Gear & Recording Techniques for "Fire Handlers"

A couple weeks ago I let my new album, The Fire Handlers of Mercury, out into the world. See and listen here.

First-off, I made a trio of videos for some of the tracks:

Next, I wanted to talk about the recording techniques -- because you're probably as gear-oriented as I am!

I recorded this one like it was a bizarro astro-surf band playing a set at a dive bar on Mercury. Ok! Jake's gone. Where's Jake?

That said, what I mean to say is I "factoried" the tunes -- rather than record each tune one at a time willy-nilly from start to finish I did each of the instruments for all the tracks all at the same time. I did one rhythm guitar's tracks for the whole album... then I did the bass tracks for the whole album... etc, etc... and then monkeyed with the lead tracks a lot longer after building everything else up for them to rest on.

I don't know if this is good or bad, in the long run, but it does give the whole thing a very consistent tonality which is sort-of what I was going for (on this album, anyhow).

What your ears are hearing are two rhythm guitars, a lead guitar, a banjo-ukulele used as a snare drum, and bass.

One rhythm guitar (left channel) is played clean with just a little bit of reverb, '60s style. The second rhythm guitar (right channel) is also played clean but uses a delay/quirky reverb pedal and some string-mute foam stuffed into the strings to give it more of a banjo-plonky, spanky sound.

The bass is mixed a little off-center and the banjo-uke is a little off-center as well. The lead guitar is right up front and has both tremolo and fuzz on it all the time in various settings.

Here's the gear used:

The lead guitar is all this unmarked import Strat. I tuned it CGCGCG low to high in an open C tuning (modal) and capo to get into the key I want. I looooove this thing. I don't know why. Here's the blog post on it.

The bass is my faithful '70s Tokai P-bass (click here to see) and the "clean" rhythm guitar is a '60s Guyatone I got from my buddy Steve. This thing fits me like a glove. Click here to see that.

The second rhythm guitar with the muting foam and delay on it was an '80s Synsonics mini-Explorer that I wonked-out. I gave that to my friend Ethan (local) to rock-out on after I was done recording, so that one's gone -- oh well! Click here to see that fella.

The "snare drum" heard throughout is actually a banjo-ukulele I tweaked to sound like a snare. It's the '20s Schoenhut cheapy that's been hanging-out in the store for months. Click here to see that. If you'd like to see and hear how I outfit a banjo-uke to "be a snare track," check out this DIY blog post for that... though in this case I had the "snare wires" on the top of the head.

All of the guitars were recorded through the direct out/line out on my new-to-me Quilter Aviator Cub. It's got three main voicings (blackface, blonde, and tweed) that simulate Fender amps to a degree. Tweaking the "limiter" knob allows you to dial-in a bit of a tubey saturation (to my ears?) in your clean tone. What I like about this amp is that it's solid state but yet handles like a tube amp and sounds more-or-less like one on recordings.

What it doesn't do is suckerpunch you like a tube amp -- you know that "woof" feeling you get when you hit a chord or low notes and the speaker sucks it in and spits it out? ...and it does have a more clinical high-end that takes a hair of tweaking to get "right," but for 95% of my playing, this thing has been an excellent workshop/playing-in-the-house buddy since I got it.

The biggest benefit is that the direct out sounds just like the headphones and sounds just like... the amp. There's some special sauce in there that makes it work that way but it does work. You'll either hate these Quilters or really love them, for what it's worth...

Here ate the panel controls...

For bass I use the direct out on my Aguilar Tone Hammer with no speaker attached. It doesn't matter how I tweak it... plugged direct into my recording interface this thing always sounds good.

I go through periods of owning lots of pedals and then weeding them out. I like to pick 2 or 3 to use on a recording but no more so I'm not too overwhelmed.

This time around I wanted to be sure I had pedals I knew I would use a lot over time and so they're pretty basic -- but with a twist.

Two are Catalinbread units. The Giygas fuzz is super-de-duper fun and can go to extremes. It does a good job keeping a fat-but-clear bottom-end compared to various woofier fuzzes I've owned in the past. It has a very useful control set and if you dial back the fuzz but up the mix you get a pretty decent "overdrive" sort of tone thrown-in as well.

The Adineko is an "oil can" delay sim... and has a neat cheap-tank-sounding reverb (that spirals into feedback after 12-o'clock) mixed-in, too. It has a "balance" knob that simulates the two tracking heads used in the old tanks and you can get some really interesting variations on your tone by simply moving that around. This is basically all the delay that I need (I'm a slapback fan) to get vintagey tones but the spanky-sounding reverb is excellent to have to liven-up a dry amp, too, without having a second pedal for pure reverb.

The Earthquaker Devices Hummingbird is a straight-up tremolo pedal at first glance. It does the Supro/Valco stuttery-sounding trem perfectly, but also has the convenient mix/level controls to modernize its use. The real winner on it, though, is a 3-way mini-switch that switches from "slow" to "medium" to "fast" versions of the rate control. Slow and medium fill all the vintage needs while fast gives you the ability to dial-in crazy amounts of fluttery, stuttery, and shimmery sounds. This makes it a 2-in-one for me, as when the trem is dialed-up that much it sounds like a completely different (and very useful) effect.