Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Ken South Rock Deconstructed


I saw Ken South Rock for the first time at Shea Stadium in Brooklyn, NY in 2013 with my wife. Adam and Ken have become fast friends of ours through helping us with the move of the Trident console. They've busted down walls, put in windows and rebuilt the walls they tore down, and helped dismantled the console. 

They had recorded in Nashville for their first album, Volcano. They recorded their most recent EP, Break the Walls, at pricey studio in Brooklyn. They are a ferocious rock duo. Two incredible talents hammering away at their instruments with surgical precision masked by their wild style delivery and explosive energy. The recordings translate the talent, but not their wily performance. Everything sounds very controlled and clean, trained even. IMO, too clean.

KSR Live at Lonewolf Nov. 19th, 2013
I wrote Adam on a whim, telling him I wanted to work with he and Ken. By this time, I'd seen them play a half dozen times and have become a big fan. I told Adam I wanted to hear on a recording what I hear at their live shows. Just my luck, they were already talking about working with me on a project for a new song. One song for a new music video to be directed by Julie Lamendola and Preston Spurlock. We had two days to record and mix the thing. 

I set out to capture a very raw and lively sound. I tuned the drums up for Adams arrival and he and Ken set up in the space for the session. They wanted to start with Drums and Bass so that Ken could later add his guitar parts, as they were still writing the song during the recording process. I focused on a really well miked up drum kit and I split the Bass three ways so I could make sure I had options on mixdown. 2 mics on the cabinet and one Direct signal. The drums were a four piece kit, hats, and three cymbals. I chose my 1962 Ludwig 6 lug snare for its wonderful depth and woody tone. Adam hit it and said, "Ah yeah. That is exactly what I want My snare to sound like!." I spent a good part of 3 hours dialing in the drums. I used multiple mics on the snare, 3 in fact (vintage 55s, SM57 top and bottom), for as full a sound as possible. I also used two mics on each tom to capture the attack and the release on the other end. Full, Big, Powerful, like Adams playing. 

They made probably 7 takes before they felt like they got it. We listened to the chosen take a few times to make sure it was all there. Once we were certain, we changed gears and set up Ken's guitar rig. We split the signal to two amps. Ken's Marshall Super Lead into my 4x12 Marshall Lead 1960 cabinet, and then to the Fender Hot Rod. Both amps offer completely different tonal characteristics. The crunch from the Marshall and the classic Fender sound combined to translate a warm and rich guitar tone. I put 2 mics on each cabinet. I find that the Marshall cabinet has a lot of nice qualities from speaker to speaker, so I used the traditional SM57 off center cone for one speaker, and a Sennheiser MD421 to capture the more guttural bass tones. On the Fender, I used the same concept only with one speaker. I put a Sennheiser e609 for the brighter side and another MD421 for the girth. Sweet blend. About 6 feet back I put a U87 to capture the blended sound of both cabinets. A temporary blanket wall behind the U87 helped this to sound nice and tight. Then high over head about 12 feet from the sound source I have another room mic that captures the amps in the room. This adds a real nice aura to the sound. 


Ken killed the guitar track. With some input from Adam, they basically wrote half of the guitar parts while tracking. Adam had mentioned double tracking the guitar, but Ken and I felt pretty good about the tone of the single take. It's also more in tune with their live sound and I didn't want to muddle up the mix. We then tracked a very clean acoustic track for the intro and outro of the song. Ken's acoustic has a very interesting quality. Brassy strings and a nice low resonance from the body. I put a U87 at the twelfth fret facing in towards the sound hole and then a C414 flat 3 inches from the body of the guitar. Both were inserted with LA3A's and the sound was bliss.
Two Amps One Sound

We spent the next day tracking the vocals and mixing the song. It was new to see Adam squirm and get nervous about singing. Not uncommon for any singer, but I had never seen Adam squirm. Ken and Adam both sang well and we dialed in some ideas back and forth between the 3 of us. Ken and Adam both have unique voices and I think we represent their aggressive live delivery well on this song. 

The mix came together rather quickly. I didn't use a single compressor on any of the live tracking of the drums, bass or electric guitars. I wanted all that dynamic and nuance to be raw and true to their sound. While mixing, I set up a parallel bus compressor for the drums. On my first drum bus I set up a stereo 1176 to pump the drums a bit without taking much in the way of dynamics. On the second drum bus, the paralleled bus, I added a much heavier compressor setting with lots of pumping and more on the squashed side. I only use a small amount of this to fill out the sound. It gives significant ambience to the overall track. I did very little in terms of EQ. The drums already sounded great, why would I change that? I wouldn't!

The guitars I sent to a bus and added a pinch of a plate reverb. I also EQ'd the bus a bit, adding in a fuller low frequency. Once I squashed the room mic and added it to the guitar mix, it added so much character. We all lit up when we heard the final guitar mix. It is so full and huge! The bass sound was also right on the money in the recording, so I found a nice even smoldering tone from just using more of one signal than the rest and that was it.


Its Ken South Rock! You'll hear the whole thing when it becomes available online. They're hard at work on the video as I write this. They'll be on tour for the next few months beginning in February. Catch them live whenever you can. They're playing tomorrow, January 29th, with a great line up at The Mercury Lounge.



Friday, January 17, 2014

Jagged Leaves & Dashan Coram's 'Piep'


We're at the end of the road with the Jagged Leaves EP. The evolution of the Daniel Penta sound has been in the widest of variety. He is a lifelong singer/songwriter, the kind who explores himself in many different styles and genres from band name to band name, from year to year, from moment to moment. The singular thru line for Dan is his incredible lyric and deliberate vocal delivery. 

Jagged Leaves is an exploration in a more stripped down musical form. There are no roaring electric guitars or overdrive on this collection of songs, other than the mans voice. Jagged Leaves is a progressive and musically stylistic drummer, a melodic double bass player, the heavy down stroke of Dan's acoustic guitar along with Dan's brute force vocal, Erin Regan's stunning femme fatale vocal and a sugary trumpet line. There are bits and pieces of other instrumentation, very minimal, but also very attractive to the acoustical aesthetic of the material.

On the final day of recording and mixing, we added the last instrument of sorts. Dan wanted an oscillator,  a single note attenuator that wiggles up and down the sound scale. We had tried to acquire one from a few different friends with very little luck. The sound in ones head is often very clear and precise, and trying to pin it down can be difficult without the right tool. 

I had remembered our very good friend, Dashan Coram, using one in the later years of Huggabroomstik. I remember it being a very simple and small handheld box with a single dial on it. Dashan passed away just a few short years ago, and his memory is not without it's emotional experiences. When I mentioned this to Dan, we both agreed we needed
something like that, or even that very one. I contacted Dashan's brother Awan, aka Spider $tyle, and asked him if he could help out by locating it for me. I sent him a few pictures of what it might look like and he sent me back  a couple of snaps and the piece was there, smiling right at me.

As soon as we plugged it in, Dan said, "Well, that's it." He took a few passes with the song, and in a quick easy short couple of bursts, it was finished. 

The Micro-Piep 555 as it's labeled. I've never seen one like it, and can't find out any information about it on the internet. I showed it to some friends the night Awan handed it to me and they were like, "Oh wow, The Piep!" This little box has been around. It went on tours with Huggabroomstik through Germany and France and who knows where else. It's had a life of its own and now here it is in the light of day again. The 'Piep' a great little piece and I just wanted to share it with you, as Dan and I really got a great bit of sound and emotion out of it. 

The Jagged Leaves EP will most likely be out later this year.