Home Recording Project - "I Don't Want It"

Ween is a band that music critics never associate with “high quality” recordings, especially with albums like The Pod and GodWeenSatan: The Oneness in their repertoire. But an album that truly changed my view of Ween the first time I listened to it is the album Quebec. This featured some of the most fascinating production I’ve heard from this era and when I heard “I Don’t Want It” for the first time, its sound never left my ears. For my version, I wanted to use a wall of guitar takes to provide a sort of “warm hug” for the listener, as well as a naturally occurring chorusing effect. It is really hard being a guitarist as an engineer, because it always becomes the focal point for my recordings…

For guitar, I used a Fiesta Red Fender Stratocaster into my Boss Katana with the volume and gain set low, the tone set at noon, and only using a SD-1 to boost the high mids and just barely drive the signal into my Audix i5. The i5 was placed at roughly an inch from the grill and about one inch off center from the cone. As for the “Deaner” inspired solo, I used the same mic placement and amp settings, but I used the Boss SD-1 and Fulltone OCD, both slamming into the EHX Big Muff Pi to create a huge guitar sound that was VERY necessary for this recording.

This song also features the only guest instrumentalist on my entire project, Tyler Hays, providing additional guitar layers while playing my Stratocaster through his Music Man 212, with the i5 about three inches from the grill and about two inches off center of the cone.

For bass, I ended up using the DI track like I did with “Song for the Deaf” as it really needed a rounder sound that I could not find using the rumble. The signal ran straight into my Scarlett with no FX in the chain and with the bridge-tone knob on my B-Bass rolled almost completely off.

For drums, I used my SM58 on the t-shirt muted snare, my Audix i5 on the ride cymbal to allow me to pan it in the mix, my WA-47jr as a mono over head pointing left to right across my kit, about four feet up and directly at my Sabian 18” China. For the kick, I used my Amazon 58 mic on the inside of the batter head of an open-back kick drum, also using blankets to mute the head itself. This $20 microphone truly impressed me with how much low-end it provided to the overall drum track, and this allowed me to blend in the transient signal coming from the overhead which made my job a lot easier. All of this, once again, had to run into my four channel mixer and then out into ProTools as a stereo track.

Vocals, once again, were the most relaxing part of the session. I used my WA-47jr with the pop filter five inches from the diaphragm.

For the six different rhythm guitar tracks, I kept the general range of the individual HPF’s in the 120 Hz to 130 Hz range, and provided varying boosts and cuts in the mid range to allow them to play their own parts in my mix. All of the tracks except for the hard left and right tracks were sent to a D-Verb track to further help the togetherness of the guitars. On the guitar bus, I used the ProLimiter to bring up the level and to tighten them up. Two of them are panned hard left and right, two are at 45 degrees left and right, and two are dead center. The bass processing features a 1176 comp, a low-cut at 120 Hz, and a mid cut at 630 Hz. The drums surprisingly did not need a lot of post work, except for a wide HPF at 95 Hz and a ProLimiter to even out the individual elements of the stereo track. On vocals, I cut the lows at about 200 Hz and added some light compression with the LA2A. As for the “Deaner” sound on the solo, I cut the lows at 85 Hz, made mid cuts at 570 Hz and 2.2 kHz, and dropped the high shelf at 2.3 kHz by -3 dB. I also modulated its reverb track using a Uni-Vibe style phaser. To bring the whole arrangement up to level, I once again used the ProLimiter on the master bus.

Recording this song was the most fun I had this semester. I tried my best “Gener” and “Deaner” impressions, got to explore the capabilities of my minimal mic selection, and felt truly confident about pressing “Bounce Mix” on my ProTools session.