Yes, mayhem

Hey, remember back in http://chunkstyle.net/blog/?p=14 when I said I was experimenting with kick drum mic placement, and decided I liked how it sounds with the mic further away from the kick drum?  That was a horrible mistake.  Basically, what’s happened is the mic picked up the kick drum, and the rest of the drums.  Yes, the sound is more breathy and open, but it’s much harder to work with on the back end.

My drum processing, in a nutshell, is this: gate, compression, eq/effects.  I’m gating the drum track which means I set a threshold where any sound softer than that won’t be played at all.  Ideally, this would mean that only the kick drum hits would come through, and any noise or bleed through of other drums would be effectively eliminated.  Then, the compression and other effects could aggressively target the specific frequencies I want to manage in the kick drum.  Unfortunately, as a result of the mic placement, there are snare hits louder than some of the quieter kick drum hits, so they overcome the threshold as well.  The cymbals – especially the china and ride – also are louder on that track than the kick in places, so they’re getting mixed in as well.

What this means is basically the entire drum kit is getting effected the same as the kick drum – ie all low end with just a hint of definition in the highs.  This winds up making the overall mix overly bass-heavy, and when I compensate for that, the entire mix sounds thin.

Again, I’m hearing a chorus of “well, duh!’

Luckily, I came to my senses pretty early in the process, so only one or two songs have this problem, but it is a problem nonetheless, and I’m not really in any position to redo the drum tracks.  I’ve already dismantled my makeshift studio in Kevin’s basement, and I’m pretty sure I’d have a riot on my hands between Grant and James over redoing their parts.  So, I had to get a little creative.

What I’m doing amounts to manually gating the track.  I go into my editor and decrease the volume of any hit that’s not a kick drum so that it falls below the threshold.  It was a pain to do, but I think it helped.  Now, only the kick drum sounds like a kick drum, and not the rest of the kit.  I can boost the kick drum track without boosting the low end in the rest of the drumset.

The rest of the songs have more sane kick drum mic placement of that Realistic mic.  For the next project I do, I’m investing in a dedicated kick drum mic.

I’m not going to have the album done in time for PAX.  There, I said it.

That’s ok though, because I would have rushed it and wound up with something less than what I wanted.  I’ve still got tracks coming in from several people, so songs which have been sitting around as just drum and bass are starting to take shape.  As a matter of fact, I’ve still got one bass part to touch up.  Now that I’m not limiting myself to the PAX deadline, a couple of songs I thought I might need to drop are back on the table too.

What I will have in time for PAX is a couple of songs for the aforementioned “sampler” that is now a full-on deal.  I’m in charge of putting all this together and making the discs, and I hope to have it done early this week.  These samplers will include two songs from Grant’s upcoming instrumental EP which he hasn’t really talked about very much.  Danimal is contributing songs from his crazy popular “nostalgia celebration” band, Armcannon as well as his original prog band, Weaponex.  Kirby has some tracks from the latest TSS album, and I’m not sure what I’m including yet.  I’m trying to choose from 3 or 4 different songs that are finished at this point.  I just need to finalize the mastering. So basically, we’re putting out another album’s worth of material in addition to Varia Suite at PAX.

Naked Fight is one I thought would be ideal, but it’s been up here for preview for a while now, so it seems kind of cheap to include that one.  I don’ t know yet.  What I do know is when I decide what tracks go on the sampler, I’ll make them available for the general public as well.  We’re only making 200 CDs to take to PAX to give away.  Those will surely be gone quickly, and we’re putting that stuff out so people will be interested in hearing more of what we do, so why limit that to just the rowdies at PAX?

Oh, and I also registered yesmayhem.com and yesmayhem.net the other day.  I’ve got to figure out what to do with those.  I have a couple of ideas.  I also registered a myspace account for yesmayhem.  That seemed like a good idea at the time.