Mixed from 4-track

Davenhurst

Davenhurst

New member
http://www.davecollingwood.co.uk

Click MP3, then listen to "Ed Kemper".

I recently found some old old 4-track tapes and stumbled across this track on one of them. Being young 'uns, we had no idea how to engineer properly, and only had 4 tracks available to us. So We just whacked the guitar and bass straight into 2 of the inputs, used one crappy £15 mono mic pointing at the drums and played the thing live, then overdubbed the vocal with the same crappy mic. Those were the days.

As you'll hear, the lyrics are an excercise in random dumbness, we were messing around, but I wanted to get a decent mix out of it. The raw tracks sounded terrible, especially the drums - I double-tracked the mono drum track and eq'ed L and R to hopefully go for some sense of space, and the bleed from the other instruments was insane. I'm sure I've stumbled into massive phase problems - please bear in mind that this mix is only the first go, and I only really spent a couple of hours or so on it, most of which was needed to automate the volume of the vocals.

I guess what I'm saying is I know it sounds shoddy and rough, but I'd like to get it heard as it was quite nostalgic to hear it again. Check out that vocal line, good times.
 
Other than some minor noise this sounds pretty good for a four track tune. A bit compressed sounding maybe. Vocals are cool and screamy. The bass guitar really nice ( I like the trebley sound to it). Reminds me I have a bunch of 4 tracks to convert as well before they all deteriorate......Good one!
 
Nice one, thanks for the comments. I'm quite new to the world of mixing, so I'm still getting my head around compression and the like.

When I started out, all my mixes would come out with hardly any treble, I'd just sort of forget to eq any top end into it. That's when I learnt to take regular breaks to refresh the ears. Anyone else have teething difficulties like that?
 
Sounds really cool! It has a real Jesus Lizard, almost Slint feel to it. When was it recorded? I'm guessing early '90s (?). :)
 
bigmahon said:
It has a real Jesus Lizard, almost Slint feel to it.
Click to expand...

2 great bands, definitely the sort of stuff we were listening to at the time. In fact, I think I'll always be listening to Slint, Spiderland's hard to top.

bigmahon said:
When was it recorded? I'm guessing early '90s (?).
Click to expand...

Actually more like 2000 / 2001, in the early 90s we were all about 12 / 13, so it took us a while to get round to that sort of music.

Thanks for the comments.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top