The Black Swamp
Well hello hello there, Milla here with the first instalment for our new blog page series.
So as it stands its early September 2018, it’s cold outside but nice and toasty in the studio and I thought I’d kick things off with a little recap of the first session we had since the studio updates. Having just finished up some major renovations to the studio near the end of 2017, Gold Coast heavy groove merchants and good friends The Black Swamp (TBS) were the first jump in and give the new live tracking capabilities a good run for their money. After making the 12-hour drive down the coast bringing just their guitars, peddles, cymbals and sticks, we set the guys up that same Friday evening pulling the drum and guitar tones late into the night. For drums I set Brendan up with our Pearl Master’s kit (2 rack 1 floor), Grant scored the Matamp LX 60, Jesse pulled tones with the Orange OR 50 and Rohan dialled in some gnarly bass vibes with the Orange OB1 500 (Which I might add throws a tonne of sound, that thing is a flipping beast!). We played around with a bunch of different distortion/ overdrive peddle options but in the end, the amps had just what we wanted for the main rhythms tracks and the blend knob on the OB1 makes it great to dial in just the right amount of clean to dirty signal. Having had all the gear set up, a quick beer in the belly we all hit the hey around 1:30/2 am.
Saturday morning was an early start,
and with the guys coming all the way down from the Gold Coast & Brisbane to record with only 2 days to get the 3 songs in, we made sure we allocated enough time to give the songs the attention they deserved with some pretty big days. The Black Swamp play a heavy southern style groove metal reminiscent of bands like Down, Crowbar, Corrosion Of Conformity, Black Sabbath and so on. There’s no click tracks, no samples, no bullshit, what you here in the speakers is whats coming out of the hands of the band. Which is why we set everything up to record all the guitar rhythms, bass and drums live and in full take performances. The aim was to capture the band at its best, and they sound best when they play it all together live. Of course, while we want them to be one big cohesive beast playing freely together amongst the meadows, we still want things isolated to make life easy while mixing later on. So we set the whole band up in the main tracking room with the drums, their amp heads in there with them, and the speaker boxes were mic’d up in the studios either side of the main room. Separate headphone mixes were also made up to make sure everyone was getting the right blend of sounds sent to their cans to make tracking easy and Luke joined me in the control room for vocals guides. By the end of a solid days work on Saturday we had all 3 songs tracked with a few overdubs down, 2 or 3 beers were enjoyed and then a good nights sleep followed.
Most people don’t wake up on a Sunday morning and start screaming, but Luke took to this in tremendous fashion! We hit the studio around 8:30 am, with Luke flying home that afternoon (While the rest of the band drove I might add……. bloody rock star! hehe) and 3 tracks of vocals required we were up early and ready to roll. Being the total pro that he is, we had all 3 tracks wrapped up by around 3 in the afternoon. The vocal chain from memory was a Shure SM7B – Neve 1073 pre with just a touch of EQ and a Distressor at around 2:1 just grabbing the peaks. Once all the vocal tracks were wrapped up Grant and Jesse jumped back in for a few lead guitar parts which were executed via a JCM 800 to gain that little extra clarity through all the fuzzed-up distortion. While the guys came down to record 3 main songs we actually ended up fitting in a little extra instrumental, it was something we laid down as a kind of here’s a cool idea and if it works then we’ll keep it approach…… it worked! It was super simple, 2 cycling clean lead guitars repeating a patten slowly moving along that led on for around a minute or so, nothing too complex. We then went to town adding a bunch of delays, phase, pitch, sweeping, shifting hoo-har and turned it into a pretty atmospheric trip which made for an interesting addition to what’s a pretty heavy groove-laden EP. We finished up the last of the guitar leads that Sunday night and the guys drove back home to Queensland,
pretty crazy huh!
TBS we’re the first band to come through the new set up and it had actually been almost 6 months since I’d even mixed any music at this point due to the fact that I was actually the one building all the studio renovations with hammer in hand, and all that timber work took quiiiiite a while!!!! So I asked fellow engineer Adam Jordan to join me on the mix. Being good friends with TBS and having seen them perform many times I wanted to make sure we kept things pretty damn true to a live TBS show. We spent a really good amount of time getting everything set up sound wise before tracking with guitar tones and drums. So when it came time to mix we just followed along with the path that we had already set. No samples were added to the drums and the guitar tonnes were already rocking, it was just a matter giving everything its space and simply enhancing what was already there. Driving the vocals a little harder and adding a few different long delays in a few areas. When I listen back to it, for me it feels like I’m at one of their shows which is what we were out to achieve. For myself, the best part about it all was the effort the guys had put into the songs before we even started the tracking stage. Everyone one in the band knew their parts back to front and were really well-rehearsed which is honestly the most important thing when it comes to tracking… along with a few other little tidbits of corse 🙂 But really it made the whole project move along very very smoothly, no one really got stuck up or caught out on a section and we ended up with some super rocking tunes! If you get the chance I highly recommend catching The Black Swamp live, they are an insanely great band and a rad bunch of fellas too!
Thanks for reading my rambles, Milla
The Black Swamp – Event Horizon