STANTON'S GRAVE

Finally, updates!

stantonsgrave — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:12:51 +0000

Alright, so I’ve kinda gotten extremely lazy updating this thing, but I have a few posts already written about the Slugbait recording so I’m gonna go ahead and start uploading those over the next few days (I was actually just waiting to get sample clips ready for each stage of the process).
Anyway, yeah, shit’s gonna start flowing again here soon, so if at any point over this weekend you’ve got fuck-all else to concern yourself with, sure have a read…

p.s. I should probably say here too that this EP will actually hopefully come out sometime soon.

p.p.s. Also, if you see this before Paddy’s day, go see Hope is Noise and Them Martyrs in Bradley’s on Barrack Street in Cork (also playing are Bisect and This Place is Death). It should be great!

Recording Slugbait: Day 2 – Double bass.

stantonsgrave — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:01:48 +0000

So, about a week after the first drum & bass session, Costello got in touch with me asking if he could come out to add a bit more to the basslines he’d already laid down. Of course I said yes – he’d mentioned a few ideas the previous week and I was curious as to how they’d sound.
First of all he wanted to double track the bassline on each song, which is something I had never done before, but I could understand the need for it in this case: since Seb is normally playing lead lines all over the place, it couldn’t hurt to add some extra weight to the rhythm section (as long as I could avoid any phase problems that might crop up).
The second, and more important thing he wanted to do was to add some harmonies to the bass at the end of FDR, during the part where the guitar is pretty much fading out and all 3 vocalists are screaming away to their hearts’ content. This all sounded good to me
On the day in question, he couldn’t get his hands on his own bass, so he had to borrow one (I’m pretty sure it was Mini’s), which had some pretty old strings on it. This had me worried for a moment, but once we started tracking it I figured I could actually use that sound to our advantage – Costello has a deep-seated hatred of high frequencies in his bass sound anyway, so blending the cleaner bass tracks from the previous day with the dirty sound we were getting now actually worked out OK. Especially after we added just the tiniest amount of distortion (I don’t like to use too much on bass, otherwise it gets messy in a hurry).
And so we got to work running through the songs. The double tracking was done in fairly short order, then it was time to get to grips with the harmonies on FDR. It was pretty much a case of sit back and let him play through it a few times – he already had some ideas worked out anyway which sounded great alongside the main bassline, then just for good measure he threw down a couple more little flourishes. In the end we had what was basically a big bass chord and it sounded great! Have a listen:

Download: FDR%20day%202%20-%20bass%20harmonies.mp3

After that it was time for pizza and beer \m/

Recording Slugbait: Day 1 – drums & bass

stantonsgrave — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 07:43:18 +0000

As mentioned in a previous post, I spent a good bit of Summer & Autumn 2011 working with Slugbait for their debut release. They wanted to get 3 tracks done for a split with another band, and I was only too happy to get the chance to work with them a) cos they’re all sound and b) to get some experience working with other people besides spending all my time on my own projects.
Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos during the sessions, so get ready for a big wall of text, or maybe I’ll throw in some live photos of the lads in action just to break things up…here’s one:

The adventure began in June once we could all finally get our schedules organised (we’d been discussing it since february). We figured the best way to start was to get the drums and bass down first so that the guitars and vocals had a solid foundation to build on. Also, we had to get the bass out of the way first since Costello (the bassist) intended to spend the summer abroad.
The night before the first session, Eoin (SG drummer, here taking on the role of assistant engineer) and myself had set up the kit and mics in the corner of the garage so that the lads wouldn’t have to sit through a couple of hours of sound checking. We used a similar set up to the one used when we recorded Eoin’s drums for the Stanton’s Grave stuff the previous year – i.e. close mic’ed all the drums (top and bottom for snare) and a spaced pair for overheads. For the toms, we used the Eagle tom mics, for the snare we had my trusty Beyer m201 on top and another Eagle tom mic on the bottom. The kick was the Eagle kick mic, and the overheads were the Eagle electret condensers (funnily enough, marketed as overhead mics…).
Next day the sun was out and the midges were ravenous. Louis, Costello and Seb arrived out in the evening and we got to work arranging ourselves around the limited space. We pretty quickly decided to throw the big doors open a) to try get a less “cramped” sound and b) because it was fucking hot in there, especially with 5 people in such a small space. Thankfully they’d been thoughtful enough to bring a couple of six-packs to keep us cool
Once we’d checked to make sure all drum mics were working and the bass (which was being tracked using an ART tube MP as a DI through the Ampeg SVX plugin) signal was coming through, we checked out the headphone levels (so Louis could hear the bass) then we were good to go.
First up was 4 Men, No Mic. This was pretty straight forward – the lads ran through it a couple of times with no major hiccups. A handy way to loosen up.
Next was Fighting Fire With Piss (a name Seb came up with on the spot when I asked him what I should call the project file ). Again, this was pretty spot on – the guys were well practiced at this point with these 2 songs.
FDR was left until last, because it was still a pretty new song – They had even been working on lyrics in the car on the way out, and figuring out how exactly it should flow. So, after we flew through the first 2 songs, myself and Eoin took a break while the lads jammed FDR a few times just to make sure they were all on the same page. I hooked up my guitar amp so that Seb could go join in and left them at it for a while. I also decided to leave all the mics running, just in case they nailed it while I was out of the room
After they’d gone through the song 3 or 4 times they felt ready enough to take a stab at it, so we got back to work. Since the song was now fresh in their heads, we only needed to do a few passes before deciding we had a take worth keeping. There were a couple of transitions that were announced by some quick stabs (called the “stabby bit” naturally) that we decided to try a few more times. The main reason was to try some variations in the drums to see what sounded better – all kick, a mixture of kick and snare, etc. Once we’d decided what sounded best, we just pasted the new part into the song (sacrilege! ).
And that was it for day 1. Before the lads hit the road, we cracked open a final beer for the road (except for poor Louis, the driver) \m/
And here’s a clip of what we had gotten by the end of day 1:

Download: FDR%20day%201%20-%20drums%20%26%201%20bass.mp3

STANTON’S GRAVE Protests the Protect IP Act

stantonsgrave — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:56:46 +0000

I’m just putting this up because the wordpress blackout doesn’t seem to be working properly for me…
Many websites are blacked out today to protest proposed U.S. legislation that threatens internet freedom: the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). From personal blogs to giants like WordPress and Wikipedia, sites all over the web — including this one — are asking you to help stop this dangerous legislation from being passed, even if you live outside of the US.

Back to work (again)

stantonsgrave — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 13:59:28 +0000

Jesus, first post since July! Fucking hell, how lazy am I… In fact this is the first post of any real significance since April!
So, what the hell have I been up to for the past 8 months you may ask… good question…
Well, during the summer I actually put our own recording to one side while I recorded a few tracks with our good pals Slugbait. They wanted to get three songs down to go on a split release with another band, so I was happy to oblige. It ended up taking all summer what with conflicting work schedules and all the usual crap that gets in the way of making music, but by October I had three mixes that the lads were happy with – one of which can be heard on their bandcamp.
In the meantime, the band they were meant to release the split with pulled out (possibly because I took so damn long to mix it ), so they were now looking for someone else to do the other side – did I mention this is being released on cassette? No? Well, it is. And I can now reveal that the other side of that tape will be taken over by none other than Stanton’s Grave! “Huzzah!” I hear you shout…
Of course this meant pulling the finger out and getting our own damn recordings finished! We decided that since the ‘Bait were doing 3 songs, we’d do likewise, although our 3 songs will be considerably shorter…
Guess what songs we decided to use? That’s right – the very three for which we had already completed the drum tracks! Why? Cos I’m fucking lazy, that’s why! Although this did mean I had to do some pretty heavy editing on Shut Up… because the recorded version is just too damn fast – we’re pretty much all having trouble laying down our tracks for it (I’m sure Dave will buck that trend)…
Anyway, once I’d managed that, we were able to start getting everyone else’s tracks down. I figured I’d already done OK on A New Hope last spring, so first I tackled the guitars for TV Zombie to get it more in line with how it’s done live now (i.e. me not playing during the first or second verse), then I went to lay down some new guitars for Shut Up…
It was at this point that I decided to play around with some different mics and tones, so I recorded my tracks via DI: this way I could reamp the guitars and fuck around with the mics and amp settings while the tracks were playing (while wearing ear protection obviously!). After a couple of days I figured I’d gotten something worth using so I moved on to vocals.
Well, I was already happy with the vox I’d done for TV Zombie last year, and for A New Hope back in April, so really I just needed to do Shut Up And Eat Your Freedom. This was probably the only part of that song where we didn’t have much difficulty
So finally, all my tracks were done (or so I figured at the time – more on that later). I was time to call in the rest of the lads. Dan went first – he came down one Saturday night and we got things wrapped up in just a few hours. As with Eoin and myself, Shut Up… took the longest – about 10 takes (or more) over 2 hours! This is partly because, as I’ve said, the version we’ve got on record is a lot faster than we normally play it (we laid the drums over the old demo version as opposed to playing a completely new version – bad call on my part I guess…), but it could also have been because of some possibly screwy edits when I pasted the drum tracks together. Either way, we got there in the end. After that, A New Hope and TV Zombie were a snap – two takes each, about 20 minutes altogether
Since then, I’ve been waiting for Dave to get a chance to come out here, but as with the Slugbait recording, work life keeps throwing spanners in the works. Hopefully sometime over the christmas break he can make it out here to lay down his guitars, then we’ll hopefully all get together to throw down some backing vocals of some sort. That’s the plan anyway…
While I’ve been waiting, I’ve started working on some basic rough mixes with the parts that I’ve got, and I decided I didn’t really like the guitar tone for A New Hope or Shut Up. It just sounds too thin or something, even with bass tracks in there to beef up the sound. I know I gotta leave space for Senior’s guitars (which will probably be massive ), but I don’t want to be down on record as having a weedy guitar tone. Which is why, last night and this morning (10 Dec 2011) I decided to go back and do it again! I’m much happier with the results I’ve gotten now. I also decided to beef up the heavy outro on TV Zombie just for the craic, since I haven’t used my Danelectro Fab Tone in years!
Anyway, that’s the story so far. I realise this post has been fairly light on the technical detail, but I wanted to let y’all know what’s going on in the world of SG first – in the next few posts I’ll get into the details of how most of the above mentioned work was accomplished.
Hopefully it’ll be sooner than 6 months…
Ta ta for now…

Drum tracking woes…

stantonsgrave — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:59:12 +0000

Right, this is just a quick one, to let you know we’re still at it…
Last weekend we decided to have another go at some drum tracking. It should have been pretty simple, but we were using my new shells which I hadn’t actually test driven yet, so this was to be their first outing on a recording session. Things didn’t go very well…
It started like a normal session – Eoin came up, set up the kit around himself as usual, and I threw up the usual array of microphones. Then I had him play around the kit for a while so I could set the incoming levels. So far so good. Then we took a quick sample recording to hear what the mics were picking up, and also because I was testing out a couple of different kick mic options. And that’s where the trouble started…
Unfortunately I had made the decision to take the resonant (i.e. front) head off the kick drum, because it wasn’t a proper resonant skin, just a thin crappy plastic sheet with the manufacturer’s name on it and no hole to put a mic through. Now, I’m sure I could have put a mic in front of it and gotten something, but I tend to prefer the sound I get from inside the drum, so off came the head. Trouble is, what I didn’t realise (because this was my first time recording a kick with no reso head) was that the sound of the rest of the kit would bleed in through the front of the kick drum, so the kick mic ended up picking up more level from the snare than from the kick itself (have I mentioned before how insanely loud Eoin’s snare is?)! Which made it impossible to isolate the kick drum hits no matter how much I tried to gate the signal.
First I thought it might have been the mic we were using, but after trying 3 different ones and getting the same results it was obvious that that wasn’t it. Then we threw a thick blanket over the front of the drum hoping to keep the bleed from the other drums down a bit. Still no joy.
At this point it was approaching midnight and we were feeling pretty much defeated, so we called it quits. Looks like I’m gonna have to get a reso head for that drum and hope that keeps the bleed to a minimum, and also causes the actual kick hits to reverberate around inside the drum a bit more giving a hotter signal for the mic…
Cool story, huh?

EDIT 27-07-2011: well, last night I tried a couple of things.
First, I messed around a bit with the sample recordings we’d done the other night to see if they could be made usable, and while the usual mangling that I like to do to kick signals gave a horrible snare sound as a consequence, once this was mixed in with the actual snare mic, the overheads and the room mics, it wasn’t particularly noticeable. So it would be possible to work something out recording this way.
However, the second thing I tried was to put a front skin on the drum (which first involved cutting a hole in it big enough to get the mic through). This made a huge difference to the balance between the kick and the rest of the kit that was being picked up, so I think I’m gonna have to go get a decent reso head now (as well as a new lug – turns out one of them is severely bent, and there’s no nut for it to screw into, and presumably no spring either…)

A New Rough Mix

stantonsgrave — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:15:29 +0000

At this point I guess I should mention that since the last time I’d worked on A New Hope, I have in fact been tinkering with the drum mix to try and get more oomph (or punch, whatever…) out of them, especially the kick which seemed to be a little anaemic.
Several months ago I upgraded to Cubase 5, which came with some new plugins to play around with, one of which is a transient designer. Now, I’ve never used one of these before, so like any n00b I started with the presets. Whaddya know – there’s one called tighter kick drum, perfect! And it actually does do a pretty good job of getting more attack back into it, especially when used with some EQ and compression. So this, coupled with a newly EQ’d snare (the overheads and toms haven’t had much work done, since they sound pretty good on their own – maybe just some gating to clean things up) means the song now has a pretty damn good drum track to work with.
With the drums mixed by themselves, it was time to start pulling up some other faders. Bass and guitars managed to work themselves in fairly nicely, with some cuts around the main vocal frequencies (1 – 2kHz). Obviously I panned the main guitar tracks (the close mics) about 60% either side, and panned the room mics a little farther out, and lower in the mix, so they’re only barely perceptible.
Then I brought up the vocal faders. For the room mic, I compressed the hell out of it to get as much room sound in there as possible, so that it’d essentially act as a reverb track, provided it sounds alright – this being only a rough mix to see what I’ve got to work with I wasn’t too worried yet about sounding totally awesome
Since it was pretty damn late at this point, I figured I’d bounce the work of the night to listen to the next day (using my good ol’ car test). What I notice listening back now is that I left all the vocal tracks at about the same level, which for a final mix is certainly not going to be the case – normally I’d have a lead vocal track that the doubled vocal would sit somewhere underneath just to lend a little girth (coupled in this case with the compressed room mic, and maybe some reverb or delay just for some stereo-ness ).
But anyway, in the interest of whetting people’s appetites (or turning them off ), here’s a little snippet.

Download: a%20new%20hope%2004%20clip.mp3

Now we just gotta wait for a new bass track and even more guitars! Til next time…

A New Vocal

stantonsgrave — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:55:44 +0000

Picking up where I left off yesterday…
In between my unsuccessful attempts at making more racket with my guitar (well, I was successful in making a racket, just not any worth saving), I decided I’d also have a go at doing some more vocals, specifically on A New Hope (since TV Zombie was done recently and I’m fairly happy with how that turned out, and none of the other songs are far enough along yet to warrant adding vocals).
So I dug out my (relatively) new Beyer Soundstar MkII (aka M400 – apparently a poor man’s Shure SM7, but of course I don’t have a SM7 to compare, being a poor man ) and stuck it on a stand with my shitty pop-shield.

Then I hooked it up to my ART tube-MP and set it up for a fair bit of tube gain (yum ), set up some tracks and started firing away.
Having a few beers helped (good ol’ Tuborg ), as it usually does when I need to roar my head off in a quiet room (also, cranking the hell out of the headphone mix helps too).

Since I already had the room mics scattered around the place, I decided to take recordings from them too, for a bit of ambience (hey, if it sounds shitty, then I don’t need to use it, do I? ).
Once I’d gotten a couple of passes through the song (I like to double track), and an overdub on a few parts where my voice had broken (if you listen to the old demos, you’ll hear that happen a lot, but I never bothered fixing it before), I sat down to see how well all the work I’d done so far would gel together in a mix…

Oh, before I sign off, here’s one last EXTREME CLOSE-UP! Wooooaaaoooohhhhh…

Back to work…

stantonsgrave — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:15:23 +0000

So a few weeks ago I finally went back to work! As I keep saying, we/I’ve been kinda letting this slide for far too long now – originally when we had our first session back in June last year (!), I figured we’d be all wrapped up by September and have a release ready before the end of the year. How wrong I was…
Anyway, we were discussing it again recently and we figured the only way to get this thing done at all is to give ourselves a deadline so we’ll have something to aim for. We have yet to pick a date, but even the mention of the word deadline was enough to kick me into gear
So where to start… I decided the most important thing to get out of the way first was the new guide tracks, since I wanted to have all the drum tracks laid down before getting Dan or Senior out to do their parts. I won’t bore you too much with the details on this – basically, I programmed drum tracks in EZDrummer (following some dodgy recordings from the practice room) and recorded bass and guitars direct (using Ampeg SVX and Guitar Rig 3 plugins respectively), then put some lackluster vocals on top (I wasn’t gonna fuck up my throat just for the demos ). I reckon “Mommy’s Got a Virus” is fairly spot on, but “Dark Passenger” still needs a little tweaking because of all the tempo changes and whatnot…
…But last weekend I decided to ignore that and revisit the older songs and start putting replacing the old guitar and vocal tracks with new ones – you know, actual recording! Of course, having been inactive for such a long time, the garage was after filling up with a fair amount of clutter, so I had to spend a few hours cleaning it up to make enough room for my gear with enough space for me to rock out while I’m recording (very important, don’t y’know).

OK, it’s not perfect, but at least it’s possible to walk from one end to the other without tripping over something now
Anyway, once I’d gotten the place tidy enough, I threw a few mics on the cab and did a few test runs to see which mic I’d use for the recording session (you’d think I’d have a go-to guitar mic at this stage, but no… it’s a constant search for the best mic for the job, especially since I modded my amp recently so it doesn’t sound quite the same as it used to anymore). Now, I’m sure right here would be a great place to put a photo of my cab with 3 or 4 mics pointing at it, but naturally I forgot to take any photos of this selection process. D’oh!
Well, after listening to the results of my little shootout, I decided to go for the Sennheiser MD417 for the close-mic’ing of the cab, and I also used both my Karma Silver Bullets as room mics: one just a few feet away from the amp and the other one in the far corner (where it picked up a fair amount of bass frequencies, illustrating my need for some acoustic treatment – a project for another day…).
You can actually see the MD417 and one of the Silver Bullets in the previous pic, but here’s a close-up anyway, just for the hell of it:

Everyone likes gear pr0n, right?
Onward, to the recording session (several hours later)… Starting with “A New Hope” (cos, y’know, it’s super easy), I quickly ran through 2 tracks, including an updated intro which makes the song sound way more pop-punk – I’ll leave it up to the listener to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. After a quick EQ tweak, it was already sounding pretty good. I’m not sure if it was the guitar settings or the mic positioning, but the sound was quite treble heavy, but I’m not too worried cos I figure Senior’s Dual Rec will provide plenty of low end growl (as will the bass, obviously).
Next, I opened up the “Shut Up And Eat Your Freedom” project. I was still working on the drums on this one – it was the last song we recorded the drums for last June, and certain parts of the song kept slipping away from us, so it was recorded in several parts, with the intention of editing it all together at a later date. However, while that worked reasonably well with “TV Zombie”, by the time we’d gotten to “Shut Up…”, the drums (and therefore the mics) were after moving all over the place, so when I tried to comp the various recording together, the sound kept changing, especially in the kick drum as the mic moved further from the beater head. After spending at least an hour working on it, I tried to record a guitar track on it, but the timing kept slipping, no matter how much I tried to tighten up the tracks (well, I could have gotten them tighter, but then there’s be some obvious silent gaps in the overheads). I think as far as this song is concerned we may need to consider re-tracking the drums
Once I’d gotten tired of working on “Shut Up…”, I tweaked the settings on the amp a little and had a go at “TV Zombie”. It went reasonably well to start, but I had turned up the amp a little too much without compensating in the headphones, so when the end kicked in, my timing got away from me a little, and second time around, there were a few too many fuck-ups happening.
Frustrated as all hell, I looked at the time: 4:00 a.m. – I decided it was time for bed…

New website? Kinda…

stantonsgrave — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 12:07:49 +0000

aka fuck you myspace…

OK, so it seems I haven’t updated this blog in forever. You’d almost think that nothing has been happening… you might be right :p
As far as the recording goes, it’s still moving along at roughly the same pace (almost as fast as evolution…), although with gigs fairly thin on the ground at the moment, and the imminent arrival of yet another SG baby (i.e. another break coming up ), we should have more time to get out to my house and lay some tracks down. I’ve already got some of the guide tracks ready for the last two songs that we’ll be doing, but more on that later…
The main reason I felt I should post this, though, is because I’ve made quite a few changes to the site itself. I’m sure anyone that uses myspace as a band page will have noticed in recent times that it seems to have gone down the toilet altogether, and many people have decided to jump ship. For ourselves, we’re gonna leave the myspace page as it is, but I doubt I’ll be updating it much anymore since it’s such a fucking chore. Besides, we’re also on facebook, reverbnation, youtube, breaking tunes, and, just recently, twitter (links to which can all be found on the left there…).
In spite of all those places we can be found, I wanted a full site that I could customise myself (even though I’m a bit shit at it…) with a bit more freedom than other places.
To that end, I’ve started adding more pages to this site. Since wordpress is a blog site though, the main page is still gonna be this recording diary, with the other sections available from links along the top (and bottom) of the page. Of course, once the recording is finished, maybe I’ll just use the blog page as a news feed or something…
So far, the only page I’ve added is the Gig Listings (the Bio page has been there all along), but I’m gonna try get a Photos page too, and a Discography (when we actually have a discography worth mentioning :p) and whatever else I can think of…
I also rejigged the bar on the left there – you might notice the addition of a twitter feed (the main reason I signed up for twitter, actually) that shows the last five twitter updates.
I also changed the track listing in the player on the sidebar – track 1 is now the newest version of TV Zombie, i.e. the final mix that ended up on the Cork Rock City compilation (if you haven’t downloaded it yet, you should – download it for free now!).
I think that’s about it for now… I mean, if anyone cares, I picked up a set of monitors for the studio (behringer Truths to be precise) so hopefully that’ll improve my mixing chops. I also just ordered some components that should arrive tomorrow to tinker with my amp a little (I play a Valveking head: I intend to try out the Mesa mod and add a bias pot). There, that should keep studio & guitar nerds happy
Catch ya later