The Power of Myth

February 20, 2008

Myth -A popular belief or story that has become associated with a person, institution, or occurrence, especially one considered to illustrate a cultural ideal.

Music author Richie Unterberger has described the New York music scene, and the city itself, as "(i)mmense, richly diverse, flashy, polyethnic, and engaged in a never-ending race for artistic and cosmopolitan supremacy"

Creatively successful cities are similar to less successful cities in that both will inevitably produce schools of art, musical movements, and cultural phenomenon. What makes a city and its art/ music scene successful, and what hinders other would-be scenes from obtaining this elevation, is a complicated and fascinating blend of timing, talent, context, and the power of a myth.

When examining artistic movements of the past, in regards to site and context as I’ll be examining here, some patterns begin to emerge. Social scientists and corporate marketers have forever obsessed themselves with this ever elusive quality that helps virally sell products, bring extraordinary attention to a place or product, and help elevate a mere product to cultural phenomenon. Some of the aspects of a commercially peddled product can be paralleled with artistic movements, as indeed some art is treated as such.

My inquiry is concerned with music, principally, and this rather modern phenomenon of hyper-accelerated buzz that can infuse a musical movement and place. In other words, why did some cities get a reputation for exciting music scenes while others, not wanton of musical acts and options, did not? What makes a buzz city?

Malcolm Caldwell, in his recent book “ The Tipping Point”, dissects a social epidemic in a way that could be easily tailored to this question. He asserts that buzz is created, spread, and maintained by three key components. First are the Connectors, who could be said to be the networking gurus who know everybody, get invited to all the best parties, and essentially are fed the latest cultural cues from their various sources.

Next, the Mavens provide the information and technical requirements, adding historical and genre context to the music. These could be the music producers, studio owners, club owners, and various support staff who liaison between the music and the public. They tend to hear things first.

Thirdly, those willing to spread and “sell” the music are needed. Connectors, as Caldwell calls them, would be bringing the product, in this case the music, to the ears of the people. The credence such connectors would lend the music is what really feeds the buzz aspect of it, and it is where corporately manufactured pap and genuinely expressed art is available for dissemination. These connectors could be said to be music journalists, DJ’s, podcasters, record-store clerks, bloggers, and the musicians themselves singing the praises of their fellow scenesters.

Caldwell’s dissection only goes so far in explaining the cultural phenomenon of a music centric New York or Manchester, and its hold on our imagination and reverence. The very essence of buzz, how it’s created and maintained, how it’s fed, and whether it profits those involved, requires more consideration.

Music scenes start out very humbly. The labels of yore ( Factory, Dischord, Sub-Pop) started out as artist/ fan run DIY exercises in scene building. The music was exciting enough to gather some enthusiastic, if not well-monied, individuals to start enabling, propping, and spreading. Add in some seminal venues (CBGB’s, The Hacienda, The Crocodile Café), some influential publications (NME, Melodymaker, the Rocket) and your have the active ingredients for a buzz. Their motivations as varied as any cultural movement, whether it be money, fame, sex, power, social bragging rights, even artistic satisfaction, all leads them to fill the three main roles Caldwell’s theory requires for a social epidemic. But many cities, cities you are not aware of musically, have these in place as well. What is the spark that ignites the big ones and creates an out-and-out cultural phenomenon?

I would offer that is it a large-scale perceptive shift: a myth is created. Now, the word myth implies non-truth, but when talking art the line between fact and fiction blurs; art stakes its claim somewhere in the middle. It starts with the artifact and its inherent value, sure, but what would art be without the emotional and contextual value we place on it. It is this very basic set of ambiguous values that separates a New York from a Vancouver. A myth creates and maintains buzz.

Now a myth is a very hard thing to create and spread. It takes dedication and belief. It would be nearly impossible to manufacture without the mental and emotional commitment of its proponents. All involved, from the bands to the promoters to the fans to the music writers, need to be complicit in its nurturing. I call this a city’s self-esteem.

A city with high cultural self-esteem thinks its music is as good, if not better, than any other city’s scene. Genuine musical experimentation combines with accepted convention, it finds an audience, the word is spread convincingly, and is then deemed worthy to be swept up in the place-specific buzz.

Sure, scene manufacturing seems to be attempted by every city at one time or another. Journalists love to name things – it gives a handle and makes their jobs easier. But the difference is actual belief. And this is something that can’t be bought, sold, or coerced in any self-sustaining fashion. The corporate sponsored buzzes of note die out, emaciated from lack of substance and belief. People want something that feels like it came from people, not ad executives.

Now, this issue of myth begs a further question: Is location specific buzz as important now with the explosion of the place-independent internet? Yes and no.

Live shows, when experienced in a charged (read: site specific) context can be very desirable (imagine seeing the Talking Heads in CBGB’s in 1982, right before they released Speaking in Tongues). But some would argue that buzz can travel with a band. Hell, isn’t that the essence of a myth? We believe we rock and you all believe it too!

That leads to the second tenant of this myth. Others, outside of the city, must start believing it as well. People love to get in on an exciting trend on the ground floor. Indie credibility motivates this spread. I hate to disempower music fans from seeming to make their own , independently-minded musical choices, but many of us are susceptible to liking what others like. Whether it be a desire to fit in with a scene or our faith in the taste-makers we trust, many of us can be greatly influenced by what comes packaged with a certain music, irregardless of the actual musical content.

Corporate interests have been obsessed with this “buzz” phenomenon forever, as displayed by books such as Caldwell’s, which strives to be a business manual for engineering a social epidemic, ie an orgy of selling and money-making. But the public has a very keen sense of where their culture is coming from. Is it a genuinely expressed artifact made by an artist wishing to communicate the profound and meaningful, or is it a brightly colored, slick marketed product that will only fulfill you as far as it takes to bill you? We can tell the difference.

That’s why this overwhelming move by artists to “sell-out” as quickly as possible is so fascinating and troubling. Granted, many artists are finding is necessary to survive, with the older profit streams drying up. But its effect on us, the discerning public, is complex. The line between the genuinely expressed vehicle (the art) and the marketable pap that’s sold to you (the product) has become indistinguishable. Selling out is not even a dirty expletive anymore, hissed through clenched teeth. Do you blame Feist for allowing her video on that iPod commercial?

But that is a discussion for another day.

The power of a myth, when it concerns itself with the health and vibrancy of a city’s music scene, cannot be understated. It is the power of belief that creates success.

Caleb Stull, producer/ engineer
Figment Productions
www.figmentproductions.ca
info@figmentproductions.ca
tel. 604. 339. 3683

Recording Parlour Steps

Recording our new record, Ambiguoso !

The Recording of Our Most Contemporary Humours,

Or How I Learned to Love the Most Blessed Language of Digital Discourse

We book three days in Vogville Recording, across the tracks in Port Coquitlam, cozily located near Riverview Hospital, with an intent to start in on our record. Nels, God Bless him, is there for our set-up to assist my indulgences. My first order of business, while Rob tunes his drums, is to find the whistling sound in the chamber, finally, after years of recording it, thinking it was the SSL computer fans. Nope, it was air getting sucked into the air conditioner. I tape a peice of cardboard in a bridge over it, diverting the air and creating a hushed drum chamber. Wicked.

Lyrics are gathered and embellished and whittled and starved and fattened up…Songs are deconstructed and trimmed and dieted. Brevity is considered.

Drums go so smoothly, Rob Linton filling greedily his 15 tracks of digital space. We go with the astronomical, file-size hungry resolution of 24 bit, 88.2 kHz. The air of our instruments, the ensuing acoustic flourishes of the rooms and chambers we used, are given a generous and open sound stage. Yum.

Minimal editing was done to Rob’s drum tracks. They didn't need it: masterful, human in their movement, groovy as hell. I decided early that we would allow the performances the space to breath and move a bit; there was no beat detector; there was no B Rock ProTools Extraveganza. As you will hear on the record, it sounds like a real man playing that DW trap set. The following is the signal flow for our set-up:

Kick: D112 in, Re20 in, NS10 cone out – each through API pre’s, with Distressors and Avalon compressors inserted.

Snare: sm57 over, AKG 451 under – each through API pre’s and dsitressors compressors.

Toms: Senn 421’s through Vintech 1073 pre’s and Summit Tube compressors.

HiHats: SM7 through the SSL

Ride: Octavia pencil through SSL

Overheads: Neumann KM184’s through SSL pre’s, Amek compressors

Mono Rooms: an sm57 taped to the floor, Rode K2 out front, each through Vintech 1073’s, squashed through UA 1176 compressors.

Chambers: Neumann TLM 103’s through API’s, Joe Meek SC1 inserted.

(Mono rooms sent through a MXR envelope filter at times)

After we have drum takes we are grooving on, as well as all the scratch guides of vocals and guitars, we move on to bass. Julie’s Squire short scale is surprisingly massive sounding.

Bass:Squire shortscale through Millenia STT solid-state pre (with transformer engaged), through UA LA-2A compressor set to limit. Huge!

Again, very little editing. Rob and Julie lock well, the bass lending a bouncy and flexible juice to the strident drum grooves. I fear there may be way too much low end building up, a challenge layed out for me and the mixing stages.

Guitars are next, staring at us from the corner of the control room, stood upright and set-up, new strings gleaming in the track lights, each offering their voices to Rees and I.

Guitars: Gretsch 6120 Nashville, Fender Telecaster (modded with double humbuckers), GnL Stratocaster, Epiphone SG.

Amps: Fender Twin 100 watt through Mesa 4x12, VHT Pitbull all-tube, Amplitube VST

Signal chain: a mixture of sm57, Senn 421, and sm7 through API, Vintech 1073 pres, with 1176’s and Amek compressors inserted.

Room sounds: Neumann TLM 103 through API and Joe Meek

The guitars are a blast, throwing enough acoustic energy into the live room to rattle the windows and scare the piss out of anyone unknowingly ambling through the rawk zone. We have the heads/amps in the control room for better communication with the player, with the amps feeding the Mesa Boogie 4x12 cab in the live room. We use the Gretsch and the modded Tele the most, favouring their ballsy, large sound.

That took us to the end of our weekend of play. About 40+ hours later, we had some definite songs emerging from the ether. I slept greedily and dream of tube squeal.

We take a few days off (went back to day jobs, husbands and lovers, jogging through the park) and then fired up our process in The K Lab, the den of inspiration that is my one-bedroom apartment. There I start to fill out our skeletal songs with some synths and organs and keyboards, moving between what analog models I could get my hands on, and digital replicas. Everything went through the Millennia STT tube pre. It was pricey so I try to use it a lot.

I cart my recording rig over to Mark Berube’s house and record him on his upright piano, hammering keys or plucking the strings like a monster banjo. We had him resuscitating his Accordian. We had our friend Aijineen come over to the K Lab and bow a little violin.

We decide to involve the illustrious past and rent the venerable Neumann U47 microphone off of Jonathan Fluevog, who bought it off of The Hit Factory in New York. This is the very mic that Ray Charles, Mick Jagger, and countless others sang through when they hit NYC for vocal recording. At least that is what I tell myself as I stare into it for a few days.

We lay down some Gretsch acoustic first, tracked through the Millennia STT solid-state pre, producing a wonderfully vibrant, almost harpsichord, sound. It cuts through everything like a chiming tickle of clarity.

After I amass the clutch of lose-leaf lyrics and over-worked notebooks, I start singing. Julie and I get to gaze out my bedroom window at the twinkling lights of Grouse and the North Shore range. Much tea and scotch is consumed while sending our voices through the U47 into the Millennia tube-pre. It was as warm as a desert sunset and satisfied my deepest audio gear fetishism. When we weren’t using the mic, it’s historical weight and considerable (!) cost motivated me to hide it under my bed when I slept.

So we now had most of the songs sounding nearly complete. I started ornamenting them with tambourine, shaker, and more synth flourishes. It is these trinkets and baubles of sound that make it sound all big-budgety, no?

Compared to the our previous albums and their glacial production schedules (Hours of Tremor took a year and a half to complete: Great Perhaps the better part of a year), this five weeks was fast and furious and huge.

Mixing over five days, again back at Vogville Studios, I was moved to glutony, using nearly every compressor, EQ, and effects processor in the rack, delighting in the expensive lights and flickering displays, twitching VU meters and LED’s…

Nels can testify that I eat far too many donairs during this time. I get OCD with the donair place down the street. Nels buys them for me, the helpful enabler.

Five days for mixing is a luxury not afforded every project I work on, so I take some time. I set up a PA system in the live room to feed various sounds into the chamber, bouncing a guitar here, a vocal there, around inside this room. The mics in the chamber pick up a bunch of unwanted noise as well - roadcrews digging deep into the ground, woodworkers next door cutting wood, and sometimes these mysterious snaps and crackles that our assistant Nels gets spooked by.

Then it was time to mix, amassing all the recorded elements and helping them find a home in the greater sonic city of the song (ah, urban planning as a metaphor). I steal from a long dead dude when I say something is done when you can’t take anything more away. Mixing was very much a process of peeling and trimming and fermenting into the song’s fittest self. Oh, alright, we left a few pleasure pounds hanging around the middle.

So, I ‘ve just sent the mixes off to Boulder, Colorado to Airshow Mastering and our man there, Dominick Maita. UPS screwed me over a desk under some seriously bright and unsexy lighting. But they will get there. Boulder. The mountain air creates especially talented mastering engineers, with lots of red blood cells.

We'll be sure to let y'all hear some of the tracks soon. Yup, WHEN YOU BUY EM, YA PIRATES!

Just kidding. Rob doesn't want to sound too political.

Much Love,

Caleb Stull, producer/ engineer

Figment Productions
www.figmentproductions.ca
info@figmentproductions.ca
tel. 604. 339. 3683

Plucking the reluctant piano innards...

Katie Ormiston, of the Vancouver folk-rock outfit Pawn Shop Diamond (whose upcoming album was produced by Figment), was inspired by the challenges faced by her brother, who lives with mental illness, to act out. A decided lack of resources and a general de-prioritizing of mental health issues in the city of Vancouver motivated her to strike up a deal with some like-minded local musicians - a fundraiser! A compilation album and performance, bringing together some of Vancity's finest musicians and visual artists to try and help out The Portland Hotel Society, would be cemented together by the black Crow. anyone living along the commute line of these surprising birds can attest to their daily inclusion in the city's bussle.
Black Crow Myspace Page
The performance will be held November 27th at The Vancouver East Cultural Centre.
It was from this invigorating collective of local musicians that we, yr humble Parlour Steps, felt inspired to take to Vogville Studios and record " A Pagan and a Cook" on a cool Saturday in September. It was also an excuse to work with the immense talent of Mark Berube, as he tickled some keys for us in grand style, unveiling wonderous possibilities where none existed before (that's him hand-plucking the piano strings in the second verse).

Hear the song A Pagan and a Cook on our website! Myspace streaming sounds like ass!!
I got to explore a little of the possibilties of my newest gear indulgence, the Millennia STT-1. The thing is a monster of possibilities and options: solid state and tube switchable on every component. Truely dizzying. The transformerless mic pre is so very transparent, it became obvious I'll need to invest in a better mic.
We also had the pleasure of using an immaculately kept Neumann U47 for the vocals. Such rich mids and silky highs - the best vocal mic I've ver had the pleasure of using. The price of this mic reflects that, costing close to what you'd pay for an excellent used car. But we're creating art, right? Such aims elevate us above mere dollars. I think... still gotta eat though...er...
The pictures of our studio explorations can be viewed on the Parlour Steps myspace page. The song was young when we went in, hardly written, and what took shape was glorious for us. We bloomed and it was good. We hope you enjoy it as well.
If the planets adequately align we will have a new album for yr pleasure by Christ's Mass. It will be the collest soundtrack for crucifixion ever!

Love, Parlour Steps

Caleb Stull, producer/ engineer
Figment Productions
www.figmentproductions.ca
info@figmentproductions.ca
tel. 604. 339. 3683

A Musical Rant!

For over against the convenience of instantaneous communication is the fact that the great economical abstractions of writing, reading, and drawing, the media of reflective thought and deliberate action, will be weakened.

- Lewis Mumford

We have a term in audio engineering to decry the compounding effect that prolonged exposure to sound and music, usually at considerable volumes, can have on the listening skills of the listener. We call this “ear fatigue”, when the audio becomes less defined, less clear, indiscernible from other materials, and finally incoherent. The effect, in contrast to actual hearing loss, is not proportional to actually volume, nor is it permanent. A few hours away from the sound source usually reinstates the listeners auditory intelligences.

What I’ve come to experience in my years working on many platforms and mediums of recordable media, as well as various forms of delivery of this media, is the certain and universally definite effects of these various media and how they differ from one another. I started engineering on 2” magnetic tape, about as “analogue” as one can get for first generation recording media. Running at 30 inches per second over the machine heads, the sound of tape was very distinct. The language to describe these impressions can be nothing but inadequate and abstract, as this is like trying to describe a colour. We have but the impressions it leaves on us to communicate it with.

Well, 2” tape felt wonderful. Full, bright without harshness, deep bass, well handled transients. Tape took an analogous impression of the music and imprinted it on the magnetic particles. For some reason, our brain’s liked these waveforms. Ear fatigue for tape hovered around a very reasonable 12+ hours for most material. That means we could be making very minute comparisons and enacting critical decisions with the material for this length of time.

Then came the modular digital revolution. Using comparatively inexpensive digital tape, we started recording everything to 16 bit, 44.1 kHz audio (or 48 kHz for broadcast). You will recognize these resolutions as “ CD quality” – this is what CD’s sound like. That means that between the softest and the loudest part of the music, there is a whole 16 steps. The kHz rating refers to how often per second the digital converters sample the audio( at 44.1 kHz, the converters are sampling 44,100 times per second). This is where the digital encoder takes an analogue wave (as we hear raw, real-world sounds) and converts it to a digital “word”. Many factors have a bearing on the “quality” of this translation – digital clock, converters, system integrity, jitter.

While audio impressions can vary wildly over a group of people, there are a few pieces of received wisdom that can mostly be agreed upon. 16 bit, while having a larger dynamic range than the magnetic tape of the time, didn’t “feel” as good. The cold translation of digital wasn’t as pleasing to our ears. Ear fatigue was hit at about the 6 hour mark. And it was hit hard. 16 bit would start to sound brittle and unforgiving. I remember watching people in some recording sessions grow noticeably agitated over prolonged periods of listening. Their bodies were responding to the gaps between the samples, I abstractly surmised.

Just as Marshall McLuhan believed television was more a tactile experience than a visual one, sound recordings create physical responses in listeners. When working with low resolution digital audio our brains were reacting to the lack of real-world analogous linearity. We were rejecting the digital interpretation of the real-world. But hey, it was a helluva lot cheaper that tape and no one without a degree in digital studies could really explain why we were feeling this way. It sounded clear, didn’t it? Tape was left behind, for the most part.

Digital technology moved ahead at a breakneck speed, as the market interest in it accelerated research and development. After a few years everyone was recording 24 bit digital “words” and sampling their sounds at upwards of 96,000 times per second. This was having a profound effect on the perception of the audio. Dynamic range increased immensely, clarity sharpened, ear fatigue rose to an acceptable 8-10 hours. The gaps between the samples was closing fast, creating closer translations to our beloved analogue. Keep in mind that these innovations were exclusively brought about on the creator side of things, wholly separate from the market/ consuming side of the equation.

Industry professionals and audiophiles marched behind the banners of progress. Everyone would soon be buying Hi-Fi systems and running everything at increasingly higher resolutions – things would sound better, people’s ears would become more discerning, the music would be uncompromised. It never happened.

The market, as one would call all of us, the consuming public, steered the technological trends in a decidedly different direction. MP3’s and their similar ilk were the future. Professionals were aghast! People were taking already inferior digital translations (CD’s) and further translating them to lower and lower (hence smaller and smaller) qualities for mass consumption. Our ears bristled to hear the grainy, piping and harsh new recordings that were sacrificed in the interest of file size and electronic mobility. This trend was in the interest of access, a very important and powerful requisite to the modern world’s musical habits. This one aspect, access, would change the world’s music forever; how it was listened to, delivered, created, shared, bought, sold, stolen…

This trend, this reality of people amassing thousands upon thousands of ill-translated sound recordings has had some very powerful effects on us as a listening public. The first I would write to is the psycho-acoustic and psycho-physical fall-out. As I remarked before, digital recordings illicite noticeable discomforts in listeners, mostly under the conscious awareness of the listener; agitation, ear-fatigue, loss of attention, even a physiological shutting down of the sensory organs. I believe the worse the digital translation, the worse these effects become.

Ears are shutting down and bodies are being repelled very subtly from these recordings. It is creating communication calluses to protect our very sensitive physiology from these increasingly harsher and more degraded translations. We are slowly shutting down and our appreciation of music, in all its auditory and tactile depths, can only suffer because of it.

Secondly, there is the commodification of the music. I’m not speaking of the monetary value that has been attached to music for some time now – it is well established and accepted almost to a fault; music costs money to create, record, reproduce, and own. No, I’m speaking of the collecting and filing away, mostly through copying and “stealing”, of music. I won’t speak to the ethics of file sharing and illegal downloading – this isn’t the point. The loss of importance, of sacrifice, of and for this music is what interests me. The average downloader/file amassing consumer spends only a few seconds downloading a song. That, in relation to its commodity value, is very, very cheap. Does one then value that song as much as one did the vinyl LP one saved up for fifteen years ago? It would be impossible to create the relationship inherent in the physical experience of what music consumption used to be with what is now. Back then, we would travel to the record store, buy an album, tear off the wrapper, look at artwork, read the lyrics, absorb visual cues, and listen to the album linearly as the artist had intended.

What a striking contrast to the modern act of downloading a song. Think of all the tactile and sensory information, the stuff essential to creating a lasting and valuable experience, that is lost.

The value chain, as it began with the download, grows steadily cheaper and less valued. When one has upwards of 10,000 songs, each song’s importance shrinks inversely proportionate to the choice given. Too much choice, it has been clinically documented, overwhelms consumers and contributes to apathy. What once was an open mind in the face of a steady stream of new sensations becomes a desensitization to the avalanche of similarity. “ I can like anything” becomes “ I like everything”. Why choose? Why have preferences when you can have everything? This is where “like” and “dislike” become just an aspect of playlists and a subtle itch to skip ahead nearly everything you hear to get to what’s next.

This desensitization is inherent in our television watching habits as well; too much choice of mediocre programming births the classic channel surfer. We can’t stay on one thing for too long. We need to see what else is there, ever after the sexier, more sensational, more extreme next thing. Could this auditory callus I spoke of have anything to do with this as well? Doesn’t desensitized skin require more pressure and more forceful stimulation to become excited? Why do downloaders who haven’t actually listened to a fraction of the songs they have amassed continue to acquire new electronic music? If this is the fetishizing of our music, the addiction to possessing over actual respective enjoyment, I believe we can do without it.

As a side note, this desensitization of our sensory world extends outwards, dictating how we interact, or don’t interact, with eachother. How many people are plugged into these MP3 players on the bus now? They are secluding themselves from common experience, isolating themselves from whatever sensations sitting quietly on an active city bus might afford. This speaks to our phobia in regards to boredom. We have sacrificed so much possibility, so much chance and synchronicity, undercut our own auspicious sensitivities, all in fear of one moment of boredom. But that is another rant for another day.

The electronic revolution and its effect on recorded music also just extends an already prevalent force in the capture of any media that isn’t the direct experience itself, i.e., recordings for live performances, poster reproductions for original paintings, documentaries for live experience. This force is, to steal from McLuhan’s lexicon once more, the cooling of music. The temperature of the artifact we perceive as art (the song, the painting, the poem) cools. It loses creative heat as its travels farther from the forces that created it. By temperature, I’m speaking rather abstractly about vitality, the essence of the wordless, language-deficient act of creation. When something is created, something new born into our sensory world, a type of vibration is created. I call this heat. As the artifact travels from creator to receptor (from artist to us) , from translation to translation (from live performance to MP3), its invariably cools. It is reasonable to assume watching an Iraqi man die on a pixilated internet browser window is quite different from being present at that event. The artifact has cooled.

Well, the digitization and devaluing of music further cools it from its intensely

thermal moment of creation. We are so far removed from its original intended delivery, its original and intended sensory package, it is no wonder we have grown indifferent. It just doesn’t feel authentic.

I don’t want to communicate the impression that I’m some crusty luddite who hears the (digital) death knell of musical relevance. Far from it, I think this important concept of access has opened up a whole world of promotional, networking, and communication opportunities for artists all over the world. We can now hear and trade and turn ourselves, and each other, onto dizzying amounts of new art. But if that process doesn’t come around and complete the circle and become a thermal, authentic, tactile, and thereby valuable experience, we will increasingly feel more detached from beauty, from the act of creating beauty, from the communication we all so desperately crave.

To the extent that the last works of art still communicate, they denounce the prevailing forms of communication as instruments of destruction, and harmony as a delusion of decay.

Max Horkheimer, 1941

Caleb Stull, producer/ engineer
Figment Productions
www.figmentproductions.ca
info@figmentproductions.ca
tel. 604. 339. 3683

Greetings Cyber-Nuts and Bolts!

Welcome, wandering eyes and fingers! This constitutes the first blog of recording empire Figment Productions (http://www.figmentproductions.ca), where I will take this electro-space to blather on about projects I'm working on, bands and artists I'm collaborating with, gear I'm currently using or lusting after, and various geeky anacdotes to do with recording, songwriting, and general nonsense. This will also be a venue for unabashed and shameless promotion of my thought-rock band, Parlour Steps (http://www.parloursteps.com) and other bands I like and lust after.
In the spirit of extroversive nihilism and a driving need for acceptance, I hope you like it. Let's dig in.

On March 9th I headed into wonderous Vogville Studios (http://www.vogville.com) in glorious Port Coquitlam (over on the blander side of the tracks) with my band, Parlour Steps. We stepped into that posh little den of art to translate one of our songs, Thieves of Memory, into glorious digital one's and zero's. You can hear the rough mixed results at our website.
Now Vogville is owned by a very forward thinking man, a Mr. Jonathan Fluevog (yes, that Fluevog, heir to the Fluevog shoe Empire). He has been tireless, and determined to go broke, outfitting this place with nearly every little bit of gear I've been desiring lately, culminating in his recent investment in a Digidesign Protools High Definition (HD) rig, clocked to an Antelope master clock. This thing sings.
I layed down the 32+ tracks of this new song into 24bit, 88.2 kHz Broadcast Wave files. Reasons being I had some guide tracks in 88.2, stemming from a period when I was mixing in the box at home on my Nuendo/ RME rig and thought that since 44.1 was just a halving of 88.2, less math meant easier, therby better, conversion during mastering. My little obsessive brain can chew on this shit for hours.
The tracks came back out of his G4 sounding exactly like how I layed them it. So precise. The imaging was immaculate, everything slotted so well together. Only when I started overdubbing through the Apogee Rosetta D/A converters did I start to notice that Apogee, somewhat high frequency enhanced, sound. It's pleasing to me so I went with it.
The mic/ patch breakdown was straight forward vanilla, representing what I've been going for, gear wise, for years now. The input list is detailed below, for those interested.

Kick Drum
AKG D112, Vintech 1073 preamp, Empirical Labs Distressor
Aphex D6, SSL preamp/ compressor
Converted NS10 woofer (so fuckin killer!), Avalon 737 pre

Snare Drum
Top - Shure SM57, Vintech 1073 preamp with a hint of 3.6K boost, Distressor
Bottom - Octavia pencil condensor (adequate), SSL pre/ comp

Toms
Sennheiser 421's, API preamps, Summit tube compressors

Overheads
(2) spaced pair Rode NT1's, SSL preamps, Amek compressors (smooth as silk, baby)

Mono Rooms
Shure 57 taped to the floor, SSL preamp, 1176 compressor with 20:1 ratio squashed
Rode K2 tube mic, Vintech 1073, 1176 compressor 20:1 squashed, with a slow attack, fast release for maximum pumping. I could listen this all day.

Chamber (Vogville has one of the coolest little chambers around, with a decay time suited for most rock recordings. As it is seperate from the live room, I mic it up and add it to the track as I see fit, with the option of a big, boomy room sound, or a tight intimate kit sound)
(2) Neumman TLM103's, Vintech 1073's with a hint of 5K boost, Joe Meek Optical Compressor

Bass
A Gibson Thunderbird from the '70s, DI'd through a J48 into a Vintech 1073, into the killer Teletronics LA-2A. Amped through an Ampeg tube head, Trace Elliot cab, mic'd with the Rode K2, Vintech 1073's, into an 1176 at 4:1. I mixed these two tracks through a Dolby Noise Reduction encoder, kind of a hi-end multi-band compressor with fixed ratios/ attacks etc. Sounds phat without too much low end mud that I'd need to dial out later.

Guitar
A Godan semi-hollow through a VHT head feeding a Mesa Boogie cab mic'd with a 57 and a 421, phase corrected in Protools, through 1073's, then through the Amek compressors. I had Rees double the track for phatness. I had to really brighten it up with the pultec eq to make it cut.

Stomping
We carried in a bunch of rotting, tetnus-freaky boards out of the blizzarding parking lot to try and get a thick stomping sound in the chamber. I put on the hardest shoes I have and went at it, but it sounded clacky and thin. Then I noticed the wooden, hollowed staircase in the chamber and it was love at first sight. I put a K2 under the stairs and the TLM103 overhead to catch the chamber decay, both through the 1073's and Amek comps. Then I did the two tracks in one take each, stomping away like a freakin four-on-the-floor funk-zombie. My feet are still bruised from givin'er!

Sex-a-phone
Eric Termaat came in, looking as good as he sounded, and blew away into the K2, with the TLM103 in the chamber. 1073's again, with 3.6k opened up a bit. Amek compressors smoothed it all out.

Vocals
Rees, Julie, and I wailed into the Rode K2, thru a 1073, into the LA-2A. Glorious. I grabbed as much chamber sound as possible on this song, so I left the TLM103 up and mixed in some of that real phat room sound. Keepin it real, yo. Nothing like sound waves bouncing around a real, imperfect room. Digital isn't as gritty and convincing.

Various Synths and Organs
All midi, I'm ashamed to add. We didn't have the time or access to the real synths. For our next record, we will hunt down the real shizzle, fo shnizzle!

All monitored through Halfer Amps, NS10's and Genelec's. (God Bless the Mogami wiring).

In early April I head into Vogville to start in on The Neins Circa's next record. They are fantastic and magical - Cameron Dilworth being a songwriter of masterful purportions. I'll be laying the skinny clear and throurough here after.

Caleb