First I
want to apologize for not getting a new blog up sooner. Ive been behind on updating the blog, and I
could have done better. Now that school is finally out and I have more time
though, I'm super psyched to tell you about the brand new single Four Score Studio just recorded with the band Tempest. The album is titled Without
Remorse. I have to start by saying
that it was awesome working with Tempest and I look forward to doing
more projects with them in the future. They are
truly a dedicated group of guys who work very hard at what they
love to do, which is writing and playing music! Many of you who have been following FSS may know that we have been working on this track for a long time,
and there are many reasons for that. The biggest reason was that this was the first major track that FSS has produced and released. That meant it was the first chance I
had to work on a track from beginning
to end that wasn't for school and that
used just my own gear, which was a big undertaking. I have to thank the guys from Tempest who were very understanding the whole
time. Tempest approached me last November after they had seen one of my
flyers on the Montana State University campus and said they were interested in
recording a single with me and just seeing
how it went. I was super excited
and nervous at the same time. I
had expected some of my first projects to be smaller recordings with one or two people, not taking on
a whole band! To complete this
project I knew the gear I had at the time (which was all of three microphones and an M-audio 4 I/O Interface) would not be enough to complete this
project, and it turns out it wasn’t.
We started this project trying to record some
scratch tracks of the bassist Levi Krutzfeldt and the lead guitar player Jackson Schreiber so that drummer
Jarrett Payne would have a reference while he was recording. The first
scratch track we did turned out to
be unusable because of
the recording location. Initially I has
chosen Howard Hall at Montana State University, which is a concert hall,
as the location for the scratch recording. This lead us to get a very boomy
scratch and the timing was off, so
when poor Jarrett tried to record with it
for the first time the results were not what we had hoped. The disappointing
scratch also had to do with the
mic placements that I had chosen
for Jarrett’s kit.
Fortunately we were able
to move locations before we recorded the drums for the first time. Tempest
practices out of Bozeman near Four Corners in a stone cutter's facility
at night when no one is there, and this turned out to be a perfect spot
for recording. The walls of the inside of the building are covered in dead
board to keep sound from spilling out, which helped to give us a big live-room sound without
the roominess we had before. The other issue we had with the
first drum recording was lack of
I/O in my interface. For people who don’t do recording, I/O stands for Inputs
and Outputs, and represents the number of microphones you can record at one
time. On Jarrett’s kit we were trying to record 8 mics into 4 I/O. We had been
doing this by running 6 of the mics into a mixer then mixing that down to 3
channels to make it all fit into my computer at one time. This
lead to a problem where the
mixer changed the sound of
the mics we were recording and gave the overall
drum sound a lower quality
that we wanted. This also
gave me a lot less mixing power at the computer because I had combined a whole bunch of
the mics together and
didn’t have control over them individually the way I had wanted. As a group we decided we were not happy with
the first drum take and threw away what we had. We then made several changes to our set up and tried recording the
scratch tracks again, followed
by the drums. We had a lot of
the same issues again however,
and then decided to throw away
the work we had been doing.
Knowing that something was going to have to
change to get the recording we wanted, I started looking
at replacing my M-Audio Fast Track Interface with something bigger, which I had already been thinking about doing. I ending up purchasing a MOTU
896 MK3 interface which gave us the 8I/O that we would need
for recording the drums. It would
also make anything else we
recorded sound a lot better than the Fast Track. This was an
awesome decision and I haven’t regretted it yet.
We then
started over for a third time, recording just a scratch bass track and the drums, and it turned out the
third time was the charm. We got a great-sounding
drum kit that we were all super
happy with and which we were
finally able to continue recording. The
rest of the recording went along pretty quickly. We followed drums by recording
the lead guitar part, and then re-recorded the actual bass track in the song. We
followed that with the backing guitar and then the guitar solo on the track. That left only the vocals of the talented Daniel Nelson,
who also plays the backing guitar on the single. This took us a little
longer due to a gap of spring break and again a room choice mistake on my
part. We started trying to record vocals in one of the isolated practice rooms in Howard Hall, the Montana State
music building. We were getting good recordings that were sounding
nice and dead like a isolated booth, but we weren’t getting the takes that we wanted. We then decided to move the recording
back out to Tempest's practice
spot and again this did the trick. We were able to finish recording
all the vocals in two more sessions and that finished up the recording of this
track.
Mixing this track had a couple of little challenges
but nothing that was to major to deal with. One of the only major challenges was trying to get
the kick drum to cut through so many other tracks on this mix, and there
were quite a few of them. The
number of tracks we recorded with mics on this
single came out to 56, and
when you added in all the other tracks needed for mixing the different parts together the overall piece had a
whopping 73 tracks! Anyone
out there who records music can tell you that is quite a few tracks to sort
though and remember! As a whole
this project was a great
learning experiment even though
it was quite the journey over many months of let downs and victories. I had a
blast working on this track with Tempest and I look forward to doing many more.
Make sure to check out the track and all our hard work on their bandpage.
Alex Nusbaum (Head Engineer of Four Score Studios)
