tech question : can you tell us a bit more about your workflow?
First of all i'd like to start from a consideration: there's a big work to do before recording, even before placing microphones. You must have a clear view of the final result before starting with any operation IMHO.
For this work i started listening to the demos and picturing in my mind the sound of this band, then i talked to the guys, change some song structure and arrangements.
After this:
Recording
Drums: As you can hear from the song the drums sound a bit electronic. To obtain this result i placed few microphones (bass drum, snare, hi-hat, tom 1, tom 2, floor tom, two overheads A/B figure), this because i knew that i would have replaced the snare and the kick sound later so i didn't need great accuracy on those percussions.
Bass: From the bass to the mixer and then sound card. Nothing special.
Guitars: From the guitars to the mixer and then sound card. This is not a very common workflow, i'll explain later.
Synths: I wrote the parts on Muse and used some soft synth and also used some external hard synth.
Voice: We made a very hard work on the voice since we put many parts together to obtain a certain harmony. Then the singer recorded with a condenser microphone an at 4040 if i recall well
Editing
Since i wanted to obtain an overall electronic sound i wanted the instruments to play very "together" and tight so i did some surgical editing on the tracks with Ardour 2.8.11. I encountered some problem because it's well known that Ardour gets slow (and sometimes crashes) when working with many many regions. To avoid this i reduced the hystory to 10 steps, i often consolidated regions and do some "cleanup unused regions" as well. I also did some voice tuning with Fons Adriansen's Jretune.
Once everything was perfectly tight with the grid i started reamping the bass and the guitars.
Reamp
Once i had the "perfect" guitars and bass takes, i sent the signals out from my sound card to a reamp box (i use this one http://www.radialeng.com/di-xamp.htm) and then to some amps. I recorded them in order to have the bass amp sound summed to the direct one and to have "bigger" guitars obtained with different amp sounds mixed together.
Drums Replacing
I did some drums replacing on the bass drum and the snare using ladspa-trigger.
Synths
Once the midi parts were well defined i sent them to soft (Yoshimi, Nekobee, amsynth for example) and hard synths (i had this Yamaha digital piano a Korg 01WFD and a Roland jp 8000) and recorded them into the Ardour session.
Mix
I mixed all the tracks together using many ladspa and lv2 plugins like Invada, Calf and others.
Mastering
I exported groups of tracks from the mixing sessions and imported them into a new one, then i used some soft eq and external compressor.
and also the pitfalls you encounter when using linux apps (like this app is great, but when you do this/that it crashes or does weird stuff or starts to 'suck real bad'
Except for the Ardour issue explained above i didn't encounter many weird things.
Hope this can be exaustive enough.
Cheers
Giorgio Baù
Sound engineer
T.Rex Studio
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