SnowGhost Music

The session with Get Him Eat Him was ambitious from the go. They had the 4th of July off during their extensive US tour and chose to spend the night with us. To get to Calgary for a show the next day, we had to record through the night after a bit of celebrating with some BBQ, beer, and fireworks. Songwriter Matt Lemay had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to accomplish: One song, fairly produced, called "Utility". As I was setting up I had them run through the song a few times to get an idea of the sound they were going for. I was impressed with how well-rehearsed they were; this tune was obviously Road-tested.

We made four passes of the song to get the headphone mix right and for the band to get comfortable. They nailed it on the fourth take and asked me what I thought. I told them that it sounded like a band recording a track in the middle of the night, feeling the deadline; It was this kind of nervous energy that drove so many classic recordings, and I knew that we had a keeper. After getting the rhythm track down, the band came into the control room for a listen and decided that we could move on to some guitar overdubs.

Jason and Kevin came in to lay down the fixings with some great electric guitar parts, Kevin with a variation of the rhythm guitar part, and Jason with two tracks of noisy guitar-screams. It was refreshing to see that a band with three guitar players, an often precarious situation, could find their individual voices without shredding all over each others' parts.

Now it was time to put the finishing touches on the song with Matt's vocals. With some warm-up runs we decided that the best way to get through the whole take was to go line by line. After we perfected each line we ran a double track to fatten up the chorus at the end of the song. Finally we threw in some good yells from the rest of the band.

By the end of the recording process at 8am, the band had to get on the road and I took a long nap on the couch. When I awoke I had a vivid memory of the session, but was a bit confused whether it was a dream or if it was real. I can say that it was one of the more spontaneous sessions I have been involved with, meeting the band, celebrating a holiday, recording, and saying farewell, all in the same day.

With such a short amount of time and being the only engineer on staff that night, I knew that we had to be efficient. This meant going with the tried and true mic choices, and sticking to the SSL console for all of the mic amps, EQs, and compressors. The idea was to do a live rhythm section pass made up of drums, bass, and two guitar tracks. Matt, Joe, and Jeff wanted to play in the same room, so we put the Ampeg B-15 bass amp and the Carr 6V6 guitar amp in separate rooms for isolation. We put the band in Studio A with the drums. Joe really liked our bass amp, as it was the same one used by many of the studios back in the 70s. All three guitar players liked the Carr because of its big 15" speaker. It´s also good for a chunky low-end guitar sound, but it still gets a mean lead sound. They were really impressed with it's versatility, and for time's sake, it simplified things for me.

I put an Electro-Voice RE-20 on the bass cab, post Radial DI, so I had two signals to blend together. The clean DI provided the low end rumble and high end brilliance to the bass, and the Ampeg and RE-20 gave me the mid-range cream lacking on so many modern bass tracks.

On the guitar amp I went with a combination of three mics, thus allowing me to change the tone on the fly, aiding in differentiating the three players. I placed a SM57, 421, and a Neumann U87 in-line toward from the perimeter to the cone of the speaker. Bussing them all together on to a single track allowed me to change the blend as needed.

Jeff decided to use our DW kit for this session as opposed to bringing his out for the night. Again, to keep it simple we used solid-state mics. The Neumann TLM-170s as spaced-overheads sounded brilliant and shimmery, complimenting the standard rock selection of Sennheiser 421s on the toms, AKG D112 inside the open kick, and SM57 on the snare. The result was a trashy sound, as Jeff's hard-hitting style agreed with the mic choices, and SSL compression/E series EQ combination.

Aside from putting some reverb and delay on guitars and drums to space things out, the mixing was fairly simple because we got such a charged-up performance from the band. Most of the time spent mixing was on the vocals, placing them in the same gritty space as the rest of the band. With the use of a tube distortion pedal and a Drawmer 501 gate, we got a very broken-down sound from a normally crystal clear U87 on Matt's vocals (sometimes I love destroying good sounds).

On the stereo buss out I inserted the SSL quad-compressor with a fast attack and release to make the thing pump. A slight cut in the low-mid range and boost in the presence range using the Manley Massive-Passive gave the song an even more aggressive edge.