This week we cover all the comments from the previous show, the mix submissions from the show before that, and Jon talks about changing your guitar strings. This is a long show, but there is tons of listener feedback and content in this one.
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Thanks for the great show! I looked for the full submissions on Ryan’s blog, but didn’t see them. Are they not up yet?
All of the mix submissions are up now. Sorry for the delay.
Click Here
They are not up yet… I ran out of time. They will be up in a couple days. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Excellent show.
New age power.
I think this should be released as an album : tribute to Steam and Pill (am i right with the name ?) the greatest and only one hit.
you’r getting better at french pronunciation Ryan.
by the way always keep one string for yourself so you don’t have to mix such a song ever again 🙂
thx u gentlemen
Steam and Pile sounds like a late 60’s R & B combo. I like it!
Hey just sitting here and just came up with a good question.
Anyone know how to calculate the headroom (or what it’s called in that situation) i a tracking system? Which means, the line to the computer. Mic->Preamp->possible processor-> possible processer-> etc-> Sound Interface. So you could get the right level in the signal without clipping etc.
Steam and Pile actually reformed for their 40 anniversary in 2007.
Hah! Only now do I realise I gave you no details of how I mangled your unfortunate sounds!
Version #1
I sent Igor to fetch a couple of fresh brains, but he arrived back with a tin of spam and the brain of our local, recently depart village lunatic. Passing the keyboard part through the brain produced two distinct effects – tube-like distortion and the faint sense of wanting to set fire to something.
Patting out the flames from my jacket tails, I decided to pass the bass through the tin of spam. Once I could gate out the faint strains of ’Pack Up your Troubles’, which was now clearly leaking into my temporal modifiers, I was left with a nicely rounded bass with just a touch of grit. I considered using a flanger at this point, but instead fed it out to Alfie, my cat, who chewed it for a while until it stopped moving.
The drums were going to be a tad more tricky. These I poured into a solution of elderflower and essence of wizard’s chin, although I still had to cut a little 1kHz. I pulled the result out with tongs, since it bit me when I tried to pick it up by hand.
The rest of the mix was less conventional, but no less entertaining. I’ve suffered only minor damage to the mixing chamber and surrounding rooms, and repairs to the local spire begin next week. All that remains is the faint smell of burned fur and a tendency for the words ‘Lightning is the fundamental source of the universe!’ to burst from the studio monitors from time to time, though this will doubtless fade with time.
Version #2
Bass – Distortion; flanger; compression.
Drums – Notch EQ to tame the kick click; Lexicon ‘Warm Room’.
Drum machine – Step filter; tube distortion; autopanner; Lexicon ‘Hall’.
Keys – Re-amp; low-pass filter; stereo delay (crunched and filtered).
Organ – Tube distortion; chorus; EQ to remove most of top/bottom.
Strings – Chorus (Dimension D); heavy filtering.
I need to let you guys hear a track I worked on a few weeks ago. It features John’s deliciously inspiring tortured toy samples (in fact it consists nearly entirely of sounds generated, or passed through, toys) and is lovingly entitled ‘The Last Toy Emily Broke’…
Ha! What a fantastic bunch of mixes. That was fun to hear so many different interpretations and manglings of the tracks. I msg’d Jon last night – I literally almost spit my coffee on the windshield while driving to work when I heard his mix. That was definitely thinking outside the proverbial box!
Paul – loved hearing the stuff you slapped on there – very fun.
Jesse – cool arrangement on muting parts of tracks and panning – definitely brought a bit musicality to the sound… you can make a turd sing…
Hey Dave!
Liked what you did with the mix – the bass is almost as spiky as my cat!
HOLY CRAP.. I think you just Blew my Computer speakers with your VANCOUVER this week…LOL
So that was, uhh, interesting. The one revelation that I had was “don’t bother trying to rescue a disaster.”
It would be interesting to try the same experiment at some point on a good song (or a song with some potential) with bad sounds, rather than a bad song with bad sounds.
Just a thought.
Keep up the great work.
I found that wounded strings (fourth, fifth, sixth and sometimes third) sometimes will sound better when they worn out a bit. And there will be less noise of fingers jumping between the cords. But to change not wounded strings before important session is a must.
If you play them, of course…
It’s interesting that Jon mentioned D`Adario strings – i don’t know, maybe those which sold here are made in different country or smthn like that, but here it’s the most crappy strings i ever tried. I will go with any strings but not with D’Adario. If i have money i buy Elixir.