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.

This past Monday night, I was driving from Philadelphia back up to New York, thinking about the state of my life. I had just finished playing a show with Woe, our last show for the next few months because Ruston, our drummer, and his girlfriend are about to have a son. The other guys and I chipped in to get them some gift cards to Babies R Us and Target. The crowd was great for a Monday night and kind of poor promotion, about 75 people, and my friend Cullen filled in on vocals for half of our set at the last minute because I was (and still am) dealing with an upper respiratory infection. It was also the first show with Grzesiek, one of my oldest and best friends, on bass. We played a short, furious set; lots of friends were there and everyone had a great time.

The drive was easy and quiet. I listened to Cynic’s brilliant “Traced in Air” and thought about how lucky I am. My job is fantastic. My music is appreciated. I have friends and family who love me and I love them. I am healthy. I am as self-sufficient as anyone can be expected to be. I have goals that I am achieving, hope for the future, reasonable expectations.

At the same time this was going on, I thought about a child I saw in Philadelphia before I left town. It was almost midnight and he was in a stroller, being pushed by some crackhead fuckup, laughing loudly with two friends. This child’s future was decided. As Philadelphia cuts more and more social services, the likelihood that it will ever be anything other than its parent decrease more and more. It will have to work harder, be smarter, and suffer more to achieve a fraction of what I achieved by kind of coasting through life, doing what came naturally. Sure, I worked hard, but my hard work compared to the hard work they will have to do… who can imagine?

And so, as I drove, my thoughts shifted back and forth between appreciation for the night and my life to this kid to something between wonder and excitement and fear that comes with knowing that everything we do, everything we have, everything that we are and will be is ultimately decided by luck.

Skill and hard work can only get you so far. Every individual has to be responsible for where they end up, but the most you can ever hope is that they will have the opportunity and ability to make things work in your favor. Nothing is truly earned; at some point, someone or something helps you get where you are and what you want. Maybe it’s a person you met along the way or an idea someone introduced you to or being born to the right people at the right time — we are all the result of an infinite number of variables outside of our control.

This is definitely not a new idea but when was the last time you really thought about it and let it matter to you? There isn’t anything to be done about it (and what would you do, if you could?) but the more you have, the more successful and happy you are, the more you should think about this and let it humble you. Every victory should be tempered with a reminder that you only earned a part of what you have, not all of it. It’s not God, it’s not Fate, it’s not some plan; it’s luck, stupid luck, that keeps you healthy and upright while so many others are suffering, born to shit, born as shit, with no choices or healthy one minute and sick the next.

I think that all I can do is appreciate and exploit my current fortunate and do my best to improve the world around me. As quickly as good things appear, they can disappear — of this I am acutely aware, more now than ever. This is why the popular concepts of conservatism and libertarianism are so silly to me: how can you think that cutting social services and making things easiest for people who already have the resources to succeed (businesses, the wealthy, individuals who don’t rely on some publicly funded aid) is a reasonable thing to do? Everyone was helped somewhere along the way, either by another person or by stupid fucking luck. We all have things we don’t deserve because nobody really deserves much of anything, we can only make the best of what luck gives us.

I will try to not forget this. Let it always keep me grounded.

We ran into a really weird problem at work and were totally unable to find anyone whose solution was the same as ours, so I thought I’d share.

The scenario:

Client has six Apache web servers behind a Kemp load balancer. The database servers and file servers don’t really matter. LB is set in Round Robin, persistence is enabled, almost everything works except for specific AJAX calls. In our case, it was features in WordPress’s admin area. When trying to add a file to a podcast plugin or dragging a new widget to the sidebar, they would just fail without giving an error. Firebug just showed… nothing. We recently added CloudFlare to fight a DDOS attack (more on that another time) and once we did that, Firebug showed a 502 error from the proxy service.

My co-workers and I tried everything we could find. Nobody seemed to have this issue.

The solution was disabling compression on the Kemp’s virtual service for the site. If you have a Kemp, it’s in Add/Modify virtual services and in the Advanced area. Little checkbox. We discovered this by duplicating the main virtual service, pulling one of the real service out of it, and NATing a unique public IP to it, thereby giving us a direct connection to one isolated server. We set our Hosts file to go straight to this new IP, bypassing CloudFlare’s proxy, bypassing the main virtual service for the live site. Once we had this setup, we were able to tweak LB settings with impunity, eventually landing on this. The change was immediate — click, refresh page, test, worked.

We aren’t quite sure of what to make of this. I emailed Kemp just now to see if they could give us a technical perspective. I guess that it would be good to look at all the headers and the request in a broken virtual service and then compare it to a working one? My assumption is that compression is changing the request in such a way that WordPress (well, jQuery, since that’s what it’s using in this case) doesn’t know how to respond? Regardless, we are thrilled to have it fixed and I hope this helps someone out.

I am now studioless. Things… didn’t work out with the last space and I basically had a couple grand stolen from me. It sucked, it sucks, but I’m dealing with it. New plan is to pay off all bills, replenish savings, and find a new space in a few months.

In the meantime, I am still doing some recording. Woe will begin album #3 on Saturday by heading to Gradwell House in Haddon Heights, NJ for drums. I did the drums and guitars for the last album there and am really excited to work there again. It’s a beautiful space with fantastic gear and both Dave and Steve are awesome guys. Overall, I think this is making the best out of a bad situation and I think there’s a good chance the album will come out even better because of this. I’m going to supplement their gear (API 3124+, 6 channels from an old Neotek console, some Neve clones, and a ton of killer mics) with my Sebatron, my friend’s Joly-modded Oktava MK012s, my Joly-modded NT87, and some other little things. I’m still not sure where we’re going to record the rest of the album but if we have to, we can keep going to Gradwell. Most of the mixing can be done on headphones with suplemental and final mixes done in rented spaces, so while this will be more of a hassle, it will also keep me from engineering it into the ground. I guess there’s something to be said for that.

Going to put up more info soon but in the past few weeks, I bought two 414s, ordered and received an amazing Sebatron VMP-4000e, did a fun demo with a friend, and moved into a beautiful studio space in Greenpoint. Pretty cool. Pics and details to follow, I’m too tired right now.