Home Recording Project - "A Song for the Deaf"

"A Song for the Deaf" has always been a song that has stuck out to me as far as engineering goes. From the mind melting guitars and crooning vocals from Josh Homme, to the brutal drums and bass riffs provided by Dave Grohl and Nick Oliveri (and I can't forget to mention the haunting backing vocals from the late-great Mark Lanegan). This song is almost frightening at times, in the best way possible. For my version, I wanted to encapsulate the original sounds of the song, but on a significant budget cut. But in my opinion, the aura of Dave Grohl and Josh Homme on this track make it hard to even come close to the original...

Being a "stoner-rock" epic, this song is very guitar forward, and as a guitarist myself, I had to follow suit. I recorded the guitar parts using an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Pro into a Boss Katana 50W combo amplifier with the gain at about two o'clock and the volume at ten, with the master pushed just enough to come into the mic hot enough to just barely clip the signal. Each track was recorded with an Audix i5 dynamic microphone about two inches away from the grill and about an inch to the right of the center of the cone, and straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2-channel interface. Guitar FX used on this track include the EQD Life Pedal V3 for its "octave" setting and the Boss SD-1 for a treble boost to really drive the signal into the mic.

For bass, I recorded a mic'd track and a DI track simultaneously. However, the mic'd track coming from my 90's Fender Rumble was too brittle and didn't add much to my mix, so I opted to use the DI track solely for this recording. To get the "Nick Oliveri" sound, I used my Yamaha B-Bass running through a Behringer Super Fuzz (which has been scientifically proven to have an IDENTICAL circuit to the Boss Hyper Fuzz used on the original track). When tone testing for this recording, I was truly shocked at how much of an effect the Hyper Fuzz has on the tone. It's not too fuzzy, it's not too brittle, and it's not too... generic. It was what this song needed and it truly stands out in a world full of Sans Amps.

For drums, I felt gear limitation helped my tonal search due to the lack of options, and I am truly happy with how they sound with the setup (except for my ride cymbal that I cracked during my second take, but hey, it all worked out in the end...) The kit used was a wooden Ludwig Break Beat with a Zildjan 20" Ride, 16" Crash, and A-Custom 14" Hi-Hats, as well as a Meinl 18" Dual Crash. With only having four microphones to my name, it was pretty easy to figure out the right sound for I used an SM58 about two inches up from the edge of the snare pointing somewhere around the halfway point between the center of the head and the rim. It was difficult to put it any closer as I kept hitting it during takes because of how hard I was hitting the drums. I had an Amazon Basics 58-style mic on the rack tom at about the same measurements as the snare mic, and my Audix i5 on the floor tom at about three inches up from the rim and pointed directly at the center of the head to get more of the transient sound instead of the resonant sound. For the rest of the kick, I only had one option left: a WA -47jr condenser mic. That meant I couldn't have a dedicated kick mic and an overhead mic, so I really had to experiment with this. After exploring the different settings on the mic, I settled on a mic position about a foot away from the center of the kick, and switched the polar pattern to bi-directional, allowing the cymbals and room sound to be captured as well, but just enough to add some flavor. I personally feel that the cymbals come in too strong to that mic, but after some post production, I was able to balance it out a bit with bleed from the other microphones, which allowed me to acquire some degree of panning. The kick had a good thump to it though, and that was really all that mattered to my vision. The real kicker is that all of this ran from my mixer into ProTools as a stereo track, so I had to set mic levels while playing. This was quite the challenge.

Lastly, the vocals were recorded through my WA-47jr, with a pop filter about five inches away from the diaphragm. This part of the recording process was honestly the most relaxing part of the process as I didn’t have to run around my studio every other take setting levels…

For post-production, the four guitar tracks got the typical HPF treatment, cutting at about 150 Hz on the hard left and hard right tracks, and at 250 Hz on the left and right of center tracks. For compression, I used an 1176 clone on the individual tracks and I threw a ProLimiter on the guitar bus to tighten the arrangement up to taste. The entire bus was also sent out to a ReVibe II to carefully fill up the empty space in between the tracks and give the tracks some more body in the mix. For bass, I chopped the lows at 40 Hz, pulled 6dB out at 400 Hz, and set a high-shelving EQ at 1.8 kHz. I also used an 1176 clone to slightly drive the track and restrain some of the stray frequencies. For drums, I utilized multiband compression to single out primarily the 3k to 20k range, as I felt I needed to tame the high end a bit in order make it less jarring in the mix. This once again became a challenge as I found myself losing the crack of the snare by doing this, but I found a good balance by setting the threshold at -12 dB dropping the gain by -5 dB. I also used an SSL style bus compressor to drive the signal after the multiband and this truly brought life into the drum sound. This was also accompanied by a HPF at 70 Hz and some corrective EQ in the 200 Hz to 5 kHz range. This track was also sent to a reverb track to bring back some of the lost room sound from the kick mic. On vocals, I used an LA2A clone to bring a little crunch into the vocals, as well as to pull some of the dynamic peaks back just a tad. This was partnered with a de-esser at 7 kHz and an EQ cutting at 130 Hz and boosting at 8 kHz to bring them as far in front as I could without removing them from the atmosphere of the mix. Finally, the master bus received some treatment as well, featuring the aforementioned ProLimiter to bring the overall level up just clipping the bus itself, which really tied a bow on top of the whole session.

This whole recording was a lot of fun to make and proved to be a big challenge for me. I will definitely be revisiting this in the future (hopefully with some better equipment…)