To celebrate the release of our new double A side 7” I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to nerd out with you for those who are interested in recording and the process for these songs. Disclaimer: this is for fellow nerds, others; geek out at your own risk.

The record was produced by Linc le Fevre and engineered by Linc and yours truly.

The tracking for the 3 songs that we recorded (one we’re keeping for a rainy day!) was done at Red Planet studio in Hobart. They have two similar sized live rooms and we used one for the drums and the other for guitars. The bass amp was tucked away in a hallway. Liam played his guitar in the room with the amps (they were fucking loud too) and I played bass in the drum room so I could really watch Matt and try to play tight. We were sepeated from liam by some huge glass doors so we could all see each other the whole time.

We tracked live for this record so we were really concentrating on getting guitar and bass tones right from the outset. Here is a quick rundown of the gear we used.

Liam’s guitar was a Maton Mastersound 2000 with stock pickups split into a Marshall JCM 800 2205 feeding a vintage Marshall cabinet, and a Marshall JMP feeding another vinatage Marshall cab. The JMP was juiced up a little by a Super-Hardon pedal. Both cabs got an SM57 and MD421 on the grill so we were taking 4 tracks of guitar for each section. We double tracked the guitars later as well, playing the exact same part through the same setup just to thicken things out a bit so we ended with 8 tracks of guitars. There were very few extra overdubs.

My bass was a ’76 Ibanez P-bass with Jim Dyson pickups. It was split into a Jensen DI and a Sansamp into an Ampeg SVT3 and an Ampeg Classic 4x10. We used a Shure Unidyne3 and a Rode Classic to mic the cabinet and we ended up blending from the Jensen and the two mics. All the bass tracks went to Studer preamps.

The drums were Mapex Mars-Pro drums with a 13x7 Pearl Masters snare and were miced like so:

Snare top: SM57 through a UA6176

Snare bottom: SM57

Toms: 421’s

Kick in: M88

Kick out: D12

Overheads: Neuman KM 184

Rooms: mono ribbon (Fig8) through an SSL strip + stereo pair of NT2s tracked through dbx160s

We wound up tuning the snare to the key of the song to get it to sound massive.

Vocals went throught a C414 into a UA6176 for most parts, some additional vocals were into an NT1 at Linc’s house afterwards.

Hope you guys like the results.

Peace,

Dicko