Extraterrestrial Highway

Current works in progress:

The Feng Shui Ninjas, Garbage Pizza.  We were working on a more ambitious full album, but fell behind schedule.  Now we’re making a sort of rarities album, consisting of old recordings from before Tami joined, music from the soundtrack for Dragons in the Basement (an as yet unreleased movie about the history of roleplaying games), and whatever we can get recorded/mixed between now and Feburary.

Beth Kinderman and the Player Characters, unnamed EP.  We’re recording an EP of anime theme songs mixed with original material.  The covers will be “Call Me Call Me” (from Cowboy Bebop), “Rolling Star” (from Bleach, sung in Japanese), and “Duvet” (Serial Experiments Lain).  We’re also recording an acoustic version of Beth’s original “Heavy As Stone” (about Fullmetal Alchemist), and she’s promised us another original or two.  This should be released in February.  So far, we’ve only tracked “Call Me Call Me”, but we expect the album to go together easily, with lots of live recording.

Beth Kinderman and the Player Characters, Apocalypse Blues - Originally titled Blue Horizon after the opening track, our next full-length album is now named after a trilogy of songs about Battlestar Galactica.  At this point, the songs “Blue Horizon”, “Good Intentions”, “Heavy As Stone”, “Steady as She Goes”, “Keeper”, and “What the River Left Behind” are all at least partly tracked.  “Blue Horizon” is getting pretty close to done now - I’m going to Tiny Robots with Justin tomorrow to cut the drums.

Monitoring is the most important link of your audio mixing chain.  And knowing your monitors is more important than the quality of the monitoring.  A while back, I rearranged my studio, moving my monitors from the long wall to the short wall.  This completely transformed their sound!  The biggest change was that the bass seemed smaller - I moved the listening point from a boomy spot to a flat spot.  Beyond that, though, everything became clearer and more accurate. 

Recently, I aquired new monitors - a used set of Tannoy DMT-12 concentrics.  As used monitors, they’ve been problematic.  In particular, mine had a blown tweeter in one speaker, and it’s been an expensive pain to get a replacement.  But the sound!  Wonderful speakers, but very, very different from the Wharfedale Diamond 8.2 monitors I’ve been using the past few years.  The Wharfedales are accurate, but kind of harsh and fatiguing after a while.  Moreover, bass and dynamics are limited by their size and power.  The Tannoys, by contrast, have enormous dynamics.  I have them hooked up to an old Hafler DH-200 amp, and dynamic contrasts feel completely effortless and live.  They’re also much easier on the ear than the Wharfedales, but also bring out far more fine detail.  Expensive, but a good investment!

Meanwhile, I spend a lot of time “knowing” my headphones - Sennheiser HD280s.  I use them for my iPod/iPhone while commuting or working.  They’re more accurate, and protect my ears compared to any in-ear headphones.  I also use them for tracking, so it’s good to know them well.

I recently had the pleasure of tracking at Tiny Robots Studio in Columbia Heights, run by my friend Mark Keyser.  Although a low-budget affair, the studio has a couple of things I don’t have - a great, well-treated main room, and a nice collection of amps (including Marshall, Boogie, Vox, and Savage).  I can definitely get better guitar sounds there than I can get at home!  But alas, it’s time-consuming and potentially expensive to track in a nice studio like that.  You spend lots of your limited time trying to nail down performances, which cuts into setup time, and you get what you’re up to getting that day.

Still, a cranked-up Marshall through a real mic beats the snot out of Amplitube, at least in my world!

To get around this, I plan to try re-amping.  I can record my (electric) guitar tracks direct at home, using software amp sims to get the basic performance.  Then I can take those tracks and re-amp them at Tiny Robots (or any other studio), using their superior room and gear.  This gives me the best of both worlds.  I can work on nailing my performances and editing them nicely in the comfort of my home studio, and then spend my limited time at Tiny Robots tweaking amps and mic placement for the best sound, rather than trying to get a good performance in before I burn out.

I may be doing something scary soon… moving my studio from one room of the house to another. The studio is currently in the main room of the basement. It’s a nice room, with wood paneling, carpeting, a drop ceiling, and excellent dimension ratios for acoustics. But it has some disadvantages, too - it’s the main walkway to the main bathroom, laundry room, and storage room.  It’s directly under the living room and just a staircase and a thin door from the tv room, so noise is a problem.  And of course, it’s jam-packed full of instruments.  It’s also a source of frustration for my spouse, who doesn’t feel she has a space of her own in the house.

So I’m now planning to swap the studio into the utility/storage room.  This means I need to find a commercial storage rental for our little-used stuff, and move my spouse’s sewing and other stuff out into what is currently the studio room.  The rooms are similar size, so I shouldn’t be losing too much space.  And it will have a number of advantages - the studio will no longer be on-path to anywhere else, there will be a door between the studio and the rest of the house, the room above the studio is just my deep-sleeping son’s bedroom, and the nice main basement room becomes living space.

I think the most valuable tool a recording engineer/producer can have is a good set of reference albums - music that is very well recorded, challenges the ears, and inspires new ideas. The best references are albums you can listen to over and over and find new things.  They can also help attune your ears to unfamiliar new sound systems.

Here’s a quick list of albums that I use for reference:

• Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Summerteeth, Sky Blue Sky
• Radiohead - OK Computer, The Bends
• The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
• Fleetwood Mac - Rumours, Tusk
• Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, Pink Moon
• Neko Case - Blacklisted, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
• Grateful Dead - Workingman’s Dead
• Jim White - Drill a Hole in that Substrate and Tell Me What You See
• Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
• Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
• The Beatles - Abbey Road
• Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here
• David Bowie - Scary Monsters

I’m running a low budget studio.  I can’t afford much in the way of fancy gear, so I have to be wise in how I spend the money I have, targeting weak spots.   Lately, I think my biggest electronics shortcoming is my mic preamps.  So today, I splurged on a FMR RNP mic preamp, the low end of the high end in such things.  Hopefully, it’ll be a valuable improvement over the M-Audio DMP3 I’ve been using.  We’ll see.

Next, I go back to buying room treatments.  Although my room has inherently good dimensions and doesn’t sound bad, it could be a lot better with bass trapping. And beyond that, I’d like better monitors.  The Wharfedale Diamonds I use now are okay, but I can hear their shortcomings, and they get fatiguing after a while.

I’ve been working with Beth Kinderman on basic tracks lately.  One thing we’re finding very useful is assembling the basic tracks piece-by-piece against a click track.  Of course, the traditionalists will whinge that the entire band is supposed to be able to cut the main tracks live all at once, or click kills the feel, or whatever, but we’re finding it really useful.  Record a stretch of the song (say, a verse), then record the next, and the next.  Start with the pieces that get the time under control for other pieces.

Last saturday, we started recording the track “Heavy As Stone”.  It starts with a classical guitar stating the melodic theme, and then other instruments and vocals come in.  The melody has a couple of tricky syncopations in it, and Beth was struggling to get it right against the squareness of the click.  I suggested to Beth that she try vocalizing the melody against the click as a scratch track, then playing the guitar part against that.  It worked beautifully!  Now we have a nice, clock-tight opening statement for the song.

We did a similar trick without a click in earlier recording.  In this case, the song starts with a stated riff on acoustic guitar, but is carried by a strumming part.  Beth vocalized the riff, which provided a time reference for me to strum the main acoustic part, and a count-in for later recording the opening riff.

In other cases, I’ve written a basic drum machine part rather than using a click.  The drum machine more accurately reflects the rhythmic feel of the song, even if it’s trivial compared to the real drums to be laid down later.  The important factor, I think, is to start with a solid base and build up from that.

One of the projects on my plate is Blue Horizon, the next album by Beth Kinderman and the Player Characters.  I’m very excited about this! 

Her first album, All of My Heroes Are Villains, was recorded in a tremendous rush - most of the tracking and all of the mixing was done in a five-week stretch through January and early February 2008.  It was a huge learning experience for Beth and for me, and in some ways I feel lucky we survived it, and even luckier that we got a terrific album out of our efforts!  Her band, the Player Characters, formed from the band we threw together for the studio recording. But as happy as I am with that album, there were some problems. The biggest was the band not being as tight as it could be - we were just starting out. A related problem was limited recording time. We often learned songs and recorded them the same day, so we didn’t have the opportunity to fully explore them first. And finally, there were shortcomings in my microphone and mixing techniques, especially around the drums.

Half a year later, the Player Characters are a well-rehearsed and seasoned band, with numerous live shows and a broad repertoire under our belt. Most of our repetoire is new material. Beth has 11 songs planned for the new album, and seven have been performed live already, some of them since April. The live performances have given us a strong sense of where the songs are going.  We really know the material this time!

We also have the luxury of time for this album. We’re tentatively planning to release the album at Convergence, in July 2009. Nearly a year to record and polish. Of course, much of that goes to just not getting on the psychotic schedule of Heroes/Villains, but we do have the time to do a far better job.

Blue Horizon will rock far harder than Heroes/Villains did. The first album was an eclectic mix of folk, solo acoustic guitar/vox, and rock. Blue Horizon, on the other hand, consists largely of big, powerful rock songs.  I’ll be putting in a lot of effort to capture energetic, in-your-face drum and guitar sounds. 

Beth and I have already started basic recording tracks.  Hopefully, I’ll have some samples up soon.

Lots of stuff has happened since the last time I tried to maintain this site.  I applied the name “Extraterrestrial Highway” to my steadily-improving home studio, and produced the studio’s first album - All of My Heroes Are Villains, by Beth Kinderman.  I’ve also started recording the first Feng Shui Ninjas album, and a potentially interesting movie soundtrack project. 

I plan to expand this site to represent the studio, as the studio becomes a more serious enterprise… not a professional, money-making enterprise, but rather a project worthy of the name.  My first album production experience was very rewarding and enjoyable, and I want to continue recording/producing music for other artists.  Beth Kinderman and I are already making plans for her next album, and I hope to produce singles and perhaps albums for others as well. 

Again, this isn’t a for-profit venture.  For the foreseeable future, recordings made at Extraterrestrial Highway Studio will be labors of love, for friends whose music I enjoy and respect.  But that doesn’t make it any less serious, I hope.

I started the extraterrestrialhighway.net domain a while back mostly as a dumping ground for files, and a place to put music stuff that wasn’t directly related to any particular band or music project (and to collect all my music in one place).  I still don’t know what I’ll do with it, but I installed Wordpress so I can at least manage the home page blog-style.