Ken South Rock Deconstructed

SpeakerSonic

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.