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Recording sure can be a bitch sometime. The illustrious Under Eden studio (aka UEHQ) started out in our vocalist's basement hallway and bedroom a couple years back, which is where we recorded everything but drums for the first half of our next album. He moved into an apartment, but I bought a house with a finished basement, so everything moved to my house. Same gear (guitar rack, cab, mics, interface, guitars, pickups, etc.) with the only obvious difference being the room where the cab resides. We got through all of my parts, but decided to go back and tweak a couple of songs from the earlier sessions because we weren't satisfied with how a few parts were actually played. We'd written down all the settings prior to moving the gear to my place, except for the power amp and mic preamp levels. It shouldn't be a big deal to get those dialed back in.
Wrong. Holy jeeze, we spent no less than four hours fighting with the tone for five minutes worth of recording. All the time spent during the first two hours ended up being a complete waste when I discovered that my bypassed Rocktron Multi-Valve was very much "hot" and set to +4db rather than the -10db we'd written down. Starting over with our adjustments, we still couldn't get the right tone with that guitar (basswood Dinky with a Duncan Invader in the bridge) despite everything being the same, right down to the kind of strings and picks. The solution? An old mahogany Hamer Californian Elite with a PAF Pro. Normally, these two guitars don't sound anything alike, but one way or another, the tone was almost an exact match.
The good news is that I'm down to the last couple of changes on the final track. The bad news is that now we have to repeat the process for my brother's rhythm parts on the same two songs before he can move on to five new songs. Due to conflicting schedules, it'll be two weeks before he can even get started. Ugh.
Wrong. Holy jeeze, we spent no less than four hours fighting with the tone for five minutes worth of recording. All the time spent during the first two hours ended up being a complete waste when I discovered that my bypassed Rocktron Multi-Valve was very much "hot" and set to +4db rather than the -10db we'd written down. Starting over with our adjustments, we still couldn't get the right tone with that guitar (basswood Dinky with a Duncan Invader in the bridge) despite everything being the same, right down to the kind of strings and picks. The solution? An old mahogany Hamer Californian Elite with a PAF Pro. Normally, these two guitars don't sound anything alike, but one way or another, the tone was almost an exact match.
The good news is that I'm down to the last couple of changes on the final track. The bad news is that now we have to repeat the process for my brother's rhythm parts on the same two songs before he can move on to five new songs. Due to conflicting schedules, it'll be two weeks before he can even get started. Ugh.
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