Kitbash 4ever

I'm writing this as a record of what worked for us and what we learned - not to tell you what you have to do.

I know some things about recording, but there's a lot more that I don't know. The best thing that you can possibly do (both for learning and for your soul) is to find some friends and make some sloppy art in a way that brings you joy.

If something on this page can help you make your own music, that's beautiful. Nothing here's the gospel, just notes on the process.

I'm going to be mentioning a lot of specific gear on this page, but it's not because I'm an especially big fan of either that particular gear, or the never-ending drive to keep buying new equipment. Whatever you already have is enough to make amazing art, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to scam you. There's music which has made me cry which was recorded on a flip-phone, and million dollar records that haven't moved me an inch.

With the exception of exactly one piece of gear (the specific recording interface we used), there's not a single piece of gear that was load-bearing, or which we couldn't live without. Similarly, we made our first album with almost entirely free VST plugins, and a handful of paid plugins for the second album.

I'm going to be more focused on recording techniques that we found to be inspiring and helpful, and will try and be gear-agnostic as much as possible. To the extent that I talk about things we bought for this album, I'm going to be very clear about how much money we spent, whether it was worth it, and what the alternatives are.

Our first album was a labor of love, but boy was it a labor. Due to technical constraints (i.e. barely having a working interface), we ended up individually tracking basically every instrument on almost every song. Things ended up sounding clean and precise, which is nice its own way, but we wanted our second album to feel more live and "together".

Once we had decided that we wanted the basis of this album to be us playing together in a room, we had some thinking to do. I hadn't really had much experience recording a whole band before, and we didn't have much experience recording all-together. To dip our toes in the water, we had a "demo day" in March 2025, where we all got together and tried recording all of these songs, just to see if it was possible to make it sound good. It was rough around the edges, but we ended up deciding that the proof of concept was strong enough to fully commit to live-recording.

One hot weekend in June 2025, we got together to record the bones of this album. Most songs took 3 or 4 takes, and we rushed outside to cool off between every song - there was no AC in the living room, turning the fan on caused a leslie effect on everything, and if we opened the windows, one particular neighbor would have been on our porch to complain by the time the first song ended.

It was swampy and we played everything a little bit faster than usual just so we could get back outside again, which ended up being just what the songs needed. Once we had no more juice left, we called it a weekend and took a bit of time off before entering phase two.

I had it in my head - and even promised the boys - that this way of working would be *much* faster than our first album.

Reader: it was not.

Before we added anything else, we listened to all the takes that we had, and decided which parts we liked the best - some songs (Time in Windows, Moonlit Rogue) are basically one take from start to end; most are a patchwork of our favorite pieces.

Once we had the base layers figured out, we started adding bits and bobs. We got together on Sundays, picked a "song of the week", and took turns adding whatever felt right to that song - harmonies, odd percussion, extra parts, double tracks, the works.

As the songs started to take shape, we started to think about how everything fit together - what the "connective tissue" (as I became fixated on calling it) would be to help the songs feel cohesive.

I decided pretty early on that I wanted to focus on using "practical effects" (spring tanks, pedals, plate reverb) as much as possible, and do as little FX-work within my DAW as I could. I did this for a couple reasons:

1. I don't have any good sounding reverb plugins, and didn't have the money to spend on one
2. I wanted things to be more "destructive" this time around, and to have to commit to the choices I made. Using outboard gear meant that I had to record the reverb/fx tracks, and couldn't change them that much once they were recorded. I was either stuck with what I had, or had to start from scratch.
3. I felt like this might help democratize the mixing process a bit more - I liked the idea of having everyone in the room twisting the knobs to create a sound together.
4. It was different than what we did the last time, which felt important - I love how our first album came out, and at the same time, I wanted to try as many new things as we could this time around.

For the most part, the only fx that I have on any of my tracks in Reaper are:

• An SSL-style channel strip plugin
• A compressor
• If needed, another EQ

The bulk of the other effects that you hear were all recorded using outboard gear and re-amping.

It's always the case - the last steps take twice as long as everything else combined. Once we had some nice initial mixes and added a few layers, we entered the phase of the process that I think of as "glancing blows" - you add one or two things to a song each week, hope that it's enough to make it feel "done", and inevitably do the same thing again in a week or a month when you realize that it doesn't feel as "done" as some other song.

There was some fun here, but a lot of it was pretty tedious - it didn't help that we were also doing all of this during the winter, and were getting a little stir-crazy already.

I thank the rest of the band for having faith in me during this part of this process, and for trusting that it would actually make a difference - honestly, who knows if it did, but we *did* end up adding some of my favorite parts during this phase, like the drones in Iron Dog - check out the videos at the bottom of this page to see how it came together.

We decided that 4/4 would be a good release date (mostly as a bit), and once that was in place, it forced us to finish things up. One sunday, about a week before the release, we got together and came up with the album title, art, and final mixes/masters.

Step one in recording a full band in a small room: minimizing unwanted bleed and reflection.

As luck would have it, a living room is not a bad place to record an album. The carpeted floor helps absorb some hi-frequency reflections, and the room was long enough that we were able to set up on one side of the room and avoid reflections from the far wall.

You might possibly notice the moving blanket prison that we have contained Ross in. This is for his own good, as well as ours - the small diaphragm condenser mics that we're using as drum overheads are *pretty* good at rejecting reflections from the ceiling, but the added absorption of the moving blanket is especially helpful in dealing with the unpleasant washy reflections of the cymbals. $5 a pop at most hardware stores, and light enough that we were able to mount them with hook-and-eyes (you could probably get away with Command hooks). Because they're not especially thick, they'll only absorb high-end frequencies, but those tend to be some of the more troublesome tones anyway.

The ceiling in the rest of the room is more or less irrelevant - there are no microphones close enough to the ceiling for reflections to have a meaningful impact - so, onto the walls.

The day before recording the main tracks for this album, we got a whole bunch of stuff from the hardware store to make acoustic panels - 1x4s for the framing, rock wool for the filling, weed-resistant gardening fabric for the cover. If memory serves, we ended up spending around $150 to make 24 small acoustic panels which we hung all around the living room - for the cost, I think it might be the best money we've ever spent as a band. Especially considering that this is also our practice space, these panels have been a huge quality of life improvement for us.

Oh, one last thing - make sure to turn the fan off before recording, unless you want a leslie effect on everything.

We decided that it would make the most sense to start by placing the drums, and working our way out from there. Having Ross pretty close to one edge of the room meant that we were minimizing the reflections from the far wall, and as an added bonus it gave us a little more walking-around room.

Once the drums were set up, we brought in the acoustic baffles - essentially, these are just large frames filled with dense rock wool insulation and covered with burlap. These are here to minimize bleed between the amps and drums (and vice versa). They're dense enough to absorb low-end frequencies from the drum kit, and do a very good job filtering out almost the entire amp signal in the drum mics.

You might, at this point, be wondering why we're putting the amps so close to the drums. A fair question - if you're so worried about bleed, why are you putting all the loud things in one part of the room?

It's a little counterintuitive, but if we consider that we are *mostly* trying to keep the amp sounds out of the drum mics, then it makes a little more sense. While the front of an amplifier is famously very loud, the back end of it is actually surprisingly quiet. Couple that with the giant acoustic baffles that we have between the amps and the drums, and we are pretty much only worried about the indirect reflections from the amps - which is why they're so close to the drums (or, rather, very far from the far wall, where they would be reflecting).

While there technically *is* a science to all of this, I certainly am not equipped to speak on it - this worked well for us, and might work well for you too. Give it a try, and see what happens.

You might notice that there's not a bass amplifier in this picture - that's because the bass and keyboards are going directly into the mixing board, and then into each band member's headphones. In a room this size, the bass would be showing up in every microphone if we were playing it through an amp, so we just got a clean DI signal instead, which we could then re-amp as needed after the fact.

Curious about keys? I'll hopefully add a lengthy description to the "Synths" section of this page, but here's a quick rundown:

• I recorded scratch tracks on a Nord Electro 6, and the keys were so loud that they showed up in the drum overheads
• The synth parts were recorded on an Arturia Minifreak, and I made the patches myself
• Organ sounds were a mix of the Nord and the lovely, janky organ pictured above
• Other keys were mostly Arturia Analog Lab.

Our last step before starting recording was setting up monitor mixes in the headphones - a bit more on that in the next section, but suffice it to say that I learned a lot about how important good monitor mixes are for confident performances.

Let's talk about that one piece of gear that we actually *really* needed to make this album: a decent interface, with multiple headphone outputs, and enough inputs to record everyone.

On our first album, we had to record everything bit-by-bit (with few exceptions), because we didn't have a good way to monitor ourselves when live-recording, and we didn't have enough space on our 8-input mixer to record everyone at the same time.

We did record three songs "live" on our first album, but the setup was janky to say the least. We recorded the first album using a Zoom R24 interface which I already owned, and which had *one* headphone output. In a pinch, we were able to use a 5-way headphone splitter and send the same mix to everyone, but the signal was so weak that we were barely able to hear eachother over the drums in the room.

This time around, we spent $600 on a Zoom L12 LiveTrak Mixer. We got this particular piece of gear for a few specific reasons:

1. It was within our budget - we had saved the money from a few shows, and had enough to invest in exactly one piece of gear.
2. It had 5 headphone outputs with the ability to create individual mixes for each output. This was VERY important for us, since we learned pretty quickly that we don't record well unless we have the ability to set our own individual levels.
3. The headphone mixes were able to monitor the audio as it was going into the mixer, which meant that we didn't have to deal with the latency that we would get from monitoring the mix within the DAW.
4. It had an internal SD card, which meant that we could use it to record our practices, and we could also take it with us to record shows.
5. It could be used as an interface to record directly to my DAW (Reaper).
6. It had an internal click track - this feels like such a small detail, but the fact that we could use the internal click to record meant that we didn't have to use 2 of our precious 12 tracks to monitor the DAW.

I definitely don't want you to go out and buy any gear just because it worked for us - but, if you are looking to record a full band playing live in one room, you could do a lot worse than the Zoom L12, or its big brother, the Zoom L20.

We have a nice little collective puddle of microphones in the Kitbash space - some from Andrew, some from Ross, most from me. Mostly, they're SM-57 shaped (many of them are knockoffs), though there are some exceptions. Here's most of what we were working with when recording:

• Shure SM57 - 3 real ones (~$80 each)
• Fake SM57 - 4 fake ones (~$15 each)
• Shure SM58 - 2 real ones (~$100 each)
• Pair of Rode SDCs - (~$250 each)
• Pair of Pyle SDCs - (probably $20 each, they were gifted to us)
• AKG 214 LDC - (bought in 2012, like $250 at the time)
• Cascade Fathead Ribbon mic - (bought in 2015, like $250 at the time)
• AKG D112 - (~$200 - this was our big splurge for album 1)

Did we use all of those mics? Yes, and more. Did we need all of those mics? Absolutely not. If you're on a budget, just buy as many cheap SM57 clones as you can, and point them at the thing you want to record. Set some up as room mics, get tops and bottoms of snares/toms, take time to tune and get amps sounding good - if your sound source is bad, it doesn't matter what you use to record it, it's going to stay bad.

Drums

KICK:

Prepped by removing resonant head (I wouldn't necessarily recommend this, because it became INCREDIBLY boomy. Needed a lot of damping, and weights to keep it in place.) AKG D112 roughly one-third of the way into the kick drum, pointed at the beater. Plasic beater.

I have a broken amp that I keep at the apartment - it's headless, but the speakers have a wire coming out of them with a 1/4" jack connected. If you reverse the signal, any speaker can be treated as a microphone - and, though I wouldn't recommend it, you can *also* turn a lot of microphones into speakers this way. I ran the 1/4" output into a DI box, and placed the cabinet in front of the drums as a sub-kick to catch extra low end. As an added bonus, it also blocks a little bit of sound bleed - we take every bit we can get.

If all you have is an SM57, place it inside the kick, past the porthole, pointed towards the beater. Gate the kick to a sine wave at 60hz in your DAW if you need extra low end - the big thing is to capture the articulation of the beater; low end is easy to fake.

SNARE

Prepped by tuning up and placing a cutout of an old snare head on top for dampening - can't remember the name, but this is a real product.

I also asked Ross to raise the hi-hat as far up as he comfortably could to reject bleed. This can make a pretty substantial difference - just make sure that your drummer is still able to play comfortably.

Mic placement: Positioned so that it's rejecting the hi-hat as much as possible. The butt-end of your mic should be pointing right at the hi-hat's bell (assuming it has a cardioid pattern). Real SM57 on top, fake SM57 on the bottom, both slightly over the rim, about an inch away from their respective heads. I tend to like a fake SM57 on the bottom of a snare, since it accentuates the high end more than a real SM57.

If all you have is an SM57, just mic the top - you can fake the bottom by placing the snare face-down on a guitar amp, and sending the recording of the snare top into the amp. This will trigger the traps on the bottom as if the snare was actually being played, and you can record it as you normally would - more info and a demonstration are in the "Reamping" section below.

TOMS

Prepped by tuning up and placing tape as needed to cut down on resonance. We noticed that there was a bit of a sympathetic tuning between the snare and the rack tom (meaning it wouldn't stop ringing), so Ross retuned and we added some extra tape. This was very trial and error (mostly error).

Fake SM57s on top - I very much prefer to mic both side of the drum when possible, but we just didn't have the inputs available since we were recording the whole band simultaneously. I do have a solution for this though - using a Y-cable with one side inverted. More info in the "experiments" section.

Oh! One more thing: make sure that the capsule of your microphone isn't parallel to the edge of a cymbal - you'll get these awful flangey sounds if they

OVERHEADS

I honestly do not especially like the sound of the microphones that I used on our overheads (a pair of Rode Small Diaphragm condensers), but they were the best option that we had at the time. When recording in a small room, I am thinking more about *rejecting* unwanted sounds than I am about capturing my desired sound - in this case, I knew that a pair of Small Diaphragm condenser mics placed in a spaced pair relatively low would do the best job at rejecting the reflections of the drums from the ceiling and walls, and that any signal that came in from the sides wouldn't be overly colored.

Ross' cymbals tend to have a very long decay, so we added a little bit of damping underneath them - just a wad of paper towel taped near the bell of the cymbal. If you add too much, you lose all the liveliness of the cymbal, but a little bit can really help cut down on muddiness/brittleness that comes with long delays on mediocre metal.

Each of the overheads was roughly 42 inches from the center of the snare drum - I usually have a fabric ruler in my toolkit when recording for just this occasion, but mic cables/drum sticks work just fine to check distance in a pinch.

ROOMS

I *love* the Cascade Fathead as a room mic - honestly, just about any ribbon mic will probably do. I have no idea why I decided to place it at eye-level; shin-height would have probably been better, and gotten more of the meat of the drums. Still, there's a very mellow quality to this mic that does wonders to a drum kit, and because it is a figure 8 pattern, it also catches the reflections off the far wall.

In addition to the Cascade, I also decided (god knows why) to throw a pair of cheap Pyle drum microphones into 10 gallon plastic buckets and place those on the far side of the room to use as room mics. Did it work? Kind of, although there are about a dozen alternatives that I would recommend before this - still, geting colorful room mics can be a great way to give a unique sound to your recordings, especially if you're recording a whole band. At the end of the day, we ended up faking most of our room mics - check out the sections on Springs/Varispeed to learn how.

A tangent: it might be worth thinking about *every* microphone in the room as a "room" mic when recording a whole band - you're going to have some amount of bleed between all the elements that you are recording, and it's simply not worth swimming upstream to competely eliminate that. With the recording setup that we used, there was a natural "stereo bleed" from the guitars into the drum overheads - Simon's amp bled into one mic, and Andrew's amp bled into the other, turning the overheads into a kind of "room mic" for the guitars, on top of its main role of recording the drums directly. I found it easiest to just accept the bleed and let it inform the rest of the mix.

GUITAR

During our big tracking sessions, I kept things simple and just put an SM57 as close to the cap of the amps as possible - on about half of our recordings, I ending up just using that signal as-is.

When re-tracking, I ended up going for a two-mic setup, using the Cascade ribbon mic next to the AKG LDC. There's a very different tonal quality to both of these mics, and I basically used them as EQ - I could bring up the ribbon mic to mellow out a sound, or increase the LDC to brighten it.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: If it is at all possible, I most emphatically encourage you to get yourself a DI box (~$30) for each guitarist in your band so that you can record a clean DI signal alongside their amp. There's nothing worse than having an amazing performance, only to discover that the amp sounds too distorted with no way to dial it back. This can also be very helpful if you only have a handful of decent mics - put all the good mics on the drums, use your shitty mics and DI box to grab some scratch tracks on guitar, and then use your good microphones to record a re-amped signal after the fact (more on that below).

ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS

We have a few acoustic guitars on this album - for the most part, I recorded these by just pointing an SDC at either the bridge or the 12th fret, depending on the tone I was looking for. Since the acoustic guitar on Dry Ice is more prominent, we recorded it with a three-mic setup: two Rode SDCs in an X/Y configuration, and a ribbon mic pointed at the bridge (since this guitar was very bright, and needed some warmth).

For both trumpet and flute, I recorded with a ribbon mic as the close mic, and a pair of large diaphragm condensers set up in a blumlein configuration as the room mics, in the ballpark of 6 feet away.

VOCALS

It is an unfortunate fact that my AKG 214 is the best microphone I have for recording vocals - it has a nice clarity to it, and sounds crispy. But it is also so unbelievably sibilant that I end up having to put half a dozen de-essers on it to make it usable. In my next life, I am going to start by recording with an SM58 and making it brighter; at least it will be a new problem.

I love love love love LOVE spring reverb tanks. During the recording of our first album, an amp I inherited broke down, and we scrapped it for parts - the cabinet became our trusty sub-kick microphone, and I held onto the spring reverb tank. It lived on my shelf for about a year until a spring cleaning kick found me deliberating between either throwing it out or learning how to use it. As luck would have it, I chose the latter.

Here's the basics: a spring reverb tank is basically what it says on the tin - a signal is sent into an RCA input, amplified via a transformer, sent into one end of a metal spring, and is sent back out the other side via RCA output. The "reverb" sound comes from the way that sound lingers and warps from point a to point b - it takes time for the metal to stop moving, and there's a lovely natural "tail" to any sound that is passed in. Depending on the volume of the signal that is passed in, the decay can last for a few seconds, or can be a slap-back delay that trails off quickly.

To use a spring reverb tank in your production, you need a couple things:

• A spring reverb tank - can be found in old amps, on craigslist, or new online (around ~$30)
• RCA cables - I use a stereo pair of 1/4" to RCA cables, which cost about $5
• A way to send an amplified signal - any headphone amplifier (like the one in your interface) will work
• A way to record the output - we'll get into specifics below

If you happen to be recording with an interface (or tape deck) that has an FX send, then you can probably do the following:

1. Plug the FX send output to the input of your spring tank
2. Use the "fx send" knobs to determine the send amount for each track. Depending on the output power of your FX send, you might need to find a way to amplify the signal a little bit.
3. Plug the output of your spring tank into an available input on your interface/tape deck. NOTE: you can create a feedback loop if this return signal is being sent to the spring tank.
4. Hit record.

Once recorded, you can mix this track in to taste.

This is an area where the Zoom L12 ended up really shining - you can follow these steps with most interfaces, but some of this is Zoom-specific. As long as you have the ability to set up different monitor mixes and have a headphone output, you should be able to pretty much follow these steps.

Basic Setup:

• There are 6 separate output mixes available on the Zoom L12 - one of these should be dedicated as your "FX send", and it should only be receiving signals that you want sent into your spring tank. I pretty much always used the "Master" mix for spring sends, partly because it allowed me to send both a Left and Right output, which let me record simultaneous stereo spring sends. Use whatever works!
• If I had the space available when recording, I pretty much always had a spring reverb tank set up to record alongside the signal - i.e. if someone was singing, I recorded their vocals (dry) and sent their vocals into the spring tank to record a parallel wet signal. If the performer wanted it, I would mix some of this spring return into their headphones - this sometimes helped with the performance, especially on vocals.
• If I wanted to run something which had already been recorded into the spring tank, I set up a hardware send to USB 3/4 on the Zoom L12 - basically, this was an auxiliary send which ran in parallel to the main mix, so I could monitor how the spring sounded in the context of the mix (more on this in the Re-Amping section). There was about a 20ms delay when doing this - sometimes I compensated by moving tracks after the fact, but more often than not, having a bit of a delay actually made the reverb sit a little better with the main track.

Experiments:

One of the wonderful things about spring tanks is that they physically exist in the world, and the mechanics that they use to create sound can be directly monkeyed around with - for example, by placing materials on top of the springs, you can change the character of the reverb, and shorten the decay. This turns it into more of a slapback delay sound - you can just barely hear this effect on the very beginning of Iron Dog, on Simon's guitar.

Looking to create a transition between two sections of a song? Pluck the spring with your finger and then reverse it in your DAW to create a giant swell - you can hear this during the buildups in Broken Mirror.

Similarly, creating a feedback loop with your spring tank by sending a bit of its return signal into the input signal can yield very pleasing and unpredictable effects. You can even "ride" the effect by playing the fader during recording - I especially like this for transitions or endings. You can hear this at the end of Beach Day.

Every spring reverb tank is a little different - there are certain resonances that really "sing", depending on the length, tension, and number of the springs. You can use Varispeed (info below) to pitch your input to the sweet spot, and then slow it back down (or speed it back up) to alter the decay and overall tonality of the tank.

Taking it one step further - you can get a lovely natural chorusing effect by using Varispeed two times at two different speeds on your springs, and then creating a stereo image by hard-panning these recordings. You can (just barely) hear this on basically all the vocals on this album.

Broadly speaking, re-amping is the act of taking a recording (usually a DI signal from a guitar) and sending it back out into the world - often into an amplifier - and re-recording that signal, typically with a microphone.

Here's a common application of this technique: let's say that you recorded a whole band in a room, and recorded the guitar's amplifier, as well as a clean DI track. You listen back, and realize that you like the guitar peformance, but that there's way too much bleed from the drums in the recording that you have of the amplifier. You use a re-amp box (more on that below), and send the DI signal into a pedalboard, which feeds into an amplifier. You take your time setting up microphones just the way you like, and hit "record" as the ghost of your guitarist plays through the amplifier.

The principle behind re-amping is pretty simple - you record a signal, then use a tool called a re-amp box (~$125) to send it back into an amplifier at a volume that it can handle. A re-amp box is kind of like a DI box, but in reverse - it takes a loud signal, and uses a transformer to cleanly bring it back down to a volume that can play nicely with things like guitar pedals. In a pinch, you can use most BOSS pedals (or any guitar pedal with a good buffer) to accomplish much the same thing, with maybe a bit more noise and a bit less fidelity - not a huge problem if you're running through overdrive or similar distortion effects.

Guitar

If you only have a few good mics, but want to record everyone in your band at once, re-amping can be a good option. Put all your good mics on the drums, get some cheapo fake 57s to record some scratch guitar through the amps while using a DI box (~$30) to get a clean signal. After the recording is done, if you like the take, you can send it back out to your amp, and dial in a tone that you love, then use the good mics to record the signal from the amp.

Another idea: if you're the only guitarist in your band, and you want a stereo image of a single take, try re-amping the same take multiple times - either through different amps, or with different tone settings, or with different microphones/placement. Pan these all over to create what should be a fairly phase-coherent image with a bit more oomph.

Snare Trick

Got a snare top recording, but need some sizzle? Here's what to do:

1. Take a speaker (like an amp), and lay it flat - on a chair, floor, table - with the speaker pointed towards the ceiling
2. Place your snare top-side-down on top of the speaker
3. Use a re-amp box to send the recording of the snare top into the speaker - you'll get the cleanest sound if you heavily gate the snare, so that you just hear the initial transient with a short decay
4. Use a microphone of your choice to record the bottom of the snare - ideally, it will be a similar mic/placement to what you used on the top
5. Don't forget to invert the phase!

Other Ideas

Want some gritty rock vocals? Send 'em through an fx pedal (my favorite is the Sansamp), or right to an amp! We did this all over the album - basically anytime you hear some crunchy vocals, it's because they've been sent to an amp of some kind. As an added bonus, you can automate various feedback changes by twisting knobs during playback - you can hear this most clearly on Time in Windows, on Andrew's vocals.

What is it?

When I was first learning how to record, I bought a Tascam 414 Portastudio tape recorder (way before mk.gee made them into a cool pedal), and had no idea what to do with it. One thing I *did* know is that it sounded cool as hell to record something at "High" speed (with the tape moving twice as quickly), and slow it back down to "Normal". It made things half as fast, and twice as low in pitch - even better, it made my voice sound absolutely demonic, which was immensely fun. When recording to tape, there is a direct correlation between the speed that the tape is moving (the "rate"), and the pitch of what is on the tape. When recording in a digital format, this might not always be the case - nowadays, there are time-stretching algorithms, which are able to preserve the pitch of a recording, even when the rate changes. While useful (and very capable of creating new and fun kinds of glitches), I have a soft spot in my heart for the old ways.

My experiments with recording at double-speed and slowing it back down were an early attempt at what we might call "Varispeed" - intentionally recording something at a rate that is either faster or slower than it should be, then bringing it back to the normal rate.

In my DAW of choice (Reaper), there is a Rate fader, right in the middle of the transport section, which I never thought to manipulate until recording this album. As luck would have it, it works in exactly the same way as my old tape deck - twice as fast is also twice as high in pitch, and vice-versa. This discovery led to quite a lot of fun.

Tracking with Varispeed

One of the more practical and subtle applications of Varispeed: let's say that you've written a vocal melody, but it's out of your register. Try slowing the rate down until you can sing comfortably and confidently, then record your vocals. Bring it back up to speed, and you'll notice a very Alvin and the Chipmunks-quality to your voice, but it will be the right notes. If you like the sound (and I do - I used it on Broken Mirror and Inner Gleam), then keep it. If you want to make things a little more natural-sounding, you can open up your pitch-shifter of choice (ReaPitch, in Reaper), and use the "formant shift" to lower the formants in your vocals. If you fiddle around, you can find a pretty natural sound.

Want to add some ethereal backing to your song? Record an instrument in a high register at double-speed, then bring it back down to see it stretched beyond recognition - we used this on a few different songs to create pads.

Varispeed and Reverb

My favorite use of Varispeed on this album is one that is probably not even noticeable to anyone but me, and is a bit hard to explain - let's see how I manage. Let's imagine that you are using a spring reverb tank to add some reverb to a snare drum. It takes about a second for the decay to stop - way too long for your liking. You *could* add some damping on top of the spring, but let's explore an alternative. If we think of the physical properties of a spring as "fixed" - if we imagine that the spring will *always* reverberate for about a second when hit - then we can use varispeed to control the length of the decay. If we slow the rate of our snare drum down and send it to the reverb, then it will react the same way as before - it will be hit, and will reverberate for a second, then stop. When we speed that recording back up, something magical happens: the decay becomes shorter on each hit, because our one-second reverb time has now been sped up. We can use this in the opposite direction, too: send some sparse vocals into a reverb take at a higher rate, then slow it back down to create a lush, pad-like decay.

We can extend this principle to physical spaces too! I wasn't totally happy with how the drums were sounding in the room mics that I used when we were doing full-band tracking, but I *do* like the sound of our room. What's a girl to do? Create a special mix of drums (heavy on snare, medium on kick, light on overheads), send that through a bass amp, and set up a pair of omni-directional mics at equal distance from the amp - et voila, we have conjured a room reverb track. However, I still wasn't satisfied with how things sounded - too wimpy. So, using the principle from above, I thought that I could increase the rate of my drums, send that into the room, and slow it back down to create a larger, darker space. It wasn't perfect, but it felt satisfyingly real, and is what we ended up using as the drum room tracks on most of our songs.

To make the drones that we used on Iron Dog, we used a transducer (~$5) which I wired up with a 1/4" jack and slapped onto the headstock of Simon's guitar. A transducer is basically a speaker that turns whatever you place it on into a resonanting plane. If you happen to send a signal into the transducer (say, an electric guitar), then place the transducer onto whatever is creating the sound, you can get some truly wild feedback, and essentially infinite sustsain on a guitar.

If you're anything like me, then odds are overwhelmingly high that you have more instruments/microphones than you do inputs. Most entry-level mixers (including the Zoom L12) only have 8 or so useful inputs, but a whole band tends to require quite a bit more than that. Here are some ideas for how you can record as much as possible without sacrificing quality.

The Y Cable Trick

I don't remember exactly where I heard about this - I think in Sylvia Massey's book Recording Unhinged. Here's the basic idea: it's really great to record both heads of a drum to get a fuller picture of the instrument, but recording each side separately would require two whole inputs. You can use a "y cable" (pictured below) to turn two inputs into one output, but you run into an issue here - the top and bottom heads of a drum are out of phase with each other, and combining them into one signal in this way would result in a nearly silent output.

Conveniently, it is *really* easy to invert the phase of an xlr cable - pop it open, and flip the red/white wires. Here's an example - the left-hand cable is the default, and the right-hand cable is the inverted one.

You can get a 5-pack of these cables for about $20, and it took me about 10 minutes to convert the whole 5 pack into these "prepared" cables. Worth the money and worth the time - it's much better than trying to revive an anemic tom which you only recorded the top of. You can also use this on a snare drum, as long as you are okay with locking in the amount of snare bottom that you're using - once it's recorded, there's no way to disentangle the signals.

• Andrew: Guitar (solo 2), singing
• Brendan: Keys, words, main singing
• Eli: Bass
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Guitar (solo 1), singing

Iron dog
Chase the last of the cars
Mirror eyes
Glass in his paw

Rusty cog
Fossilize it in tar
Frozen tire
Caught in his jaw

Oh, oh, oh iron dog
[guitar solo - Simon]

Copper fang
Tear the pleather apart
Twisted scraps
Bended and charred

Bark and bang
Motor oil in his heart
Old hubcap
Playing fetch in the yard

Oh, oh, oh iron dog
[guitar solo - Andrew]

• Andrew: Guitar, main singing, music and words
• Brendan: Keys, singing
• Eli: Bass
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Guitar, singing

Keep them busy and they will sit down
Slowly finding little will amount
Hurry up now— can’t you get that clout
Time is quicksand— just poke your head on out

Just a window of time
To get around— to get it right
Broken ladders broken toys
But they aren’t far beyond the point

We have bodies that we must maintain
Drops of water can’t escape the drain
When to nourish and find the light of day
Keep on dripping or evaporate

Just a window of time
To get around— to get it right
Broken ladders broken toys
But they aren’t far beyond the point

• Andrew: Guitar (solo), singing
• Brendan: Keys, main singing, words and music
• Eli: Bass, singing
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Acoustic + electric guitar

Dry ice on naked skin
Leave no trace of where I've been
Sand the tips off fingers
I won't be found out

I hide myself in time
Cut the thread when I was twenty nine
Cells rearranging
They know who I am
And who I've been

Baby teeth in a dixie cup
Dead fly in a pile of dust
Every body's changing
Always shedding skin

So I make myself again
Can't repair where the hair is thin
School picture of somebody
Only share a name
I love him just the same

• Andrew: Guitar, main singing, words and music
• Brendan: Keys, singing
• Eli: Bass
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Acoustic + electric guitar, singing

Gleam– fallen petals
Seldom settle, dancing with light
What did I once spy
These little eyes once were so bright
Through the light of the trees I could suture the shade
Not a need for a scripture to conjure a flame
Unattended but not forfeited
Phlox and the fox
Claws sunk in deep to what once was

Tucked inside
Slid under dormant tiles
(tiles) Can you get a grip
(grip) On a solid stone
(stone) in a garden below
(know) (wow)

After this aster
Within the quantum-lit pasture
Stardust is half of it passed on
What’s left the innermost photon – when chasing

Vessels
Sent to
Find roots
Inwards
Feign not
Full bloom
Finds you
Hands out

Seal must be broken
Words unspoken— clouds of ennui
Flame sits in stasis
One kinesis longing to be

• Andrew: Guitar (solo), singing
• Brendan: Keys, main singing, words and music
• Eli: Bass
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Guitar

Green fingers
unfurling,
reach for the breeze.
old tendons;
winter sows
atrophies

Dicotyledonous -
split at the seam.
Twin sisters
Sun Hunters
Hide and Seek

Twist and turn,
Pirouette
Take what you need.
Dance of the
Dawn chorus
Nature leads

Skyscraper,
Cloud shaper,
Bathed in the light
One day you'll
Share all the
warmth you hide....

• Andrew: Guitar
• Brendan: Keys, music
• Eli: Bass
• Ross: Drums, trumpet
• Simon: Guitar (solo)

:AAB:

A Section
|Gm6|Gm6-Abmaj7b5|Gm6|Abmaj7b5|
|Gm6|Gm6-Abmaj7b5|Bb6-A7|Abmaj7-Gbmaj7|

B Section
|EbMaj7 | % | C7 | % |
|Dbmaj7b5 | % | D7 | % |
|EbMaj7 | % | C7/E | % |
|Fsus4 | % | D7/F# | % |

• Andrew: Guitar (solo), main singing, words and music
• Brendan: Keys, singing
• Eli: Bass, flute
• Ross: Drums, trumpet, singing
• Simon: Guitar, singing

In one ear,
Out a dozen
mouths running
doubting nothing
Heard it from whom?
The credible skew
On the news

Stiff-neckin’
Set in sediment
“Don’t tell me
I placed all my bets”
Tales we tell
Dipped in zeal
For the feels

CHORUS
Let’s discuss
Let's Discuss
Get right on down to it

My cousins
We once saw the same
Light from the source
Invite a change
A fertile mind
A skeptic heart
Beats

AABABCAABCCDE

A:
| Gm7 | - | - | - |

B:
| Bbmaj7 Bo | Eø Ebmaj7 | Cm7 | C7 |

C:
| Gm7 | C5addb7 | C7 (Abmaj7#4) |
| Gm7 | C5addb7 | C7 (Abmaj7#4) |

D:
| D7(#11) | - | - | - |
| - | - | - | - |
| D/A D/Bb | D/Eb D | B5 | B7 |

E:
| F#m7 | B5addb7 | B7 (Gmaj7#4) |
| F#m7 | B5addb7 | B7 (Gmaj7#4) |

• Andrew: Guitar
• Brendan: Keys, Bass
• Eli: Music, Guitar
• Ross: Drums
• Simon: Emotional Support

harmonics Ebmaj7(13)
Abmaj7 | Ebmaj13
Ab | Bb | Cbdim

Riff

Repeat A and B section

Ebmaj7 | Bbmaj7/F

• Andrew: Guitar (solo 1), main singing, words and music
• Brendan: Keys (solo 2), singing
• Eli: Bass (solo 3), singing
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Guitar (solo 4), singing

Rogue lit by the moon, clashing on slicing through
Eyes under a veil, cut by fronds of a tail

Drew with a knife– Mark of Cain
Conditioning ricochets
Clenching a fist— rightfully now
Foe that we made
Take your claim
And make off within

Into the blue – baring scars pink in hue
Crowns slightly displaced deem this one a waste

• Andrew: Guitar (solos), nylon guitar, singing
• Brendan: Keys, banjo, singing, words
• Eli: Bass, nylon guitar, singing
• Ross: Drums, singing, words and music
• Simon: Main singing

Hands where I can see 'em
You already know
I’ve got the cash, I've got the steel
Ain’t nobody goes
I came in like a fault line
been tearin' up your town I am the storm that's passing through
It never tickles down

CHORUS
All your blood, your sweat that stains the ground
I’ve been stealing it just to build my cloud
Silver-lined, tailor made
(No more hiding in your shade)
The people work this land
But all the harvest is in my hands
Empty field, barren plains
(Now it's time we take the reigns)

Empty out them pockets
Loosen up them rings
Might take a golden tooth or two
I wanna hear you sing
I leave you in the river
The banks are running red
I am the thunder rollin' in
And this is what I said

[CHORUS]

(We won’t give in, we won’t give in, again)
(We won’t give in, we won’t give in again, again)

[CHORUS]

[CHORUS]

Chorus/A section:
F#m - D - E - C#
D - Bm - C# - C#
F#m - D - E - Fdim
Bm - A - E - E

Verse/B Section:
F#m - C# - F#m - C# -
E - E - Fdim - Fdim
F#m - C# - F#m - C# -
E - E - Fdim - Fdim

• Andrew: Guitar, main singing, words
• Brendan: Keys, singing, words and music
• Eli: Bass, singing
• Ross: Drums, singing
• Simon: Guitar, singing

Cells stay safe for seven years
Dawning self that slithers out
Just out of reach
Going- now gone

CHORUS
Memory's a broken mirror
Revenants of us appear
But nobody seems the same
Endlessly they rearrange
The words reverse, the faces change
They wander and can't go home

Cleft perception- looking back
All that time spent counting cracks
As they arose- do they belong
Under your nose?

CHORUS
Memory's a broken mirror
Revenants of us appear
But nobody seems the same
Endlessly they rearrange
The words reverse, the faces change
They wander and can't go home

FORM: ABCABCDBC

A Section

| Em | Cmaj7 | A/C# | Bsus - B |
| Em | Cmaj7 | A/C# | Bsus - B |
| Am | Gmaj7 | F#m7b5 | Bsus - B |

B Section

| E6 | Cmaj7 | C#m | Bm7b5 |
| Amaj7 | Fmaj7b5 | F#m | Bbmaj7b5 |
| E6 | Cmaj7 | C#m | Bm7b5 |
| Amaj7 | Fmaj7b5 | F#m | Bbmaj7b5 |

C Section

|Bbmaj7b5 | % | % | % |

D Section

|: Fmaj7b5 | % | F#m | # :|