I've had the pleasure to record, mix and master Vindicator's first release since signing with Heavy Artillery Records.

Visit them at www.myspace.com/savindicator

I put this little article together for your viewing pleasure. Please enjoy and leave comments.

Scratch guitar tracks

Vic had already completed many of the scratch guitar tracks on his own time, hey the less work I have to do, the better! We spent about 8 hours on the rest of the scratch tracks that he didn't have done. These ones had tempo changes but were relatively straight forward.

I recorded scratch tracks for this project through a Behringer V-Amp. There's really no sense in firing up an amp for scratch tracks in my opinion.

Drum tracking for this project was a little more tedious than the previous project I worked with Jesse on (Outbreak of Metal Vol. 1). He wasn't 100% comfortable with these new songs but he got through it like a champ.

The kit is my Gretsch Catalina Birch. Heads are: Aquarian Super Kick II on the kick, Evans G1 Coated on the toms and a Remo Ambassador coated on the snare. I ended up triggering the Kick & Toms with Steven Slate Samples in the end but the real snare made it on the album.

Cymbals are: Zildjian A Series 14" Hi-Hats (a bit loud), Zildjian Z Custom 20" Ride, Wuhan 16", 18" Crashes, Unnamed 8", 10" splashes, Wuhan 18" China.

For those who don't know, you will almost always see me using an ORTF overhead configuration. The resulting stereo image is much wider than an XY pattern and sounds much more realistic than most spaced pair setups I've heard. It's mono-compatible, quick and easy to setup and a complete moron couldn't mess it up.

Wuhan crashes are the last thing I'd like to be recording with. Unfortunately, no ones paying me for new cymbals. They make fine jamming and gigging cymbals, for the price you can't beat them but for recording, yuck. I suppose since this is thrash metal, the tinny trash can lid grit of these crashes is well within the acceptable range for this project.

I decided to just drumagog -> midi the kick and tom tracks from the triggers. That made editing and quantizing those tracks as simple as possible. Some manual quantizing of the snare was necessary in some places which also means editing the overhead tracks to match up (most of the time).

Overall I am 90% satisfied with the way the drums turned out on this album. It was my first time really getting the ride and hi hats loud and up front in the mix, the snare is real and is gated by the trigger, the toms are clearly fake (but thats ok) and there is no definition of what a metal kick drum sounds like so as long as it's clacky you're golden.

Tracking rhythm guitar with Vic was very detail orientated. We spent a lot of time making sure the takes were as solid as possible and a bit of copy and paste was used, respectively. Actually it seems like I use copy and paste a lot regardless, there's not much sense in re doing a chorus or verse part that repeats over unless you want some kind of different feel.

We ran through the Behringer V-Amp for monitoring during tracking and I grabbed a direct out of the guitar for re-amping later on in the project.

This was my first time working with Kidd Chaos since he joined the band. I was not sure what to expect but turns out he's a solid bass player. He had been rehearsing some of the tracks with the band so some of them were more familiar than others and he had to work some out in the studio. We were having a little trouble with "power bends" as in just out of habit, Kidd would bend the string out of tune. We got that issue resolved with some advice and a little auto tune on the bass track and all turned out well. I just went direct with the bass, nothing fancy.

Mikey B Lial came in to record leads for this project. He is a very affluent guitarist, like a melting pot of many great shredders plus his own originality that stands out from the crowd. He never heard these tracks before doing the solo's for them, just like on Outbreak of Metal Vol. 1. It is impressive and it turned out well. We spent about x hours doing the solo's. He used his pedal board and Laney amp but I made sure to grab a direct out from the guitar which I ended up re-amping later. There is a little video at the bottom of the page from the guitar solo day.

Tool Tip: We were getting a ton noise from his amp and I blatantly assumed it was from all the pedals and perhaps a microphonic tube...well, it turns out I had the ground lift switched on my direct box. Whoops, caught that at the last solo. Turns out his setup isn't that noisy.

Marshall Law came in and knocked out the vocal tracks. Some of the lyrics were written by Vic, Jesse wrote a song and Marshall wrote the rest. When tracking vocals with Vindicator, Marshall takes a lot of direction from Vic on the vocal rhythm and relies heavily on what the rest of the band and I had to say in the control room.

Aside from the lead vocal tracks, this album features numerous back ups from Vic, a verse in "Raze the Dead" by Jesse, backups by Kidd in "Fear Monger" and gang vocals in numerous tracks.

Fact: Jesse wrote the lyrics for "Raze the Dead". While he was scratch tracking the vocals it sounded so good that we ended up keeping Jesse's scratch track on the second verse of the song.

You really have to make time to play some Nerf football in the parking lot while recording.

Vic brought his Mesa 50 cal and Laboga Mr. Hector for guitar re-amping. I instantly ruled out the Mesa 50 cal because it had some issues so we got the Laboga out. I found this to be a extremely true and clear sounding amp and went ahead with reamping. I was under a bit of pressure to get the reamping done that tracking day because this project was on a tight deadline. Unfortunately my ears do not work the best under pressure and I find dialing in guitar tone to be a delicate procedure I need to do on my own time. I went through with the re-amping on the Laboga and it sounded *ok* but ultimately the tone was off. I had to do it again a day later, this time with one of the amps at my shop.

Here is the amp that made it on the album. Yes, a "Line Sux" on the "orange insane channel". I managed to get a better sound out of this than I was anticipating. The settings my ears decided on are completely awful on paper...Bass at Noon, Mids at 0, Treble at 0, Presence at 10. Not only is that crazy enough but in final mixing I took the upper midrange (1000hz 0.7q) down another 3dB with a high pass (12db/octave) at 150hz AND a high frequency boost. Yikes just kill me now! This goes against my beliefs but it worked damn well!

The mic on the left is a Shure SM57 and the mic on the right is a Behringer XM8500. If you don't believe me that the XM8500 stacks up with the big boys on a guitar amp you've got to try one. It's a $20 microphone that often sounds smoother than a 57. In this case I blended both of these mics together.

Mixing was fun. I also "mastered" this album. I'll post more details later.