Because I lost my studio space sort of out of nowhere, we had to scramble and find a suitable place to do this recording. As luck would have it, Gradwell House, where we recorded drums and guitars for the last album, was available the very weekends we planned for both drums and my guitars! Providence. Sadly, I did not take any pictures or make a blog posting for the drum recording because there was too much going on. This time, I’m able to write about the guitars a bit because I finished a little ahead of schedule and I’m reviewing tracks. I always promise myself I’ll do write-ups like these after sessions so I can go back to them later and figure out what worked and what didn’t but I never do, so… here we are.

The album is 8 songs, 50 minutes. It’s Woe’s most ambitious recording, with both the fastest and slowest stuff we’ve ever done. We wanted something a bit more focused and aggressive than the last record but wanted to hang onto the smarter sense of dynamics and songwriting, which is what I think we ended up with. I felt that the last album got a little self-indulgent at times, so this one tries to get back to basics a bit. The whole thing just… rages. Start to finish. When it gets slow and heavy, it gets really slow and really heavy, but it is more similar to the first one in terms of attitude.

For this recording, I used my new (only new to me — it’s from ‘94) Les Paul Studio, my new Fuzzrocious distortion pedal, and the same JCM 900 from the last two albums into my buddy Matt’s Marshall cab.

I wasn’t able to get a good picture of the mics because the room is on the dark side and my phone’s camera is jacked. I used three mics: 57 and Royer 121 close and a U87 back about 15 feet, maybe 5 feet off the ground, kind of to simulate a person standing in front of the amp. I might not use it, we’ll see. 57 went through a Great River MP-500NV, 121 went through my Sebatron vmp-4000e, U87 went through an API 3124+.

The Great River sounds fucking fantastic. The studio is borrowing it from someone and I’m glad it was here because I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get such a thick sound out of a 57.

I spent about two or three hours setting up. At first, I had the cab in one of the vocal booths and was trying the 121 with an SM7b but just wasn’t feeling it. Despite everyone’s love for the SM7b, I just can’t get into it on guitars. It’s possible I’m doing something wrong but I just like the 57 more. I ended up dragging the cab out into the live room, which let me take advantage of the room mic anyway.

It took some time to get a ton that really worked for me. When we play live, I really like going through my amp’s clean channel and hitting it really hard from the distortion pedal, which gives me a heavy, almost hardcore guitar tone. I like the clarity and in a room where you can’t control the sound, having a slightly less noisy sound makes it easier to control, easier for the sound guy to do his job, easier for the crowd to hear what’s going on, easier for me to hear what’s going on. I tried this at first and just wasn’t feeling it. It was too clean, too friendly, so I went with the distorted channel. The distorted channel doesn’t really offer much distortion — with the gain all the way up, it sounds just a bit dirtier than the clean channel with its gain all the way up, the result of a mod last year that cleaned everything way up and took a lot of the harsh JCM 900 sound out of it. I use pedals for that reason. In this case, the little boost from that channel and my pedal really did the trick.

The 121 and 57 both went through an API 5500, which was absolutely crucial. I’ve found that I always have to do the same couple of things to metal guitars, especially with my amp: boost highs to add air, maybe add a tiny bit of presence, cut below 40 Hz, boost around 1K, carefully boost low mids to make palm-muting a bit punchier. In the interest of not mixing this into the ground, I opted to go the dangerous route and do a lot of this shit on the way in. It was worth it. The guitars sound massive already, very nicely balanced, and quite a bit more “modern” sounding than what I intended for this album. So be it, they rip. I kept goofing off, playing low, palm-muted old school death metal riffs because it’s just so tight, full, and punchy. I might have gone a little overboard on the highs, there’s this noise around 2.5 KHz that’s already bugging me but it’ll be an easy fix.

Both the 121 and 57 went through a Hedd 192, U87 went through an AD 16.

I plowed through most of the songs. My last few projects have only had one rhythm guitar track per channel but because I was prepared and had the time booked, I decided to double mine and Ben will do the same. Despite the fact that industry standard seems to be double- or even triple-tracking guitars, I’ve been finding that it tends to complicate the mix a bit more than it’s worth. Still, better to have it and not need it than wish it was there.

And that’s pretty much it. I just finished reviewing all of the songs and I’m pleased with the results. We’ll see how I feel when I listen back in a few days. Ben comes in to do his guitars in two or three weeks, then bass will be who-knows-when, and I have to write a ton of lyrics.