Hey guys, heres some of the updates i posted on facebook during the process:
So, Day 1 one is done and were starting Day 2. Yesterday was tough because we had to setup the studio, update the hardware and software and plot out our course of action. Stephen wanted to start from the beginning, so with picked "Bored" off of Adrenaline. We started from complete scratch and built each block piece by piece making tons and tons of fine adjustments. When scrolling through the amps, he immediately loved the Marshall JVM OD1.
Now we have a strong basis, but this patch gets a little more complicated. Stephen wants to hear the Axe play out from his cab, which he powers stereo with two E.H. Magnum power amps, and have another output running to the monitors and F.O.H. With his cab tone sounding crushing, we now need to tonematch the F.O.H. sound to the Bored tone from the original album stems which were bounced from tape...but at 192khz. He's running PT 10, non HD, so we have to convert the session to 96khz. Not a bid deal.
After we tonematched off the intro riff of Bored, we tried the same thing with the chorus since its a little more open. Stephen picked the chorus version of the tone, but it still now perfect yet. For whatever reason, the tone match is lacking a bit of bite and has too much in the 250hz area. After popping on a paragraphic eq and A/B the tones for a bit, we got it. I'm going to double check with Ozone later, but it sounds so close to the original album tone that its stupid. Lastly, we had to set up all his pedals to trigger his gates, and volume pedals etc...
Now were going to check yesterdays work and see if we're still as happy as we were yesterday. Fingers crossed....
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For any huge nerds interested...
Day 3 is over finally. We didnt stop at all really since we need to finish all of this and test it before sunday. On Day 2 we did all of Adrenaline and managed to put all the tones into one preset, utiizing 2 amps and X Y blocks for each. When we went onto "Deftones" (self titled) we got this huge tone using the FAS Modern. The biggest issue were facing is trying to tonematch the cabs for the F.O.H. straight off the record via stems. It SHOULD make things incredibly easy as we have access to the stems, the same guitarist, and exactly knowledge of the original amp setup/settings but Fractal Audios V10 update totally messed up the algorithm and for whatever reason heavily rolls off 3K+ and adds low mud. So after each match i have to use a Para-eq to remedy a fix, but thats not ideal.
When we finished that, managing to do another whole record on a single preset, we started White Pony. Again the tone match sounded like he was playing under a pillow so i tried and tried again for about 2 hours. I just got so pissed off that i got Matt from Fractal's number and had him walk me through every step to make sure it wasnt user error. (See below about a later discovery of a possible problem with ProTools).
Lastly as were just about to wrap up scene 7 of White Pony, the Axe starting freaking out and constantly rebooting and had 0 output. This happened after we spent about a full hour getting the tiny radio sound for the intro of Back to School. It's still not how we want it, but we cant figure out why. He originally recorded that with a small smokey amp just cranked up. Im not sure which amp would be best to simulate that either.
Tomorrow we have to get through 2 more records to stay on track for our deadline and hopefully we'll run into less brick walls. For as much fun as this is, it's also super frustrating working with buggy software, especially when were both perfectionists. Hes convinced after were done, he'll have the best axe-fx tone on the planet! lets hope.
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Attn Guitar Geeks:
Finally wrapped up a long week of tone hunting! A few days ago i posted about how we were having issue with the tonematch from the fractal after v10. I spent a long time on the phone with Matt from Fractal Audio and he sent us a beta update to try out. After the update i was still encountering the same issue so he requested i send him a stem off the record, the preset, and a DI of Stephen playing. We continued while matt checked out our work and wrapped up the rest of the records with barely enough time to test them out, program the midi controller and adjust levels.
After we got all of the patches sounding great through his cab (a marshall 4x12 that he uses solely for monitoring) we sent our other direct signal to a pair of JBL floor wedges. HOLY SHIT, it sounded terrible. Our PEQ that we used to try and correct the tonematch discrepancies that we heard in pro tools was ruining our tone. This leaves me to think that our monitoring from the axe to PT was somehow defective. I double checked by running the axe XLR out to the KRKs and validated my results. I still dont understand it, but it didnt matter, we needed to fix it. We went though all the patches and re-adjusted all the Paragraphic EQs for the direct outs. Christian from Fear Factory was there and helped throw tons of riffs my way while i adjusted when Stephen took a break. After what seemed like forever, we got all the tones 90% of the way there id say, in spite of the tragic news we received about Chi. I'll be joining them on tour for a week to test/tweak each preset to get them the rest of the way.
We'll be putting ALL tones and cab impulses up for free download with a full PDF explaining his whole rig, each preset, and each scene of each preset. We took elaborate notes to cover any potential questions. Stay tuned!
