The Old Whores of San Pedro

Manufactüra have been busy working on a new track. Sam Dawson whom apart from song-writing for the "Rebel Art Centre" also plays and writes for "The Old Whores of San Pedro" - a 60/70's sounding band from Sheffield. "The Old Whores..." already had some previous recordings but never had the opportunity to work closely with an engineer/producer, and like many bands who don't have access to their own recording facilities, have been subjected to availability and good-will from diverse people in order to produce these, so we've been asked to assist. The track in question was to be "Beating like a Drum", and we recorded their rehearsal at the Yellow Arch Studios so we could get familiar with the song.
The recording process would happen in 3 stages:

1) Record a backing track consisting of guitar and bass played simultaneously to a click onto separate tracks
2) Record vocals and rhythm acoustic guitar on top of that with no click
3) Set up a single mic in a good sounding room to record the drums separately while feeding the drummer with a basic headphone mix

Upon listening to the material on the first recording day, it was suggested adding some Hammond organ which worked very well, and to check whether the proposed recording method for drums would fit in the mix later on, some of the rehearsal drum recordings were used as a test. Indeed the fears that a mono drum recording could possibly sound dull and small vanished from our thoughts as we listened to the result. The recording microphone used for the rehearsals had been an AKG 414 XLS gold which picked up a very consistent image of the drum kit. Because of the high-end boost very characteristic on these large-diaphragm vocal mics, the ride cymbal used heavily by Greg was very noticeable, but had also a very natural decay - which was a pleasant surprise.

Next session took as little as an hour, as usual when working with Sam. With vocals and guitar now in the mix, it was time to balance things a bit and sit back and take some notes on what could be improved. We didn't want to take advantage of Pro Tools' editing and time-correction facilities as this would certainly spoil the analog tape-like approach we were trying to get as much as possible, however given the fact we were not using any real vintage equipment - everything had to be done in the box.

This is the point at which the producer's creative mind starts to work, and vocal harmonies were added and spread around the panorama to blend them better with the rest but not bury them too deep. The aim was to place them side-by-side with the guitars which in turn sound very gritty and close to the listener. We chose not to use any real compression for any of the elements in the mix. Instead the preferred approach was to use the sound of a saturated preamp on each track to build the mix, resorting to a character-shaping strategy and working the gain levels instead. Obviously since we were working on the box, the recorded material was mostly D.I-ed and digital plugins were used for recreating a vintage feel.

Listening to old 60's and 70's music one notices that the use of stereo wasn't anything like in these days. Specially in the 60's, stereo was a relatively new thing, perhaps like 5.1 surround is today, and there were no real guidelines to how mixing in stereo should be done. So it was up for the engineer to do what he felt needed be done. The most common approach to take advantage of the separation provided by two speaker systems was to shift everything to either side, so you would end up with bass, drums and metals on the left, and maybe an acoustic guitar and vocals on the right. The advantage of this approach was that the mixes would normally also be very mono-compatible, a good thing as the mainstream systems were still mono. Engineers back in those days really knew how to take advantage of reverb and how to place a microphone in a live room in a way that allowed them to capture exactly what they wanted to hear on the recording. I personally really like the sound of vintage compressors and if you listen to Serge's Gainsbourg music you can verify a real example of this. The vocals are huge and picked up with extreme detail, and it almost feels like your ear is glued to the singer so you can hear every whisper, breath and saliva, however they somehow leave lots of room behind them for the remaining instruments. Of course the quality of the arrangements play a vital role on building a balanced composition of sounds, but I won't dwell into that now.

So with our recording sorted with backing vocals and Hammond, it was time to decide upon a mixing strategy. As always various things were attempted and thrown out, only to come back a couple of days later with a more objective mind and a day's worth of listening to Velvet Underground, Nancy Sinatra, The Who, Nick Cave and others as an ear freshener.

We are still due to record the drums since the drummer is currently, in his own words "as sick as a dog", and we had the misfortune of having a PSU problem on the TASCAM field recorder which was sent back to the factory under warranty, but here is the first mix which hopefully leaves just enough room for adding the drums later. On this mix you can still hear the drum intro I took from the rehearsal material - I'll just leave it in for now. In the future Greg, the drummer may replace my own backing vocals for his and I'll want to ride the fader levels on that Hammond. Other than that I think we may want to add some clapping in the chorus, otherwise Sam is happy, I'm happy, Greg is happy, Steve is happy. We're all really happy.