prog rock

[bennyboy]

hey guys im currently recording a prog rok band for the first time and am freakin out abit lots of synths and 15 minute songs with very dramatic changes through out they want to start tracking at the start of next year were doing a bit of pre production over the next couple of weeks

any pointers on how i should tackle this project

the idea is to do a double dvd to a film there bass player has made sort of like the tool clips meets the wall sort of thing im feeling a bit out of my league

any help(like how to start) would be great

[jkhuri44]

have you recorded demos of what the band thinks the songs should sound like?

thats usually a good place to start....

it then allows you to work out how big or small the project is going to be...and lets you work out stuff like...


whats missing from the sound??
is this band tight enough to record this live
do we need complex tempo maps to pull this off properly
are we tracking rhythm tracks live, then overdubbing, or 1 player at a time...

a rough track length estimate will also help with your budget....

im not exactly sure what you are worried about specifically, care to clarify what your main concerns are??

[Aearth]

Tracking shouldn't be a problem, mixing all the keyboards and other voices is more of a concern.

nIC

[heathen]

Mixing is the easy part, for me anyway. Actually capturing 15 minute songs is a big challenge, Bennboy Jamil is the lad to speak to, him and I just finished mixing his bands project, which is exactly this type of record.

Jamil had it mastered by Rick the other day and it sounded absolutely fantastic. Jamil did a very good job of recording and organising the thing. Made mixing easy, though the actual length of the songs and dynamic changes and transitions were the biggest challenge.

[NYMo]

Hi there,

Ah...Prog rock ...I was bought up on it ;-)

Try the old school way.. record and mix all the sections seperately and then put them
together in DAW of choice.
With YES, Eddie Offord used to splice them all to 2 track tape...fortunately you don't have to do that !!
(some of the YES snippets were under 60 sec)

Cheers

N
Y
M
O

[beatmad]

Try the old school way.. record and mix all the sections seperately and then put them
together in DAW of choice.
With YES, Eddie Offord used to splice them all to 2 track tape...fortunately you don't have to do that !!
(some of the YES snippets were under 60 sec)

I was thinking of Yes too. Adrian Belew is playing at the Vanguard in Sydney next month it would be great to hear what he had to say. Although there is a difference between the Yes albums he played on compared to earlier ones like Fragile,Close to the Edge,Tales from Topographic Oceans etc.

[NYMo]

Hi there,

Never saw Belew with YES !!
Interested if he actually did...although my money is on...


Cheers
N
Y
M
O

[jkhuri44]

similar to recording sections in different sessions, is to record using tempo maps, that are created in pre production,

i only suggest that, because 90% of bands will want to do that , especially in complex music.

Other things to do...

give your sessions around 5 minutes space at the start, so maybe start your session at negative 5 minutes incase anything wanky wants to be added at the start of a track, usually self indulgent intros :P

also, if you go the tempo map route, try to stay within the same program, cubase, protools, etc, for the whole project if possible because from experience i've found that even if you export a tempo map as MIDI...and import into another program, 120 bpm doesnt always equal 120...and this becomes more convoluted, the more tempo changes you have...

dont ask me why....i am perplexed by this.

if you're working on a good DAW. i dont see the point of reocrding each section in different sections.

however, what you may need to do is keep, drums and bass in 1 session, create a new session for guitars, and a new one for synths...possibly a new one for vocals....

synths/guitars/vocals, usually need their own sessions coz overdubbing gets ridiculous....

you may however be able to put 2 of the above in 1 session depending on the type of music.

Preproduction is paramount though...make sure there's some good demoing before recording date !!

Thats all for now...:)

Jamil.

[TimS]

Try the old school way.. record and mix all the sections seperately and then put them
together in DAW of choice.
With YES, Eddie Offord used to splice them all to 2 track tape...fortunately you don't have to do that !!
(some of the YES snippets were under 60 sec)

I was thinking of Yes too. Adrian Belew is playing at the Vanguard in Sydney next month it would be great to hear what he had to say. Although there is a difference between the Yes albums he played on compared to earlier ones like Fragile,Close to the Edge,Tales from Topographic Oceans etc.

I thought Adrian Belew played with King Crimson?? Peter Banks and (afterwards) Steve Howe played for YES..

Anyway, I went in to JB Hi Fi this afternoon as I had some vouchers that I got for Fathers Day and was browsing the < $10 bins..
Came across Tales from Topographic Oceans - as follows
Jon Anderson – lead vocals
Chris Squire – bass, vocals
Steve Howe – guitars, vocals
Rick Wakeman – keyboards
Alan White – drums, percussion

Althought I must say 90125 is my favourite YES album - I slightly prefer Trevor Rabin to Steve Howe..

T..

[beatmad]

I thought Adrian Belew played with King Crimson??

You're right, my bad. I have so many fond memories of hearing King Crimson and Yes in the 80's I get them mixed up. I guess Bill Bruford was the connection for me but hearing Steve Howe, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, they all blew me away in different ways and still do. I liked the precision of prog rock but I liked it better with a psychedelic twist. I love that feeling of being in completely different acoustical spaces within milliseconds...like running from central station to a small toilet in the space of a second. "A day in the life" popped into my head..."I read the news today oh boy...", Sgt. Pepper was definitely a tripper. Pink Floyd, King Crimson, _______ (insert psychedelic prog rock band name)... there's so much from the late 60's to late 70's that sound's like it's from another planet.

[TimS]

I thought Adrian Belew played with King Crimson??

You're right, my bad. I have so many fond memories of hearing King Crimson and Yes in the 80's I get them mixed up. I guess Bill Bruford was the connection for me but hearing Steve Howe, Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, they all blew me away in different ways and still do. I liked the precision of prog rock but I liked it better with a psychedelic twist. I love that feeling of being in completely different acoustical spaces within milliseconds...like running from central station to a small toilet in the space of a second. "A day in the life" popped into my head..."I read the news today oh boy...", Sgt. Pepper was definitely a tripper. Pink Floyd, King Crimson, _______ (insert psychedelic prog rock band name)... there's so much from the late 60's to late 70's that sound's like it's from another planet.

I just bought David Gilmours first 2 solo CDs when I was in JB yesterday.. David Gilmour (1978) and About Face (1984)
I've had On An Island for several yrs.. thats a lovely album too... very tasteful..
I'm a big Gilmour / Floyd fan, so for 9 bucks each, they were a great price..

[heathen]

On an island took me a while too get used to, the actual track on an island is almost pure Floyd, I really dig that track.

Marooned blows me away too, love the intro, just sets the mood, takes me where I want to be when relaxing.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6hBI1SAL4

Link to live version. Hmmmmm that just set me up for the whole day, heh.

[TimS]

On an island took me a while too get used to, the actual track on an island is almost pure Floyd, I really dig that track.

Marooned blows me away too, love the intro, just sets the mood, takes me where I want to be when relaxing.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=3W6hBI1SAL4

Link to live version. Hmmmmm that just set me up for the whole day, heh.

I know exactly where you're coming from Heath.. It is a very mellowing album..

[Ryan Collings]

incase anything wanky wants to be added at the start of a track, usually self indulgent intros :P

Haha - sounds familiar ;)

however, what you may need to do is keep, drums and bass in 1 session, create a new session for guitars, and a new one for synths...possibly a new one for vocals....

synths/guitars/vocals, usually need their own sessions coz overdubbing gets ridiculous....

Stupid question - why would you need seperate sessions? You mean create stems in each session? or what?
[/stupid question]

[jkhuri44]

ummm....going by my album as an example...

we tracked a 7 piece kit .....with around 20 cymbals.

we only had drum overheads...hat and ride cymbal for more organic tone, but during tracking....i asked for lots of parallel processing, like, smashed room, and uncomped room...

the kick was on 2 tracks...snare on 2 tracks....toms 5 tracks....2 room mics.... 2 mics for the kit frontend... Overheads, ride and hat mic, plus any parallel processing....thats getting to +20 tracks...you can then record bass in the same session....coz its usually simple.

if you're recording in 44.1 24bit...not too much of a prob....in 24 96...getting quite a few plugins on that is a BITCH. so i ended up submixing everything....coz that was the only way it would work....admittedly, i needed to review the submixes several times...1 drum might not have been sounding right, so i needed to go back.

guitars needed to be on 1 session because each riff was tracked seperately....and many different takes of each riff were kept using protools playlist function....by the end of a 12 or 15 minute song, thats a fckload of tracks....so the guitars were bounced at 0 as 2 tracks (one clean riffs and one heavy) after compiling and editing.

In addition...i had lots of world instruments....and each had their own track in a session mainly for simplicity and organisations sake...so the world instruments session was about 16 tracks in 24 96, which is CPU taxing...

at the end of all this....i took a stem of each element and stuck it into a master session. This master session, by the end of the whole ordeal was almost maxing a PT HD system...with automation, plugins...sends...busses...u name it.

[Ryan Collings]

oh crap!

Thanks for the detailed answer, interesting way of working...

[jkhuri44]

i would have prefered a 100 track session, to splitting it up...like that.. it was a bitch, and getting perspective on your mix is really hard when u have to switch back and forth between sessions.

[Ryan Collings]

Yeah but if you were maxing out an HD rig... Not much choice i guess...

It sounds to me like it would be really nice when you get to the point where you only have the stems, it would feel NICE, nice and uncluttered...

[jkhuri44]

ohhh, and coz i was recording my own vocals...

i'd need a new track for each particular section coz i might be screaming in one and quiet in another.....and i needed to "ride the gain" which would have been done on one track if someone else was engineering me. at the end of a 12 minute song, thats about 20 tracks. and each track has about 10 or so takes in it....more CPU taxation..

[jkhuri44]

what pissed me off is that the system had 6 HD cards...and was still having CPU hissy fits...it must have been terribly configured...god knows.

[TimS]

what pissed me off is that the system had 6 HD cards...and was still having CPU hissy fits...it must have been terribly configured...god knows.

JK,
Was this at UTS??
I hope not..
T..

[heathen]

Yeah and there were still 30 stems for some songs. :)

Though it worked well. Did you compress individual tracks on the drums much/at all Jamil? As paralleling seemed to give a very nice amount of compression and hold the kit together without killing the transients, anyway I usually use a long attack and short release, I hate dead drum transients. Though I think we smashed a couple of the parralleled tracks pretty hard while analog processing.

[heathen]

Ummmmm wall of sound anybody? heh.

[TimS]

Ummmmm wall of sound anybody? heh.

Ok Phil....

[Mike Wyatt]

You could always watch the couple of Making Of... videos that Spock's Beard made while Neal Morse was still with the band. A lot of it's pretty self-indulgent with Neal talking to the camera about how much certain bits mean to him or how he was crying doing a vocal take or whatever, but there's tips in there you can pick up. Every band has their own way of working, of course, but certain prog cliches (including the afore-mentioned wanky synth intro being added at a later date) are in there, and are good to be aware of.

[Ryan Collings]

wanky synth intro being added at a later date) are in there, and are good to be aware of.

Gotta love the wanky synth intro...

[TimS]

shit, I just wrote a song with a wanky synth intro - guess I'll have to write a wanky guitar intro instead maybe...
;-}

[Mike Wyatt]

Mellotron choirs and some Minimoog, now that's how you start a half hour epic! :)

[jkhuri44]

drums.

basically,

we compressed everything except cymbals while recording....kick and snare were all un processed....but there was a summed kick and snare track that was send through a distressor.

all the toms were compressed with 1176s.

then i compressed, and eqd in Tools, and limited the drum buss....

then we compressed the drums again with hardware....so, quite a bit of processing at the end of the day.

Tim, i wouldnt worry about the HD rigs at UTS....i think they work alot friendlier at 44 or 48 :)

[jkhuri44]

incase my exact sentiment wasnt well expressed..

im all for the wankiness...bring it on i say :P


i mean wanky in the cool 70s way...hahahaha