Back Wall of Live Room during a take.

Not Your Typical Recording Studio

There was nothing typical about the Willow Smoke sessions up at the Motherpine Camp – Except maybe for some of the recording gear we used – other than that, this session was a straight up anomaly as far as recording music is concerned.

The first and most obvious difference is the building itself.

This was a solar powered log cabin out in the woods (The advantages of solar power are covered in Part 1 of this Blog).

The lack of sound treatment – other than my hand-crafted, portable “vocal/drum booth” shown in the pics – was more than made up for by the geometry and materials of our chosen ‘live room’.

View of the Front Wall – Also the view from my desk for the week – it was hard to leave.

Rockin Room Geometry

We decided to set up camp in the second floor loft. The back wall was flat, but the roof angled down on either side of the rear windows to create a trapezoidal room cross section.

This was great because it meant a lot of the left/right (as opposed to front/back) direct reflections would be bouncing around at all kinds of angles, and would create a live sound without the danger of standing waves or room modes being created.

In addition, the front walls came to a point in the centre of the room, creating a concave wall opposite the flat rear wall – again, this was great because it meant another “non-parallel” surface in our live room, and the front/back (as opposed to left/right) reflections would not be an issue either.

Better yet was the fact that the front wall was a good 12 feet beyond the edge of the loft, so alot of sound got pulled down into the kitchen area – in fact it sounded so good on the main floor that we decided to set up our room mic down there!

The Wood Makes it Good

Not only was the room geometry extremely conducive to recording, but every single non-glass surface was 100% locally cut Canadian Red Pine. It was like recording inside of a giant acoustic guitar.

This is definitely one of the best sounding rooms I’ve had the fortune to record in, and it has a very distinctive character compared to the relatively “controlled” sound of my carpeted, dry-walled, drop ceiling-ed studio live room.

Audio Technica Room Mic  – the pop filter on top was to block the wood dust falling from the constantly rocking floor/ceiling beams.

Monitoring Systems

Monitoring was between the nearfield monitors – which are pigs for power and will not be used next time – and the 4-channel headphone amp pictured below – I monitored from the board. I sincerely believe we could have rocked for an extra couple of hours each day if not for the draw from those monitors.

The headphone amp was also critical in ensuring that the bass player and drummer could play and record together without any bleed,  with a click for the drummer, but not for the bass player, and with both of them able to hear each other at appropriate levels.

This was our solution to not having separate isolation booths or live rooms for different instruments and it performed admirably. Guitars were typically recorded at ear shattering volumes with an SM57 after the bass and drums (not always, sometimes bleed sounds good), but those two were always together, to keep the Willow Smoke vibe fully intact.

My Control Room – Monitoring was done with the nearfields during the day when the juice was flowing, and with a headphone amp later in the evening when we were in conservation mode.

Not Your Typical Recording Process

I don’t necessarily mean the placement of microphones, gain staging of the preamps, effects in the signal chain or any of that stuff – that was all pretty much standard issue:

SM57’s on the snare and guitar amps, B52 on the kick drum, small diaphragm pencil condenser mics spaced equidistant from the snare with Roxul panels to block near wall direct reflections, and bass amp with a DI – all vocals were overdubbed with the Audio Technica LDC which also served as our room mic.

The creative process is where this session really broke the mold.

“Creative” Recording

When we got out to the camp, we had a whole lot of gear (and booze), and a tonne of ideas, but very few fully assembled songs. The whole thing was basically an experiment, as the solar power system had not yet even been tested for a situation like this.

Trapped in the Vocal Booth – Reflections from the Roof added a bit of “room sound” to Vocal Takes.

In a typical recording session, your band is tight, practiced, and ready to lay down tracks as quickly and efficiently as possible. In general, you also have no issues with electricity running out.

In our case, the recording was more-so a means of capturing the creative process. Once the mics were set up, arrangements would be tested, tweaked, and many takes would be done with discussions in between and changes being made between subsequent attempts. People not actively recording went off to the woods to write lyrics or practice acoustic guitar parts. We averaged about two (2) song’s per day this way.

This was writing, arranging, practicing and recording all rolled into one – as the planning for this session had been going on for well over a year (all members of the band live in disparate parts of North America) we had no other real choice.

Song fragments were fleshed out into full arrangements, long-forgotten lyrics were revived and sung by anyone but the writer, and a general good time was had by all. We also pulled together a huge amount of new material in a relatively short amount of time.

Just a Little Taste

I’m still actively working on the mixes and the band is working to get a single released in advance of the album.

Update: January 31st, 2013 – the First Single from this Session has now been digitally released – Check out both the A-side “Video Diplomacy” and B-side “Rattlesnake (The Ballad of Bill Tilden)” at the link below!!

http://willowsmoke.bandcamp.com/

The post Adventures in Solar Powered Recording – Part 2 appeared first on Red Room Recordings.

In September of 2012, I went on an adventure – I spent a week out in the woods with 4 of my best friends, and we tracked the debut album for our band “Willow Smoke” in a solar powered, boat-access-only cottage which we have dubbed the “Mother Pine Jam Studio” – It’s located in the middle of the woods of northern Ontario. We were “about an hour by snowshoe” from the Quebec border (using the local measurement system)

In six days, with a day on either end for setup, tear-down, and travel – we managed to not only lay down the framework drum, bass and guitar tracks for 11 songs, plus scratch vocals and a few solos, but we actually wrote and arranged most of the parts for these songs while there.

None of us really know how we did it – We went out there for a vacation, an escape from the monotony of the grind, with the intention of seeing what we could put on tape. We came out with an album in every sense of the word.

We came armed with some of our old material, a bunch of acoustic jams from various campfires of recent years, and a desire to create. All those acoustic songs ended up turning into heavy insane prog/funk rock craziness. None of the originals we have ever played live even got recorded. It was all new, and it all has a common vibe – we tribute this entirely to the venue.

Acoustic, Electric, Sun & Trees – The Perfect Combination!

The Venue

There’s something about going out to the middle of nowhere, with no-one but your bandmates – So long as you can ensure everyone keeps their F***ING cell phones off (I don’t own one), there are zero distractions – the only distractions out there when the amps get turned off are the sounds of the birds and the fish jumping.

The guys in the band, myself included, are all Engineers. For their final year project, a couple of them decided to redesign the bass player’s family cottage to be a solar powered, off the grid retreat – where a band could plug in all their gear, and play LOUD to no one but the animals and trees.

And then they built it.

Outside of the Motherpine Studio with a literal boat-load of music gear

The venue has been running smoothly for 5 years. Only once or twice has the solar power system been drained in a given day, and very little ‘electric’ music was being made out there prior to our session. Then we came out and pushed it to it’s limits. We drained those batteries every day, and during the prime “power hours” the batteries were topped up, and our amps were literally drawing energy directly from the sun – How epic is that???

A Typical Day

The Morning Ritual

Day 1 was all travel and set up – Rage Against the Machine was our “setting-up-the studio” music, which may seem like a strange choice in such a pristine setting for some people, but not for Willow Smoke, who started out doing RATM, RHCP, Zeppelin & Floyd Covers. It definitely set the mood for the week – or at least the first song we recorded, which had tinges of all four of those bands.

We would start the rest of our days off easy – with the batteries drained from the previous night’s work, we had a few hours to kill in the morning before we could really get in the game, so we would go fishing, take a sauna, jump in the lake, and eat a hearty breakfast of eggs, meat, fish (the bass count for the week was 15), and coffee with Bailey’s. We’d jam acoustically, work on lyrics, and get ready to slay some tracks.

Once the sun was ready for us, we would head up to the studio and start putting down some tunes. We usually did one song in the morning and one in the evening. The details of this process, including the gear used, will be discussed in part two of this blog. I’m also hoping to include some audio samples in that one.

A Learning Experience

A couple of things to note if you ever record on a solar powered system:

1) If you rock hard for 12+ hours a day – you will drain the batteries.

My APC battery backup surge protector saved at least one “perfect” take from deletion every day. It seemed the power would always die sometime between 10 PM and Midnight, and always right as we had nailed that final take we’d been slaving after for hours. We’d go to play it back and boom – lights out. The APC allowed us to save the project, shut down for the night, and go work on some lyrics or whatever over a few pints.

The mighty SM57 sucking up some vibes from a Traynor Stack – and a very relaxed drummer

2) Amps sound better on Solar

Due to the fact that the power is literally “clean energy,” we have found that our amps sound better on solar. Half the time we would forget to turn amps off, because the usual “hum” of the idle amplifier just didn’t exist. There was no noise coming out of these amps, it was magic! Nothing but pure, delicious tone.

I’ve been told this is due to the fact that the power comes in as a perfect sine wave (or Pine wave as we became accustomed to calling it). Grid power alternates – up, down, up, down, up, down – its like a switch being flipped on and off countless times per second. I don’t know the details, but if you were to graph it, it would look like a bunch of spikes – not like a nice clean wave.

3) Cell Phones are Pure Evil

I’ve already gotten into this a little bit but we had a strict rule of cellphones staying off during working hours. There was one incident where someone had left their phone on and gotten a text. Said text arrived during a take, and it just happened to be THE take for that song. The culmination of the ‘morning’ sessions work.

Well wouldn’t you know it, but that burst of signal raining down on us from outer space showed up in the TRACK! We actually have a blip in the take, on every single track, when that text came in.

We’re not sure if we should edit it out – It could serve forever as a reminder to us of how cell phones, texting etc. are the bane of society.

What’s Next?

We are planning to release a single on 31/01/2013 with the album to follow sometime later in 2013 – things are sounding awesome so far!

Click here for Part 2 where I do my best to get into the nuts and bolts of the recording process.

This is by far the coolest project I’ve ever worked on, and I hope you guys/gals are diggin’ it.

Update: January 31st, 2013 – the First Single from this Session has now been digitally released – Check out both the A-side “Video Diplomacy” and B-side “Rattlesnake (The Ballad of Bill Tilden)” at the link below!!

http://willowsmoke.bandcamp.com/

Let there be ROCK!

The post Adventures in Solar Powered Recording – Part 1 appeared first on Red Room Recordings.