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"Then, after Dave Grohl joined the band, the new stuff was recorded at Sound City in Los Angeles. That's pretty much a no-frills studio. It has a big, live tracking room, there's an old Neve board, a 24-track analogue Studer tape machine, a good collection of tube mics, some nice
LA2A compressors, but not a lot of outboard gear."
Recording was approached very much from the live perspective, with the drummer set up in the middle of the room and the bass and guitars isolated for separation. Nonetheless, Vig was determined to push the band in order to achieve the right results, and to this end he had Krist Novoselic redo some of his bass parts and Kurt Cobain performing quite a number of guitar overdubs. "He doubled a lot of the rhythm guitars," Vig recalls, "and he overdubbed clean and distorted tracks in almost all of the little solo sections."
Band and producer shared the engineering credit for the album, yet Vig confirms that this was hardly the truth of the matter. So, does this mean that Kurt, Krist and Dave were the only ones with their fingers on the faders? "Er, no... At the time almost every project that I was involved with had me co-producing and engineering," says Vig. "I had kind of grown up in the punk scene, when a lot of the bands wanted to have a say in everything, so I didn't particularly care if I had solo credit for that stuff. In fact, if you look at a lot of the records that I've done since then, many of them say that they are co-productions, whatever that means. The bands' input may be marginal, but I still like to collaborate."
EXTRA DRY
Utilising
a Neumann U67 and an LA2A, most of Cobain's vocals were recorded in the small Studio B at Sound City and ran straight to tape. The results alternate between a smooth, compressed, phasey sound and one of extreme dryness when the voice sits alone, yet minimal effects were employed. "Kurt really had an amazing voice," confirms the producer. "He could scream and it would have this great rasp and tone to it, and yet he could also bring it down really quiet and sound so world-weary and exhausted and intimate. It's hard to put your finger on it, but not many artists have that kind of voice or persona. Kurt had this brilliant pop sensibility in terms of melodic structure and phrasing, and yet he loved the attitude of punk, and those are the two things that collided and made Nirvana so special.
"In the studio I used a fair amount of compression on the vocals so that I could control his dynamics, and I also got Kurt to do some double-tracking. I'm a big fan of doubling, particularly on choruses, so he did that quite a bit on the record and that's part of what the sound is. Andy Wallace, the mix engineer, had a little bit of tight slap echo -- almost a double echo -- on a couple of the songs, and he also used a little bit of reverb and so on, but for the most part the vocals were left fairly dry. That really was the approach that the band and myself wanted to take. We didn't want to have it too washed out with reverb or echo, and it was the same with the drums and the guitars; we wanted everything to be fairly dry and in your face.
"I actually started getting more and more into recording everything very dry, and getting away from ambient mics, when I worked on Gish with Smashing Pumpkins. Everything would be really in your face, and then if you wanted to add reverb or echo later you could. You could put it farther back in the mix, but if we wanted something to be way up front in the mix you could also do that. That's how I've worked on pretty much all of the records since then. I don't really like to record with a lot of ambience, particularly on vocals or guitars. I will put ambient mics on the drums, but I also like to have tight mics.
"In the case of Dave Grohl's kit I used
an AKG D12 and a FET 47 on the kick, and then we built a drum tunnel consisting of old drum shells attached to the bass drum and extended out about six feet. That way you can move a mic back three to four feet, and the FET 47 was a little farther away from where the front head would have been. By having the drum tunnel, you isolate the room, so that you don't get all of the cymbal bleed, or whatever."
Otherwise the drum miking was fairly standard: a Shure SM57 on the snare, along with an AKG 451, Sennheiser 421s on the toms, AKG 414s and Neumann KM84s on the cymbals, and Neumann U87s for distant room mics.
DISTORTED REALITY
The guitars, on the other hand, were a different story, often characterised by assorted types of distortion and, in some cases, a sound so overdriven that the end result bears little resemblance to the instrument that originated it.
"Aside from a Marshall on just a few things, the amps that we primarily used were a Mesa Boogie,
a Fender Bassman -- which is one of my favourites -- and
a Vox AC30 for the cleaner overdriven sounds," Vig recalls. "However, there's not a lot of processing going on. Kurt had a Rat distortion pedal that he used on a couple of songs, and on a track like 'Breed' we just DI'd the Rat, we didn't go to an amp. We split the signal and we ran it to an amp, and we also took the DI and ran it right into the board so that it had much more of a fuzzy white-noise kind of sound to it. Then we blended the two together to get something that sounded cool."
The extremely warm, fuzzy sounds f Novoselic's bass guitar also resulted from a combination of DI and miking. "I like to put a couple of mics on the bass, even though I usually only end up using one," says Vig. "On Nevermind we placed a FET 47 and a Sennheiser RE20, and we then just used the 47, which has more of a thumpy, mid-range sound to it. Krist used an Ampeg SVT amp, which I'm a big fan of, while in terms of the DI I don't like to use normal DIs. I use a customised Tech 21 Sansamp, and I have a live split, so you can use it as a DI but it produces more of an amp sound. You can dirty it up, you can add some tone to it, and it's just much more usable as a DI signal as opposed to a straight DI, which to me sounds really thin.
"As for that kind of washy sound on 'Come As You Are', that was an effect that Kurt had, called the Small Clone, which is basically just a flangy chorus box but with a very distinctive sound. It's really kind of wide and watery. Not subtle, put it that way. Then we double-tracked his guitars on that so it had even more of a wide sound to it."
-travis
guhlenn
. As long as you get the answers you're looking for, the system works, and if you haven't found what you're asking about, ask again when the banter has subsided (or during, whatever). Also, this might be something more appropriate for the recording techniques, guitar/bass, and microphone forums, yet it was proabably either easier to post it here (no biggie) or you weren't familiar with the set-up here (no biggie). Please don't take offense to the banter (no biggie), because it's gonna happen anyway...