Buy two get one free - here's an idea

[onelife]

I've been playing guitar in a trio with the same bass player and drummer for seven or eight years and we are pretty tight - especially after all the gigs we played this summer. When it comes to recording we like to do it "live off the floor" to capture the essence of what we can do live.

 

We are recording some original ideas with the idea of overdubbing in an effort to develop the songs so we setup with an MBox and our live Yamaha mixer. The MBox is essentially a two channel interface (not using the S/PDIF) but we still wanted to keep everything separate.

 

I set up a kick and overhead for the drums and panned them hard left. The bass and guitar went direct with the bass hard right and the guitar down the middle. We used headphones from an aux send on the board for monitors. After tweaking the drum balance a bit we recorded some beds to two tracks.

 

On playback I panned the two tracks hard left an hard right. By flipping the phase on one track I was able to eliminate the guitar then bus the two tracks in stereo to two more tracks and record isolated drums and bass.

 

By playing the bass track out of phase with the original track that has bass and guitar on it I could eliminate the bass and bus the result to yet another track that ended up with just the guitar on it.

 

Then we were ready to do overdubs while having the drums, bass and guitar on their own separate tracks for re-amping and/or mixing. We were able to capture that live feel for the original recording.

 

As an added bonus, having the drums on their own track and panning them hard to one side gave me a few ideas. Using and pushing the IK Multimedia Vintage Compressor 370 along with some hard panning we were able to get some interesting "White Album" textures. I always liked the sound of that album even with it's whacky stereo. At the time it came out it was the heaviest thing I had ever heard on record.

[Ernest Buckley]

Can we hear some of it?