Dwell Studios was actually a combined effort of locations. The drum tracks and scratch tracks were all done at the home of Dwell's vocalist Tony, in a pretty nicely laid out studio, with dedicated tracking rooms and a control room under construction. However, air conditioning had apparently not been installed at this point, because it was rather hot and swampy in there. I can still smell the odor that the green acoustic foam gave off, possibly in hopes of making the noisy band go somewhere else. The drum tracking room was slightly bigger than a closet, but Mat was able to fit in there with his sizeable drum set, but I do remember it being quite an ordeal for him to get in and out.
Other than these tidbits, I don't recall much more about this day of tracking. What I do recall is an angry neighbor, tired of hearing drums. Though, there's no way he could have heard them beyond much more than a far off 'thwack'. I also recall the awe of wondering what in the world Miah was doing with his Roland VS880 digital recorders. I'd actually borrowed one from Butcher that he'd bought at some point and could make little sense of what to do with it aside recording a couple of tracks of guitar. And by 'tracks of guitar', I mean 'plugging into the input and making a horrible noise'. We do thankfully have a few pictures of this day of tracking, though I again recall little aside what I've shared above. Two things of note here are the Ampeg VH-140 guitar head, which is actually a FAR better amp than how I dialed it in or how it sounds recorded. More on that later. The other note is Chris Blackburn's Fender bass amp; which I would now kill to have. I think this was one of those cases of not knowing what we had.
Guitar and bass tracking was completed at the second half of Dwell Studios, Miah's house, which is now known as The Sound Lair. A quick note here; Miah's neighborhood also had its own share of unhappy neighbors. Now, I've been an unhappy neighbor before; but the noise that we were making was even less at Miah's than at Tony's. Oh well.
Sadly I don't believe I have any pictures of the tracking at this location, and my memory of it is pretty foggy as well. I do vaguely remember what came to cause the biggest problem with the sound of this album. Miah was pretty insistent that we needed to record at least two guitar tracks. I was adamant that we didn't. I seem to recall the reasons why a bit, but not 100%. It seems that it was a combination of:
a) I didn't understand why it was necessary (it is so VERY necessary)
b) I thought that since we couldn't sound like that live, that we shouldn't on record either
c) It would take longer to do, and
since we were paying by the hour, I couldn't justify it. Never mind that
it might've taken an extra hour or two at the most. I think the final
bill on this album was
$600 if I remember correctly. Now, to be clear, that was a TON of money
to us. It still is really, but it's nothing in the scheme of making a
record, even these days with a local studio.
In the end, it was a horrible idea. I believe that had we double-tracked the guitars that the overall sound would have improved dramatically. Instead, we left Miah with one guitar track to try to fit into the mix. Never mind that I had the gain maxed, the bass and treble on 10, and mids on zero. I know this because that's how I understood things to always be dialed in on a heavy guitar amp. (And sometimes it is!)
I can also recall Mat tracking vocals, but not really Chris. I need to get with the other guys to see if they want to add their own recollections as well. Basically, we've reached the ends of my memory banks on the production/recording of this record, for better or worse depending on the opinion of the reader.
Anyway, many moons have passed....many, many. But at some point, late last year I found the HM Magazine review of this album/demo, and I took a good listen to it. I'd spoken with Miah at other times about having those tracks "exported" to where I could re-record my parts over the existing production, but due to the format that it was recorded on (the Roland VS880), getting the tracks transferred off would be quite a chore, let alone in a format that I could use easily. So, I started looking into how to grab those files and convert them, and it turns out that it would be quite easy if I had the hard-disk from the Roland. When I approached Miah about it, he said he'd actually seen (as I had) that the Roland units now commanded a fairly substantial price these days and he was going to sell his. He decided to just transfer the audio straight out onto wav files so I could use them.
This is both good and bad.
I was expecting the files to basically be the audio as heard on the disc; with effects, levels, EQ, all the details taken care of. It turns out that his effects section wasn't rendering things correctly, so I got the raw audio.
In other words, I had to start learning the art of mixing.
On a scale of 1 to 10, my level of knowledge on the subject was a solid zero, if even that.
So I've embarked on many months of study and experimentation, trying to figure out what in the world I'm even doing. At this point, I've actually gotten things mixed to the point where I'm happy with them, surprisingly so considering my lack of good equipment, and my even more lacking knowledge bank. So, I've started recording guitars, which something else I've had to relearn (which is another story in itself; basically, recording and balancing w/ REAL audio tracks vs. sampled (triggered drums) is quite a bit of a different ball game)). On top of that, I'd never attempted to really get the sound of my Mesa to 'tape'. So that's also been a learning experience. It's quite different (in good and bad ways) from the 5150II that I'd owned for years. In some ways I prefer one over the other, but the Mesa Dual Rectifier was THE sound of the time for us. All of our favorite bands, from alternative guys (Bush and Soundgarden) to hardcore and metal (Zao, Meshuggah, Cannibal Corpse) played these amps. This was the sound we all wanted. So that's what I'm aiming to get, the sound that I think we would've wanted to have back then, not what we'd be more likely to hear out of modern heavy bands. It's been kind of funny trying to even get back in that state of mind...I mean, who did we want to sound like? We had so many inspirations at the time, Zao and Fear Factory especially, Korn though no one would admit it (that was probably more on my side of things I guess), Meshuggah and Fear Factory have a very sharp and cutting and precise tone, which is quite different from what Zao and Korn brought to the table with their brand of downtuned sludginess, so I've been trying to find something that's in the middle, or trying to cut certain parts that were in the spirit of those bands with sounds that were closer to theirs. We were adamant about not copying any of these bands directly, and I think for the most part, we succeeded, for better or worse, as the HM article did make a point about our lack of focus, the hip-hop influenced "Something Like Autumn" probably didn't help that, but even without that song, we were still all over the map.
In working on this, one thing that's struck me, is that I didn't know any of the lyrics to our songs for the most part. I've really worked hard on getting the vocals to a different level (literally and figuratively) and though I dislike the repetition in the first two tracks, some of the lyrics are fairly deep and thought provoking (knowing what we had in mind theme-wise, especially w/ the Collective), and while some are not, it's almost like a record I've never heard, because I'd never been able to discern what Chris was saying before. That's all changed now. I'm looking forward to folks hearing all of this in a new way. The drums have more separation and punch, the bass has more snap and presence to it, the vocals, as I said before or worlds away from the raw audio. Weirdly, I'm having more trouble with the guitar tracking/production than anything at this point, probably because I'm so 'close' to it. None of this is a slight to Miah, it's just that production tools are more available now for free to cheap, and also that working on a PC is quite a different beast than working w/ the Roland's interface.
Also, to anyone that happened to see the trailer (I need to post a link I guess), one little 'easter egg' would be that the jazz tunes leading up to the 'reveal' came from a happy accident of sorts. Basically, I had some cables hooked up in a bad configuration, attempting a vocal effect idea that I had, and I was picking up some horrible radio interference. So, I recorded what you heard, slapped some reverb on it to make it cooool, and there's history no one cares about.
In my next entry, I hope to share some pictures and information on the tracking process of the guitars, and also to present the idea of possibly starting a Kickstarter or something similar to re-release the album physically, with a full color, multi-page layout with pictures and the whole lot; the way we wanted to do it, but couldn't afford to.
And here's a few pictures from the day we recorded drums/scratch tracks.
