fHumble fHingaz
Mixing Clockwork Clown - A fHumbling Journey Part 2 - Wrestling the with THE GROOVE.
by , 04-04-2012 at 08:13 AM (4437 Views)
Here is the link to the mix that I am discussing: cLockWork cLown - fHumble mIx
The second installment about the mix of the track linked above; Here is the first part if you missed it: http://forum.recordingreview.com/blogs/fhumble-fhingaz/153-mixing-clockwork-clown-fhumbling-journey-part-1-big-idea.html
In my last entry, I mentioned how I felt the thing that what "Clockwork Clown" needed was a bit of a "groove injection"... Let me explain what I mean:
As M24P commented on my last entry, the "mechanical" angle of the rhythm seemed important to the message of the song, along with the "clockwork ticking" that provided an internal rhythm of it's own. This is one thing I weighed up, but after some thought & more listening, I came to the conclusion that what we were dealing with was a juxtaposition of a kind - the fragile "human" element of our lives wrestling with the forces that push us towards the regimented, machine-like existence where feeling & emotion are inconvenient & unwelcome.
In line with this, I decided I wanted to try to evoke two contrasting rhythms within the song – On the one hand, a feel that parts of the current drum track already expressed to a degree - The introductory "kick, sidestick, open hihat", very rigid & repetitive loop - & on the other hand, one that was kind of hinted at by the rest of the drum track, containing tom fills & crash cymbals, & even a little hihat sequence with a 16th note "skip" in it.
I set to work with the introductory pattern - My first port of call was to insert an instance Addictive Drums into my DAW - I've had AD for the longest time, & I'm very familiar with the sounds. It has some outrageous sounding presets that are very "effected" - distorted, twisted & radically eq'ed & processed. I found one that seemed to fit the bill - it was very dirty, roomy & lo-fi. Playing back the loop, I felt that the kick drum was just too big & fat, & not nearly crunchy enough for me. Diving into the Addictive Drums effects controls, I high-passed the kick until it had just the slightest bit of "punch", but virtually nothing in the way of sub-bass to speak of... I cranked up the distortion on the kick - Ah! that's better! Industrial levels of grime & grit - nothing that could be mistaken for "Hi Fi".
At this point, I was possessed by the idea that I should use this same repeating loop through the whole song at various levels of prominence, but once I brought in the "other" drum parts, I thought better of it.
I can't tell you how much I struggled to find the right drum sound for the rest of the track - at one point, I had about 3 different virtual drum instruments open in my DAW project, just trying to find something that I felt really fit. When I got to that point, I thought "time to make a decision , be done with it & just MOVE ON!" - I settled on Superior Drummer 2, called up a fairly natural-sounding preset, & set about "massaging" some "humanity" into the drums…
Why? Well, the most obvious thing that spoiled the drums for me was that all the sections seemed to repeat with no apparent change, or drummer-like randomness (let’s face it –most drummers are notoriously random!) – All the velocities of the hits repeated themselves through each section, everything was bang on “the grid”, all the tom fills were exactly the same, & what’s more the hihat played right through part of the drum fills! That’s ok, if you have access to a 3 armed drummer, but my OCD fixation in the pursuit of human randomness (now there’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one) just couldn’t accept these things! Another thing that just blew my little mind was: Why was our “virtual drummer” pummeling his crash cymbal with such supreme venom? Had someone drawn the face of his mortal enemy on said crash cymbal? Why did he only seem to have one crash cymbal? (Maybe he obliterated the other one in his cymbal-smashing zeal!) Why did he insist on hitting it at the same time as his first tom hit on each roll? Why didn’t he finish his rolls with a crash on the down beat at the end like every other drummer known to man? (Maybe because he didn’t have a crash cymbal on that side of his kit?
... hence, I enjoyed a delightfully busy evening shifting midi drum hits to other notes, thus introducing the virtual drum sticks to other crash cymbals on my virtual kit; shifting timing by miniscule amounts, adjusting midi velocities, & generally going OUT OF MY MIND! Why, Why, WHY?
…SWING! That’s why! Yeah, yeah, I know… Isn’t that something that ancient, moldy old dudes with clarinets & trombones talk about? Maybe, but after playing in bands for years & studying my favorite players, swing is the thing that separates the men from the boys when it comes to rhythm. No, we’re not necessarily talking about “dum da-dum da-dum” obvious, Status Quo –hit-you-between-the-eyes-with-a-4 x 2 type swing here… Rather that almost imperceptible push’n’pull between a great rhythm section that ensures a track doesn’t just ROCK, it ROLLS as well & creates a groove “a mile wide”… ACDC, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Double-Trouble & many, many others – they all had it. It’s what makes rhythm come to life... It’s not just in the timing of the drum hits, it’s the way the accents are played, it’s the bass, the attitude…
But there was one critical piece of the puzzle that was needed to complete a compelling rhythm in my mind – The tic tock – yes, that dreaded tic-tock… so many of our number were almost vitriolic in their hatred of it’s insistent clatter whenever one of our brave mixer brethren dared to raise it above more than a whisper during the track’s duration…
I mentioned before that I felt the drum rhythms were “ploddy”, stodgy, Pink Floyd with a hangover, whatever… The rhythm just didn’t seem to move the song forward, whichever way I sliced it. The fact is, if you want a song to feel faster, simply divide the beats up more - Try it… play the same beat on the drums with quarter note, then eighth note, & finally sixteenth note hi-hats… see? It sounds faster even if the tempo is exactly the same…
Lo & behold! Who’da thunk it? The tic-toc held the key to the Clockwork Clown’s sense of forward movement. Simply raising the volume of the tic toc effectively created a fast sixteenth-note pulse that propelled the song forward!... BUT… As already noted, that gets old pretty quick – what to do?...
(Cue ethereal, swelling choir effects)… Guitar Rig! What?...Actually, if there is such a thing as fHumble’s secret mixing weapon, then Guitar Rig is it! Rather ironically, it’s use usually has little to do with guitars. I found a great preset called “Trance Gate” with uses step sequence-able, tempo sync’d effect modifiers to control volume of whatever sound you put through it. By feeding the tic-tock through it, & was able to create accents on the tic tock so that it behaved much like a sixteenth note hihat rhythm…& with a touch of tempo-sync’d delay, it was extra-cool!
Great, it certainly won the war against monotony, but what about the basic tone being annoying & overly prominent in the mix… Mr High Pass & Mrs High Shelf filter came to my rescue – I was positively vicious with them, but it turned out to be a marriage made in heaven, the offspring of which was a kind of hihat/shaker mutant mongrel…
Perfect! I multed the track so that I had 3 different versions of the tic toc going at different times in the song to create 3 different feels for each respective section.
Listen to the difference in the difference in the attached files below..
...oh, & one more thing about the drums - & this was a HUGE discovery for me...
Some how, all the drum sounds I called up seemed too heavy-handed & bombastic for the feel I was trying to achieve... Then I remembered- Superior Drummer has a whole other set of samples for both brushes & rods... Ah ha! Rods instead of sticks!... That was IT! Suddenly the drums & cymbals sounded like they were being played instead of destroyed!... It was a big lesson to me - the right sound starts with the right source!
Of course, swing is also in the way the bass pushes & pulls, creates tension & release against the drums…
So that left the bass – what did I do to it? Absolutely nothing! No timing or note tidying at all...Well, for the most part I left it completely “As is” – Now that the drums swung a teeny bit & carried the song forward, the bass seemed to have a lovely, quirky unpredictability to it – kind of like John Entwistle holding down the bottom end for Pink Floyd – completely maverick & all over the place! Great!... BUT… I couldn’t resist… I had the craziest idea & just had to try it. As you can see in the screen-shot, I did it in 4 different sections of about one & a half to two measures each. Basically, I simply took the bassline from the same section earlier in the song, lined it up with the next section, then shifted it to the right by an eighth note. Because the original bass was playing quarter notes mostly, I was able to “slot” them together like musical “teeth” & create a pumping eighth note bassline for that section of the song that followed the same chord progression framework… It took some careful crossfade editing to get it to sit right, & I hemmed & herred about whether I should use it, because I knew I was really stretching the “rules” to the breaking point… but, what the hell – no guts, no glory!
Bass processing? Check out the screen shots:
I multed the bass to two different tracks – the first was the lo-fi version of the bass – low & high passed in the Sonar’s Pro Channel EQ, & run through Amplitude’s “Tube Lead” amp.
The Main bass sound was a pretty simple matter of compression & eq in Sonar’s Pro Channel – just low & hi passing, notching out some troublesome muddy frequencies, & getting some clarity in the mid range, as well as some pretty solid compression.
Whew! Well, that’s it for now…
Next Up: Guitars & keys…
Here's the next episode: http://forum.recordingreview.com/blo...3-guitars.html
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