Production Notes

The notion of recording onto tape has always been daunting to me, combined with the lack of money that being a hikkineet brings, and i get a lack of ability to really give a shit about
recording on an old school 4-track or whatever. Believe me, it's fascinating, and i'd want to do it, but it seems out of reach. To add to this, i don't have an amp. So, what do i do to
compensate and get a truly raw sound? I don't. Rawness is manufactured at a mixing level. Previously i used mastering to turn everything into a verbed out soup and constrict the frequency
response of every track, with some added excessive vibrato to simulate tape wobble. This might do the trick, but it's not exactly realistic. What you've got in a raw setup might be the
reduced frequency response of a shitty tape machine running shitty tape (usually in the high end), and the wobble, and the cheap reverb on the master that a lot of bm bands employ, but
realistically, a lot of rawness comes from shitty gear and shitty recorded tracks. So, i use minimal effects on the master now and instead employ effects on each track to simulate all
of that. I'll go through each of the instruments and my methods.

Drums are my most thought out element, mostly because they're programmed, but i really try to fool people, so i put a lot of effort into it. For a while, i swore by drumgizmo, due to
the unparalleled modularity and realism that it offers, having a full 15 tracks of unmixed but pristine audio to fuck up creatively. But i was always secretly eyeing a real apple
of my eye, kvlt drums ii by ugritone. I mean, c'mon, it's kvlt! It really tries, the trash mic is a beautiful thing, and it has a lot of great options. I've used kvlt drums for countless
albums, but there's one big problem (aside from loading any sounds from the osdm expansion crashing my computer). It's a similar thing with garageband drums: not enough one shots! For a vst fine tuned for black metal, having insufficient one shots is a big problem, given that the core rhythmic elements of the genre is a flurry of fast-paced snare hits. You can see where this is going. Though there's some sort of randomness to the samples which play on each hit, there are so little samples that are actually attached to each velocity group and one shot that blast-beats turn into an obviously robotic experience, since the sheer amount of notes being played increases the chance of the same exact sample being played twice in a row. The effect is horrible. Drumgizmo doesn't have this problem. Every drum kit is about a gigabyte in size. This is a good thing. There's also the issue of using a vst that standardizes rawness. Weird, right? I never really used the fully mic'd kits with all the outputs, just used the oh mics or trash mic in the method i'll detail below, at that point every vst is just a glorified sample loader. But the problem still exists that you're likely to homogenize your sound if you use this stuff. There are no presets in drumgizmo, you have to do it yourself. And that's a good thing. Drumgizmo is superior. It's better than your shitty hackjobs like superior drummer, ezdrummer, perfect drums.... Steven slate drums. The only issue is you have to actually get off your ass and learn to mix real drums. Boo hoo. Anyways, instead of employing any complicated mixing, gating, routing, whatever {which i can do! }, i instead program my drums and isolate the overhead track. Doesn't matter if it's the left or right or center mic, since it'll all be in mono anyways. I turn this single track to mono and do all my mixing there. Imagine now the first time you recorded acoustic drums for a metal project on your low quality mic. You might remember that every single hit clipped the mic, and most importantly, since you had to position your mic as far away from the drums as possible, you could hear a cathedral's worth of reverb. I've always remembered this awful sound, since it's really the height of 'necro-sound'. So, using a
convolution reverb, i usually load in the impulse response of a basement or garage initially, and adjust the wet and dry to taste, usually reducing the dry slightly and increasing the wet signal. I use fl studio, so i use fruity convolver, but i'd recommend convology xt for that. Then, i load in a hard clipping distortion plugin and adjust that to taste, depending on how raw i want it. I don't want a power electronics album, so i keep it light. Then, i load up an eq and constrict the frequency response towards the low and high mids. Again, this all depends on how raw i want it. Another method i sometimes use is loading nadir or boogex and loading an old school "boom box" ir to get the organic frequency response of that and apply it to the drums. Then comes the 'digital effects' chain, or what i imagine some incompetent black metal musician might do to compensate for their absolutely terrible drum sound. Being an fl studio supremacist, i typically use soundgoodizer on preset a after a brickwall compressor, and lately i've been beefing up the sound even more and using ott (most of you probably don't know that plugin, it's more popular with commercial electronic music producers than metalheads, but it's an incredible plugin for making blown out drums). If i'm feeling merciful, i'll roll off the high-mids, which
can really be ear piercing with this kind of mixer patch. Then i'll run everything into a nice digital reverb device ir (fruity convolver has some good ones, but if you want some real nice stuff
you can also get a free pack of 480l, which is suitably digital and artificial, despite being so coveted by mixing "engineers" https: //www. Housecallfm. Com/download-gns-personal-lexicon-480l). another emulation ive been using is the alessis microverb vst which you can find online for free, its quite shitty looking and 32 bit and thus is amazing and probably what some black metal guy used in his four track at some point. I usually program drums for a bit, then mix, then program the rest of the drums. Weird, but it works. I use absolutely no quantization unless i want to insert a triplet fill, and insert every note in a pattern by hand. This is ridiculously tedious, and when you add in fills and subtle variations, you get too much work! But it's work that i'm willing to do. I use to lay down the drums in a single continuous pattern, but now i cut things up into more digestible pieces. This has reduced the time i spend programming drums from around 2 hours per song to half an hour. Your ability to program interesting drums has a lot to do with how well you can actually play drums. Luckily, i can actually play drums pretty well. Anyways, that's about the sum of it.

For guitar, i'm not as meticulous. The work comes less in mixing and more in recording. Since i'm not very good at guitar, my riffs are usually a patchwork of crossfaded takes, though by the time
i get to recording the right ear, i usually can play through the riff in one take. Then, to make things less repetitive, i alternate the takes between ears. The style that i'm going for changes
how i record the guitar in the first place. For melodious vothana-worship, i usually have around 4 harmonic layers (bass, tenor, alto, soprano) in 8 tracks (one track for each ear). I play this style with no effects, pure di. This is so i can hear the harmonic layers as clearly as possible and focus on creating an enthralling composition without effects (since, theoretically, effects will just enhance the piece). The amp i use is the cypress tt-15 with the cab off. (i'd love to use the orange amp for something doomy, but unfortunately the sound of the tt-15 is associated with a project i want to keep anonymous, so i'm afraid of the tone being too similar. ) i got a nice blackstar cab from a shady wordpress site that no longer exists. It's real good. i also have a ton of other cabs, usually practice combo amp IR's. Too bad you can't find them anymore muahaha! Anyways, after i've recorded everything, i usually select everything and crossfade everything slightly to just add to the realism and eliminate any garish cuts. a lot of times i'll add an impulse response of an old mic in another nadIR instance,