EAST LONDON CALLING
Feb 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy
SIDEBARS
Grouse Hunting
Nestled in the quiet countryside of Ireland's County Westmeath, Grouse Lodge has been the scene of some extraordinary recording sessions with everyone from William Orbit to Ms. Dynamite — a diverse swathe of clients that reflects the space's flexibility in any tracking situation. For Bloc Party's Weekend sessions, though, Jacknife Lee and engineer Tom McFall went the extra mile.
“The main room there is pretty big,” McFall explains, “so it's got a lot of natural ambience to it. Quite often we would end up dampening the room down, and we'd build a little booth around the back of the drums and have the front open. Sometimes we even built a roof over the top of the kit just to kill it completely.”
The band would set up guitars, bass and drums in the room with only a P.A. — no headphones allowed. Although Lee wasn't worried about bleed, the miking scheme for Matt Tong's drums was crucial, particularly in light of the extreme amount of looping, bit-crushing and processing that Lee had planned for the drum tracks once he got them into Logic.
“We'd have a D 112 with 47 FETs on the kick,” McFall says, “and an NS10 speaker [rewired] as a sub. Then there were 57s on the snare, 414s on the toms and a pair of overhead Brauners. The Coles mics were for the room, and then we'd have two more ambient mics that were distorted and heavily compressed to add a bit of grit. Quite often we ran those through Distressors, or we'd overdrive them on the [Neve] desk.”
From there, virtually anything was worth trying. Drums might be re-amped through a pair of Genelec 1031As (and sometimes while the band was playing live), or a brick might be wedged into the sustain pedal of a piano, with the vibrations miked during a live take. For one track — no one can seem to remember which, but listen for it in the latter half of “Uniform” — an old speaker was tossed off the balcony while blasting a drum beat, and the results were captured by a Digi 002 rig.
“It made this amazing smashing sound,” McFall remembers fondly. “Eventually it caught on fire, and we kicked it to death. That sounded pretty epic.”
WEEKEND GEAR
Computer, DAW, recording hardware, interfaces
Apogee AD-8000 24-bit A/D converters with Pro Tools card and 8-channel D/A card
Apple PowerMac G4 dual 1 GHz computer, Logic 6 software
(2) Digidesign 888 audio interfaces, Pro Tools|HD system
Console
Neve VR60 with flying fader automation
Software, plug-ins
Audio Ease Altiverb 5 convolution reverb
Cycling '74 Max/MSP and Pluggo suites
Native Instruments Komplete 4 bundle
Ohm Force effects and filters bundles
Propellerhead Reason software
SmartElectronix SupaTrigger plug-in
Waves Renaissance bundle
Mics, preamp, compressors, effects
AKG C 414, D 112 mics
Blue Kiwi large-diaphragm condenser mic
Brauner VM1 valve mics (matched pair)
Coles 4030 ribbon mics
(2) Empirical Labs Distressors
Focusrite Liquid Channel (as vocal mic preamp)
Neumann U 47 FET mic
Shure SM57 mics
Sound Performance Lab Transient Designer dynamic effects unit Tube-Tech LCA2B stereo valve compressor
Urei 1176 Blackface, LA2A compressors
Synths, drum machines, instruments, effects pedals
Alesis HR-16 drum machine
Boss DD-6 digital delay
Clavia Nord Lead synth
Electro-Harmonix Big Muff distortion
Electronic Dream Plant (EDP) Wasp synth
Fender Jaguar, Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars; Precision bass; and Hot Rod Deluxe amplifiers
Gretsch Tennessee Rose guitar
Korg MS10 and MS20 synths
Moog Minimoog synth
Roland TR-606 and TR-808 drum machines
Monitors
Dynaudio M4S 5.1 main monitor system with BM15 surrounds
Genelec 1031As
Yamaha NS10s
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