New Monday #95
Happy Monday -
¡Hola!
Start here:
Lo-fi blues with a 50s rockabilly thing going on, a big dose of psychedelia, maybe with a touch of Tom Waits in there, too. Noisy, snarly recordings with fuzzstache slide guitars.
Guadalupe started as a duo from Úbeda, Spain. They augment with other musicians, the occasional cross-dressing Flamenco dancer. They’ve put out seven albums, all titled Guadalupe Plata. The name translates roughly to Virgin Mary of Silver. Feel free to correct me. The earlier albums are raw, psychobilly fun. Probably because they recorded them in two or three days by themselves in a house somewhere. The later records are more polished recordings, done in studios with engineers, but there’s something lost I think.
Baby Me Vuelves Loco - over the top vocals, a trombone, lava-like guitar parts.
El Boogie De La Muerte - features some very cool roomy drum sounds with interesting phase issues.
Later recordings are cleaner, more traditionally panned and mixed. Still, loaded with tape echo and spring reverb.
They bring their musical aesthetic into their videos as well. Watch this low-budget delight!
SO... getting sounds like this. Again, tape delay and spring reverb.
Slapback Delay
Slapback delay, like on the guitar, is a loud delay with low regeneration, so you hear about 1 slap. The delay time is from 30 to 100 ms. This delay time would depend on the speed of the machine, the distance between the record and playback head, etc. At 30 ms our ear is just about able to discern the delay as not part of the dry sound. As you increase delay time the slap becomes its own clear thing. Feel free to pan the direct and the delay away from each other, although, with higher delay settings this might be really distracting.
Also, once you get above 100 ms the delay is long and clear enough that it will start registering as rhymically related to the music, depending on the tempo. You might or might not want things synced to the tempo of the track. I, for one, usually like delays to be slightly off from the tempo, so I set them mainly by ear.
We have a tape delay plug-in, the Echoleffe Tape Delay.
Grind
Guadalupe Plata records sound lo-fi and vintage because they’re really distorted. Even clean parts have a saturated haze on them.
The best way to get this sound is to overload some analog equipment. In the box, saturation plug-ins are the way to do that, or a tape emulator. Our Chocolate Milk emulates tape but mainly low-end saturation characteristics. For more snarl and distortion, again, our Echoleffe does that.
Drums like that
You can get a lot of great lo-fi drum sounds by using a single mic in front of and slightly above the kit. Squash this or stick it through a Level-Loc to add even more distortion and break up.
In the old days, when I was recording punk bands to eight-track tape at a high school, one drum mic was a dangerous proposition. After overdubbing you might find you lost the kick or captured too much high end and the final mixes kinda sucked.
If you’re gonna do the one mic thing, do two. Put one mic low and definitely get the kick on it. So, maybe five feet from the kit, about two feet off the ground and pointing at the snare. Stick another mic above the kit so it grabs cymbals, pointed at the snare. Before you track this, listen to the two mics and check for phase issues. Mute one and listen. Unmute both and listen. If it sounds radically different, like the middle is scooped out or the low-end goes away, you’ve got a phase issue. Move one of the microphones. Repeat until the issue goes away or it sounds worse and you like it.
You’ve now got your drums kind of split by frequency — you have a “low” mic and a “high” mic. This gives you a surprising amount of flexibility in the mix.
We do have one plug-in that is designed to get this exact sort of sound, our Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is a saturator, and has a delay as well as a small-ish sounding room. Works great for this kind of thing. It's also good to simply make anything sound less boring. First ten people that write me and say, "Luke, I want a Pumpkin Spice Latte,” I’ll send you a coupon for beaucoup off. Truly.
Audio 101
This week, it all gets put together into how a passive EQ works, and why the Pultec Low-End Trick is a thing.
It takes the electronics and extends it into how plug-ins are made. I’ll be writing more on that soon, but for now, the way a plug-in is constructed has a huge impact on its sound quality. You’ll find out why in this post.
Audio 101 - From Passive Components to a Passive EQ to a Plug-in.
Who’s been reading? Any comments or feedback, positive or negative? It’s all welcome. And any topics you’d like covered? Reply and let me know.
That is all from the frozen north. Back to work! Have a great week. Stay warm or cool, depending on your wants and needs.
Warm regards always,
Luke