I realized I forgot to share a new release from my band Rosetta, that came out last month. It’s a quiet drone record with lots of acoustic instrumentation, not like the massive heavy stuff we usually do. Still pretty dark and long on concept, though.
The reason I thought it might be worth sharing is that, as usual, there’s a lot of connections between that record and the stuff I post here. I engineered the whole thing, recorded mostly right in my house. I also mixed it – part of it at home and part of it on tour in Europe (mixing on the road is not actually fun). Nathan Moody a.k.a. Noisejockey mastered it.
I posted a picture last summer while working on it, so you can see some of the guitar recording setup there:
Almost all of the guitar parts are Bass VI, using my stereo-mod Roland JC120, with all effects from the big pedalboard – no effects were added to the guitars in post other than a little EQ to improve mono compatibility. I leaned heavily on the stereo capabilities of my Flying Pan clone, as well as my Gilmour Electric Mistress clone. Loads of modulation everywhere. I used a mic on each speaker of the JC120 and just recorded most of the guitars natively in stereo – either a pair of SE VR2 active ribbons or a pair of Beyerdynamic M88s, with a SE 2200A II in omni mode to pick up some of the room.
The piano we used was my wife’s c.1932 Hobart-Cable upright, with the VR2 ribbon mics in a spaced pair. The action and strings leave a lot to be desired but its fundamental tone is really beautiful. Acoustic guitar (played by Eric, not me) was my old Taylor 410 with a lowly pair of modified MXL603S condensers on it. I’ve since let those go, but they really are pretty decent (if a bit too bright) for acoustic guitar.
Of course there’s a huge amount of environment sampling that Mike brought in, which I had very little to do with. And for the synths, we mostly used a Minibrute, often sent through the big pedalboard before it went to the DI. There are soft-synths for the Rhodes (Addictive Keys) and some of the drones (mostly Roland’s software model of the Jupiter-8 and Arturia’s MiniMoog emulation).
Oh yeah, and if you listen closely, at points you can hear my dog’s collar jingling.
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