YEP it kicks ass