Big Rock Tunes with Big Red Fire Truck

Looking for classy 80’s rock flare, soaring vocals, massively catchy hooks and a free set of steak knives? Then look no further…

I recently worked with a local Northern Beaches band called Big Red Fire Truck on their self titled debut EP which has just been released on October 11th, and I must say, it came out a treat!

So the main man behind BRFT, Digby Robinson, got in contact with me earlier this year about working on the EP together. He had a bunch of demo’s already recorded which was nice, luckily he’s quite handy with home recordings. From memory, there was around 8 or maybe even 9 songs in total which we narrowed down to the top 4 that we felt best worked together for an EP. BRFT came in really well prepared, even from that first point of contact which made my job quite easy in that sense as it allowed me to get a good vision of where they were going right from the outset. They knew what they were after and had put the effort into honing their songs well before they rocked up. Having said that tho, we still left room for experimentation while in the studio and an open mind to change and mix things up, which ended up doing in a few area’s that all came together really well. The guys originally booked in 5 days of tracking to get started, but we ended up taking 6 days to accommodate what became quite a lot of layers of guitars and vocals. We also brought in a large arrangement of strings supplied by the ever so talented Marcus Anderson for the track ‘Point Of Love” which really added that little something special to the track.

We kicked off with drums. Pete Grant is the man on the tubs for Big Red Fire Truck, I’ve worked with him on a bunch of projects over the last few years and his always an absolute pleasure to have in. He brought in his set of Brady drums made from Jarrah timber which is just such a nice kit to mic up, beautiful deep tones with just the right amount of resonance, accompanied with the classic Ludwig Supraphonic snare it’s a great combination. After getting the kit set up and sounding great, the mics went up, in what order exactly I don’t remember now but I’m sure there was one or two we placed around… We got click tracks & guide guitars going and boom, it was action jackson! I always love working Pete, I also bring him in on a lot of studio sessions for projects where a client requires a session drummer. He pays a tonne of attention to the details of his playing, right down to the most simple grooves, which is just killer to work with. Once we had all the drums down I might have nudged a kick or snare here or there in editing before we moved onto recording the rest of the band, but really, I hardly had to touch it. The drums were nailed!

Nick Frazier was the next to step up to the plate, and he did it with pure steeze brandishing a big ole Rickenbaker looking classy as hell. We tried out a few heads, starting off with his Peavy, we moved over to an Ashdown, but ended up going with the Orange OB1 500. We ran a Radial passive Di, popped a couple of mic’s on the cab, a Sennheiser 421, AKG D12VR and a Dr Alien Smith Sub mic and Nick proceeded to lay down some super tasty bass lines.

Guitar tracking was really fun. Digby rocked up with a tasty selection of axes and we mixed things between a Gibson Les Paul Custom, Ibanez Destroyer & Fender Max Strat. We set him up in the live room with all his gear and got stuck in. We rolled with the Les Paul for all the main rhythm guitars and just cranked up the gain on the Marshall JCM2000, we had this thing blasting pretty loud actually. I had 2 mics on the cab and while tracking the main rhythms I also ran 2 room mics, sometimes I’ll do this with 1 room mic and sometimes 2. For the room mic’s I used the same ones we’d set up for the drum room mics (U87’s in omni) and with the same settings we had for the drums. I use these room guitar tracks really low in the mix just to add that extra bit of something to it and bring it all together, and sometimes in varying amounts as a way of creating a little extra flare in particular song sections. To me it also helps them feel like they are sitting in the same space, it’s not always a huge huge thing, but it’s just one of those little things that I feel on occasion gives it another few percent… plus it’s fun. After we got through double-tracking the rhythm’s pretty tightly we moved on to solos.

Now Digby is a total shredder, the dude has serious chops…. but then again this whole band has serious chops, their pretty rad. So tracking solos was a tonne of fun. There were a lot of cool sections where we would double up solos, sometimes with harmony parts and even layering up to 4 or 5 layers on top of each other at times to bring out that little extra suspense, climax or dimensionality. Once again it was great to have Digby in as he’d really put the time in while writing these tunes, and when it came to the crunch we just went to town with it and let the ideas take us forward. After getting pretty much all the solo stuff done we sat back and had a listen, it was sounding great but we thought it could do with a little extra something more. The Les Paul through the high gained amp was sounding crunchy and had all the characteristic’s we were initially after, I mean it’s a pretty classic combination, but then we felt like it could do with a little extra bite & grit to just give the overall vibe and little extra…. vibe… We had a little play around and ended up reaching for the Strat again, we tweaked a few setting on the amp, we may have added a peddle I can’t fully remember what but we pulled a much dirtier rhythm tone with that Strat. We then went about double-tracking another bunch of rhythms to pretty much all the songs which just gave it all that extra bit of edge we were after. Later on in mixing I brought these extra rhythm tracks up underneath the original rhythm’s in varying amounts to give the songs a little extra crunch/dirtiness and push or pull depending on what section of the song it was and what it was calling for. They were the thing for me that gave the guitars & songs their own voice and place. We both walked out of the studio that day feeling pretty happy about it all. We also broke out the acoustic guitar for the track ‘Point Of Love’ which I close mic’d and room mic’d but in the mix I only ended up using the close mic as it just worked better for this mix on this occasion, plus we ended up stacking a few guitar tracks alongside it. The intro of ‘Point of Love’ was pretty fun too, there’s layer’s of acoustic guitar, electric guitar and then a bunch of heavily layered guitar swells with stacks of delays and a few other subtle things, which was all super fun to mix. We tracked a lot of guitars in general really, good times were had! 

It was vocal time and Digby was back up to the plate. We ran him through a U87 – Neve 1073 pre & eq – Distressor set fast – 1176 set slow and into Tools. Once again we had a really good play around coming up with cool harmony parts for sections and just really focused on getting really good takes.

The last thing we added was a pretty large string section to ‘Point Of Love’. As mentioned earlier, all the strings were provided by Marcus Anderson which he sent through in the form of stems which he recorded, I’m assuming, at his home studio (Digby organised this). A pretty talented dude no doubt as they sounded just great. We had 32 layer’s of options which I worked through in mixing to come up with just the right blend and combination, and they came out super nice.

I spent 5 (and a bit) days on mixing in the end as we did end up adding quite a lot of extra parts & layers and the strings were a bit of an after thought. Plus we also decided, part of the way through production, to mix an acoustic version of ‘Point of Love’ which lent itself to it quite well.

All and all I think we came up with a pretty damn rocking EP and I had a ball working with the guys.

Check out these rad tunes… enjoy! 

Big Red Fire Truck – Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/brftband/

 Well, thanks for reading my rambles…
Much luv
Milla