Recording Metal with Eyal Levi: A Bootcamp

Lesson Info

Guitar Cab Mic Choice and Placement

All right. So John Brown and I decided that we liked the 3-channel dual rec through the oversize recto cab. After shooting out a few different options, we liked that one the best. So if you notice, the room looks a little different. There's a cabinet missing, the head missing, and there's this giant monstrosity behind me. And what this is is a set of gobos, and gobos are basically a dumb word for portable acoustic equipment or acoustic treatment. You use that when you want to change the sonic characteristics of a room. Like for instance, if a drummer was too live, and you're recording a fast drummer, like at my place in Florida, you might put gobos around the kit to get the mics to sound more focused and get less room in them. In the case of this room, like we've been saying there's a lot of 300 buildup which is gross, something that we don't want in guitars, and so we don't want that getting in there anyways. On the other side of this wood, which the cabinet is, there's also foam padd...

ing, so it kind of isolates it. Now, let me also say that when you're miking up a guitar cabinet for this kind of music, you might be surprised to know that a lot of room will get into the microphones, even when they're right up against the speaker. More room gets in than you would expect, so you really do need to take steps to isolate the cabinets as much as you can. It's counterintuitive. You'd expect that blasting the amp with a microphone that's literally a centimeter away would drown out the sound of the room, but that's just not the case. So, even if this was a great-sounding room and didn't make 300, and didn't sound like it was boosting 300 everywhere, we would still be doing this. So let me show you what we've done. So you can see we've got gobos on each side, and when I get out of here, I'm going to be closing this one off. If this was my studio, I would actually also put one up top to prevent any reflections coming from the ceiling, but, you know, work with what we've given. The cabinet itself is decoupled for the ground. It's lifted up and it's on a foam padding inside that case, and we've got sandbags holding the case down so that it doesn't move, because a movement of even a centimeter can completely change the tone. And as you can see, we've got four SM57's. We picked SM57's because they are the go-to de facto standard for dialing in guitar tone. Now, these are not placed in any great way or anything like that. What John Brown did was he went and listened to each speaker with his ears, and decided that he liked the top right speaker, but just to make sure, we're going to listen to every one under a microphone, because John Brown's ears are not what's going to be sending the material into Pro Tools. It has to go through a microphone. So we have each one of these 57's the exact same distance from the speaker. Then they're all right where the speaker meets the dust cap. It's just a good neutral starting point. We're going to record all of them, and pick what we like best and go from there. And that's it. And then if we get something that rules, and we can just start tracking, great. If we get something that's just kind of okay or terrible, we'll try something else. So that's what's up. So I'm going to close this and we will begin.

Class Description

Lessons

1Intro to Bootcamp
2Purpose of Pre-Production
3Technical Side of Preproduction
4Pre-Production: Setting Up the Tempo Map
5Pre-Production: Importing Stems
6Pre-Production: Click Track
7Creating Tracking Templates
8Intro and the Tone Pie
9Drums - Lay of the Land
10Bearing Edges
11Wood Types
12Depths and Sizes
13Hoops
14Sticks and Beaters
15Drum Heads
16Drum Tuning
17Drum Mic Placement Intro
18Basic Drum Mic Setup
19Cymbal Mic Setup
20Touch Up Tuning
21Microphone Choice and Placement
22Drum Tracking Intro
23Getting Tones and Final Placement
24Primary Tracking
25Punching In and Comping Takes
26Guitar Setup and Rhythm Tone Tracking
27Amplifiers - Lay of the Land
28Amplifiers & Cab Shoot Out
29Guitar Cab Mic Choice and Placement
30Guitar Tracking and Signal Chain
31Finalizing Amplifier Tone
32Guitar Mic Shootout Round Robin
33Intro to Rhythm Tracking
34Setting Up Guitars
35Working with a Guitarist
36Final Guitar Tone and Recap
37Guitar Tracking with John
38Guitar Tracking with Ollie
39Final Tracking
40Tracking Quads
41Intro to Bass Tone
42Bass Tone Setup
43Bass Tone Mic Placement
44Bass Tracking
45Intro to Clean and Lead Tones
46Clean Guitar Tones
47Lead Tones
48Vocal Setup for Tracking
49Vocal Mic Selection and Setup
50Vocal Mic Shootout
51Lead Vocal Tracking
52Writing Harmonies
53Harmony Vocal Tracking
54Vocal Warm Ups
55Scream Vocal Tracking
56Vocal Tuning and Editing Introduction
57Vocal Tuning and Editing
58Routing and Bussing
59Color Coding, Labeling and Arranging Channels
60Setting Up Parallel Compression
61Setting Up Drum Triggers
62Gain Staging and Trim
63Drum Mixing - Subtractive EQ
64Drum Mixing - Snare
65Drum Mixing - Kick
66Drum Mixing - Toms
67Drum Mixing - Cymbals and Rooms
68Drum Mixing Recap
69Mixing Bass Guitar
70Mixing Rhythm Guitars
71Basic Vocal Mix
72Mixing Clean and Lead Guitars
73Mixing - Automation
74Mastering - Interview with Joel Wanasek