How to get that punk sound?

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he's talking about a short and fast delay that is relatively loud (compared to the levels of your reverb, etc) on the guitars that will thicken it up. I do this to vocals and guitars, especially when I only have 2 guitars tracked in the song and the song sounds a bit empty, delay helps.
 
I think that a discussion of what Punk is and why is started is the biggest waste of time ever. Absolute bullshit. I have only ever listened to punk rock, and it is a very personal thing. All you can really talk about is what it means to You. I hate the word poseur. It is all an opinion. Whatever. Sorry to vent, it is just that people seem to have to prove how punk they are, or how they understand punk while everyone else doesn't. Crass and Blink 182 would both, in my opinion, fit under the umbrella of punk rock. I know that many people would disagree with this, and I applaud it. At least people are using their minds. At any rate, darnold, most of the best recordings from Epitaph and almost all of the Fat Wreck Chords records have been produced by Ryan Greene. He has a discussion board that he posts at himself at www.ryangreene.com and he answers most of the questions that people ask him. I have learned a lot there, and you may like to check it out.

Matty
 
matty_boy said:
I think that a discussion of what Punk is and why is started is the biggest waste of time ever. Absolute bullshit. I have only ever listened to punk rock, and it is a very personal thing. All you can really talk about is what it means to You. I hate the word poseur. It is all an opinion. Whatever. Sorry to vent, it is just that people seem to have to prove how punk they are, or how they understand punk while everyone else doesn't. Crass and Blink 182 would both, in my opinion, fit under the umbrella of punk rock. I know that many people would disagree with this, and I applaud it. At least people are using their minds. At any rate, darnold, most of the best recordings from Epitaph and almost all of the Fat Wreck Chords records have been produced by Ryan Greene. He has a discussion board that he posts at himself at www.ryangreene.com and he answers most of the questions that people ask him. I have learned a lot there, and you may like to check it out.

Matty
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Well...Punk (both the music, and the subculture) is whatever it evolves into, like I said, if Punks start listening into polka, then polka is now punk music. But the overall sound that people associate with punk was designed to drive people away and make fun of bands that actually took themselves seriously.

As to what is punk? I have know idea what it is now, as I am an old sellout, I can only speak to how it was a couple of decades ago, and even then only with authority on what it was like in my part of the world. But punk is not a style of music...music is/was a very small part of the whole.

I did get a chance to spend a couple a couple of hours talking to a 16 year old punk out in LA a few months back, we sat around exchanging stories, and I swear our stories were interchangable. His friends and mine would have fit right in with each other. The only differance between what was going on in his scene(man I hate that word), and ours back in the dark ages was the lack of harrasment by the police. Seems the cops, at least in LA, had gotten used to them, and didnt screw with them like they used to with us. He tried to get me to go to a show out there, but that would have been totally pathetic, an old man like myself hanging out with a bunch of kids trying to be anti-something or other after long day of solving a VPN problem at Northrop.

As for the P word, it should never be applied to an actual person. For instance, it was ok to say "I hate poseurs", but never ok to say "that guy is a poseur", unless the guy was being a total ass, and trying to put out the "I'm more punk than you" bullshit. Then it was pretty much open season.
 
Wow...

I'll never understand why it always ends up in these strange 'right attitude' discussions. On one of our concerts I heard a discussion that seemed to go on for some hours (!!) whether cell phones are 'ok' for a punk or not... Ridiculous...

Why do loads of punks take themselves so F***ing serious... Maybe that's why I insist on doing punk rock... I never took myself so serious... But I'm kinda too old, too (36) for punk rock - never mind I like it, and the kids seem to like that...

Darnold, your remarks were really nice - I found it is REALLY hard to mix punk rock... Nevertheless I'm trying to use ambience on my mixes. Mostly early reflections for the colour and a little L/R slap back delay fitting to the groove. Sometimes a gentle touch of verb tail. I find this somehow pens the song up a lot. It also helps in separating instruments. But you have to be damn careful as it muddens up everything VERY fast. This is one reason why I always end up in doing a multiband mix compression while mixing... The compression (that I feel to be necessary) keeps oon pushing the verb so much up that the result gets a lot muddier. I even tried to compress the dry mix only and add some uncompressed verbs to have the control over the verbs, but with my external triple c it seems to be much easier.

The thing is, a lot of people will probably think that I'm doing EVERYTHING wrong from my mixing process standpoint, but I did not get any mix I liked with reasonable efforts without this strange technique. I had to create dozens of mixes with different verb and EQ settings, the to 'master' and see what the result was... Really hated it.

What is really hard in punk rock or punk is the fact that you have to work a lot with different frequencies to give every instrument it's 'space'. It becomes very hard as all instruments (distorted guitar, bass voice and drums) have loads of possibilities to fight each other. But otoh, when I separated the instrument too good, suddenly the 'punk' feeling was gone as it became too transparent. And here's the thing where I think it becomes really hard: you have to know how to unmudden everything, but have to be able to hold yourself back from creating a 'chaotic mainstream' production - really hard to do.

Ciao

aXel
 
Step 1: Hold saience and invoke spirit of Sid Vicious.

Step 2: Buy requisite Alkaline Trio T-shirt.

Step3: Black wired-rim glasses.

Rinse, Repeat as desired.
 
darnold said:
The kick should be 3-12k dominant in sound, but with a bit of oomph still around the 90k.
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90k? I guess that would be the ubiquitous sopranino kick? :D
(Finally, a good reason for 192 kHz sampling rates!)
 
Heh. Discussing punk rock has been something ive really despised. I havnt really had to think about what punk rock really as or a "definition" until everyone tried to be punk rock. I just remember i was one of those kids who was a skater, wore the baggy pance, and the weird clothes, that everyone thought was a freak and thought i was stupid, but i didnt care. I remember when in my town they were gonna ban baggy pance! Lots of crap.

Ddgr - Good job explaining it. You are right, ive always thought as a punk as a life style and not a music (ive thought about that before and forgot to mention it). I just got some of my punk CDs and listened them through trying to figure out your opinion about how they were meant to sound like crap. Yes! I see that compared to every other type of music, it sound extremely crappy and obnoxious. However, the recordings are still pretty damn good.

matty-boy - Very cool. Thanks for my correction. I always thought that Fat Mike did all the producing. I thought he did some of it at least. Thanks a ton for that link btw, ive always wanted to talk to the producer because i started my studio to be more of a ska/punk record company which is what i prefer to do. But this town is more of a country and alternative town and soo i mostly do that style of music.

My last thoughts are. Im glad Blink 182 is falling out of their trend. Radio punk seems to be dieing down. This means to me that i wont have to worry so much any more about whos a poseur and whos not. I started to not care. When i went to warped tour 2 years ago, i was completely disgusted by the type of people i saw there. This last year i decided i didnt care and went because i liked the bands. Speaking of warped tour, it seems to be getting worse and worse. Vans is really trying to make money from it. What happened all the free stickers and stuff? However, i had to put my mind away from that because this years warped tour was really good. The bands had alot of good views on whats been goin on lately.

Anyway. I also listened very closely to what i was hearing on most of those recordings. I noticed on the drums, especially snare, is there is a good amount of delay on it. Its not reverb. And it makes them sound really big. The guitars from what i can hear are recorded more than once and panned left and right and stuff. The guitars sound like they are really low mid dominant, which is probably why they sound so big and powerful. The kick on some of those still amazes me. The kick is extremely in your face and punchy. Im still having troubles hearing where the bass resides though. You cant really hear with the guitars so i think it is there to blend with the guitars and use the very low frequencies. The vocals sound very mid dominant also (high mid) and compressed to mad. There is barely if any, reverb in the mix as far as i can tell.

One thing that im gonna change next time i do a punk recording, is to forget about putting less important instruments behind the mix. From what i can tell, nothing is behind. EVERYTHING is in your face and loud. Even the guitars (which i usually put a little more distant). This means dry dry dry. But dont be afraid to put delay on there. My sweetwater engineer said that Delay is reverb without the room harmonics that muffle and make it sound distant. Delays are just the same sound being repeated over and over, where a reverb calculates the room effects. I tried alittle delay on some stuff, and the amount i liked the most was about 120-140ms, and very little spin time (at least for snare). The guitars i would think a little less like 60-80. Of course this also dependends on what delay unit your using. Im using just a 1x delay.

Ive been listening to some music the entire time ive been on here. The bass and guitars are the only ones im having problems figureing out where they fit. Im gonna say the bass is in 200hz and the guitars 400 hz. Also, i dont know if i mentioned this before, but i really think the snare is much more mid dominant also, which means it might be better to use something besides a 57 on it.

Cant think of much more to say, but im planning on getting some of my friends into the studio in a few weeks to do some major expirementing. I will let everyone know how it goes and what i figure out. I will also post some mp3s of them so you can hear what it makes what sound like what.

Thanks.

Danny
 
Yes littledog. 90k is where the kick really shines. Its this really high pitch that curls your ear drums. This is what really gives punk its sounds. Being a man born with unnormal ears, i was able to hear this sweet frequencies. Now if i could only get those damn whales to shut up.

Happy Recording.

Danny
 
High darnold...

You might try one thing with the bass and the guitars - give the bass a main peak at about 600kHz and set a minor peak of one of the guitars at 400 Hz. The result is bats flying against your windows... Then try the bass at 600-800 Hz and it might work... On the mixes I did that way, it worked quite ok, the only problem was that I put up the bd with too low freqs that I would not hear on my monitors. When theses song are being played over lower quality stereos, they tend to sound a little too flat, but on subwoofer systems or PAs, they is so much BD that you (lterally) wanna puke... Might get better the next time :D

But the bass being above the lower max of the guitars gives a hard punch on the guitar (esp. with the muted stuff!) but the bass is really hard and 'bites' through...

aXel
 
Re: werd

darnold said:

I think what i am trying to say, is that there are alot of very good musicians that play punk. The drummers are usually some of the best ive seen (besides really good jazz players). They express there emotions just as good as any other type of music, which is the important part. recording a punk band would require you to "think" instead of using the same old techniques you would use for any other band. This is why i say it takes a very good engineer to mix it to sound good.
Danny
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Being a drummer and a local punk engineer god, I second this. A GOOD punk drummer can play anything, however....you can get some of these rock players to have some of the speed the punk players have.

This thread is heaven for me and I can't wait to get my punk rock samples up.

Does anyone that has posted in this thread have any mp3 samples? link us up!
 
Well, every punk drummer I played with had some problems with brushes and a nice swing feeling... But who cares. At least a lot of them is really fit in the rock/pop area...

aXel
 
Here's my rundown on modern punk, which I record a lot of, as I play bass in a punk band and run sound for a few:

@ = "around"

Bass Drum: Tune the drum and stick a D112 a few inches from the inner head, off to the side, cut @ 400 to remove the "boxiness," boost @ 5K for the attack, compress according to the drummer you're working with, preferably there won't be a lot. Roll-off lows.

Snare: Mic the top and bottom, check for phase. Boost the top @ 250. Compress (If you habe a good drummer, slightly, otherwise...lots). Roll-off lows.

Toms: Mic the top heads, cut @ 400, boost @ 5K. Roll-off lows

Overheads: Cut the lows (utilize the roll-offs on the mic/board). Boost at either 10 or 12 k.

I compress the bass drume and snare a little. Sometimes the toms, if compressors are available. Otherwise I'll leave some headroom to do it in mixdown, which sucks, but usually works.

Bass: mic a 10" speaker with a D112, and take it direct as well, mix as needed. A LD mic on a 15 or 18, backed off a little can add some smooth lows. Compress slightly, to resolve peaks and unsteadyness.

1st (rhythm) Guitar: A D112 and a high output dynamic (like a beta 57 or a Sennheaiser 845) backed off a little, to grab the "mid-highs." Maybe a LD condensor a ways back.

Guitar 2 (leads?): A beta 57 or something on the speaker, backed off an inch or 8. LD condensor as needed.

Vocals: A LD condesor and some compression.

Anything else gets a small amout of compression and mid-eq.

Mixdown:

Drums are usually ok, maybe a little more EQ and compression to solve any problems. Snare gets a tiny amount of reverb. Really small.

Bass mic gets a boost @ 200-300. The direct gets a boost @ 400 and maybe some lows. A little more compression works, depending.

Guitars are usually ok, slight boosts @ 2.5 or 5k to bring them out some more. A little boost @ 800 (or higher) can add a little energy...

Vox usually get a slight eq boost, anywhere from 500 to 5k. Whatever makes them jump out. Compress as needed. Effects get added as requested.

Anything else, compress and mid-eq as needed.

Slight effects can bee added, but that's a creative point.

A little compression on the L/R sum can add something, if warranted.

Anyways, this is what works in my tight little basement, with my equipment. It seems to be a good template for unknown equipment at live shows as well. Adjust as necessary...its only a template. And if it sucks, figure out what works. I like the Fat Wreckhords/Epitaph sound...I can achieve that. But I can get whatever is asked for, as well.

That's a basic rundown of what works for me. I'm surprised I'm so winded, considering this is punk we're talking about.

Then again, I've won Jazz awards in school and have 10 years worth of formal theory and technic - playing piano, trumpet, bass, and drums. Hell, my rhythm guitarist plays upright bass in the University's orchestra.

Digression aside, here's my template. Destroy as needed.
 
you asked to destroy as needed.


I listen to some of the fat wreck bands in my car with a big 15" sub. I can guarantee they are not rolling off the lows on the kick like you said. Point blank.

Also, with punk you probably do not want a LD condenser on a guitar cab...it's just not in your face sound.

Here's my method for recording punk:

-audix d-1 on top snare pointed at point of impact for mass attack
-SM57/audix d3 on bottom of snare out of phase with lots of bass roll off to get out the kick leakage
-audix d-2 on toms. boost at 200hz (boost at 100hz for lower toms), boost at 6-8khz
-audix d-4/shure beta 52 on kick just barely in the hole pointed at beater.
-at4033/akgc1000s on overheads and hihat. cut everything below 300hz to isolate.

all drums get 3:1 compression at 4ish db. Maybe some limiting too.

guitar close miked with audix d3 with little eq done on the board as possible. eq should be done on the amp. also gets compressed 2:1 at 3db (don't laugh)...this makes the guitar a little tighter and with a clever compressor, favorable coloring will occur--I use a dbx 160a for this.

At mixdown, further but lighter compression is used along with slight brick wall limiting.

At mastering, small ratios of compression are used and soft and hard limiting is used. The mix is brightened and there is a small cut at 315hz to get rid of the mud. There is also a boost at 30hz to further suck out dynamic range.

The result is in yo face smoothness that doesn't even compare to the ultravibe pleasure gilette mach 3 turbo.
 
Like I said, that's what works for me...

I only use a LD condensor in addition to the other mic(s), if needed.
 
Ive been reading up the stuff from Brian Greene (the producer, engineer for Fat Wreck Chords). I was expecting some really cool tips from him and some obscure techniques, but it turns out he does basically average. 57 on snare, close mic kick along with LD condenser a few feet back on kick, overheads however are low cutted at 300hz usually. Bass is generic, and guitar is just a 57 and sometimes a senheiser md421 mixed in with it (close miced). He says not to compress the guitars.

Of course this is just brians opinions on how it should so, but it does sound good. This really brought insight to me on how it wasnt so much the equipment, but the engineer. Ive decided from now on to keep my stuff simple, and less is more type of thing.

Of course compression on guitar could help it in a few ways, but its not really needed to get that "punk sound".

fenix - you are right about my comment with the kick drum. I dont remember what i said before but i changed my mind. I clearly think now that the kick should be in 90hz and 5k dominance. And the bass should be 200-400 and 800hz dominant. I tried this with the bass the other day (Ampeg SVT PRO 3) and it sounded exactly how i like it, and my brother in law who is a great bass's liked the sound also. The kick definately has a good oomph in the 90hz region because i also feel it in my car also. Really good punch in the back.

int - thanks for the comments. Why a Beta 57 instead of a normal 57 though? d112 on the kick should work good but i dont really like the sound of the d112 myself. Also the d112 on guitar amp? ill try that out cept i would think the 4k boost on it would give a really harsh sound, but ill try it with my e-602 cause it sound like a good idea to get a good bass there too.

This has been a pretty good discussion so far, and i cant wait to do this next band.

later,

danny
 
The compression on guitar is just something you might wanna add on muted sounds.... If your guitarists play more open and then totally stopped sound, you prolly won't need it...

aXel
 
darnold said:

int - thanks for the comments. Why a Beta 57 instead of a normal 57 though? d112 on the kick should work good but i dont really like the sound of the d112 myself. Also the d112 on guitar amp? ill try that out cept i would think the 4k boost on it would give a really harsh sound, but ill try it with my e-602 cause it sound like a good idea to get a good bass there too.
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I'm not a big fan of the regular 57...although I own and use 3. The higher output of the Beta works a little better for me. The D112 alone sound like crap, but with a combination of the 2 or three other mics, I can get a pretty full sound.
 
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volltreffer said:
The compression on guitar is just something you might wanna add on muted sounds.... If your guitarists play more open and then totally stopped sound, you prolly won't need it...

aXel
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Another reason I forgot to add about putting compression on distorted guitar is that if you have a slow attack setting on the compressor, when the palm mutes occur...oh jeez...just heaven. I don't know how to describe the sound, but the attack from the palm mutting is awesome. Listen to blink 182's "all the small things" (yeah, we know...not "real" punk) there's lots of this going on and you might be able to hear it on some of those fat wreck bands too.
 
I had to learn this the hard way... I always believed in the dogma 'no compression on distorted guitar' that you read everywhere... And it's sooo logical! The tubes and the distortion DOES compress... I somehow discovered it by accident, as I was already into automixing, but wanted to get a nicer attack and while playing with the mix, my looked-for sound was there...

So I just say think and play around...

aXel

BTW: I don't give the F***in damn whether blink182 is real punk or not. They're really well mixed... These Lord-Alges know their job...
 
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