La Bête Blooms Guitar Recording Techniques

In my initial meet with La Bête Blooms, they made clear that the main focus of the recordings would be the 'Wall of Sound' type approach to recording guitars. Almost as if the guitars were the main focus rather than the vocals in most popular music.

When conducting my initial research I discovered an article on Butch Vig (Buskin, 1997) and Nevermind. The article briefly mentions 'Wall of Sound' in relation to experimentation and multi-layering.

All this improvisational trial-and-error multi-layering could be said to amount to a latter-day 'wall of sound'. Vig agrees: "Kind of! I mean, a lot of the bands that we listen to and who we love are doing very similar things: Tricky, Massive Attack, Björk...(Vig cited in Buskin, 1997)  

Upon further researching I discovered Phil Spector, the pioneer of the wall of sound technique. I gained a basic understanding of what the Wall of Sound technique entails at the following link by reading a blog post by Hollis (2010). He states; 

 Phil Spector is famous for the ‘Wall of Sound’, He created this sound by having a number of instruments or vocalists perform the same parts in unison, then he would record the sound using an echo chamber. Some tracks were doubled or tripled to make songs sound fuller.'  Hollis (2010)

Taking this into consideration, I don't have access to an echo chamber, however I do have the ability to record and multi-layer guitar takes playing the same parts in order to create a dense, full sound much like the original Wall of Sound technique pioneered by Phil Spector.   

La Bête Blooms Drums and Bass Recording Approach

My practices carried out whilst recording La Bête Blooms will be informed by the practices of both Steve Albini, and Butch Vig.

Both engineers prefer to take a live approach to recording, However I feel that it would be quite difficult to minimise bleed/spill from individual microphones given the size of the college studio. 

In the aforementioned article regarding Steve Albini, he states; 

I prefer to record as much of the band in one live take as possible. If you do it any other way, the band is forced into an unnatural situation from the very beginning of the process. They play together in the rehearsal room and on stage, so it seems normal to me that they also play together when they come into the studio. With 90 percent of the records I do, the singing is recorded after the band, unless the singing is what leads the band (Tingen, 2005) 

Taking this into consideration, I have decided to take a live approach when recording bass and drums, recording both together to a click track with the drummer in the live room, and the bass player in the control room running through a Sansamp straight into the desk as a ghost track. The remaining elements such as the bass, guitar and vocals will be overdubbed using a multi-track approach to achieve more flexibility with the overall sound.    

La Bête Blooms Producer Research

After the first meeting with La Bête Blooms it was clear that I should begin my research by exploring practices used by producers, and practices used on landmark recordings in the aforementioned post.

Firstly I decided to research Steve Albini, famous for his work with grunge artists such as Nirvana and The Pixies.

My research lead me to a soundonsound article (Tingen, 2005)  on the producer which can be viewed on the link below;

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep05/articles/albini.htm

It was particularly interesting to discover his view on the engineer/producer-artist relationship and how he feels about putting the artists interests before anything else. He is 'averse' to the role of the record producer and sees his work as 'purely technical, rather than artistic'.

I feel that I will adopt this approach during the process, however I have been informed that two of the tracks that I will be recording for La Bête Blooms are new tracks, I will offer suggestions If I feel certain elements of the tracks don't work or would work particularly well in a different way.

The article features a synopsis of his favourite microphones in different applications, I found this particularly useful when trying to inform my own choices as regards microphone choices in the recording process.

I also decided to research other producers who may inform my practices when recording La Bête Blooms. I decided to take a look at producers who worked with Nirvana on their other records. Nevermind, arguably one of their most commercially successful records was produced by Butch Vig.

I also discovered an article (Buskin, 1997) about Butch Vig and working on Nevermind which can be viewed below

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/mar97/butchvig.html