Making Of: Full production of Tusk´s S/T EP

A Step Towards Professionalism

I was always very curious about everything in guitar-related music. Tinkering with audio fascinated me, hacking stuff up was my profession. Little did I know that this would lead me to the point where I could make a living out of it.

This Tusk recording was a shift in my self-perception. I had gathered a wealth of knowledge through the years of engineering my own music, collected many nice pieces of gear, and had the vision to bring my mindset around music recording to a new level. I grew out of my own shoes, no more second-guessing whether something was right or wrong, more trust in what I did, accepting circumstances, and welcoming creativity instead of going over the same things every time.

And this session proved me right.

This session holds a special place in my heart. We had lots of fun during recording and mixing. The foundation for a good-sounding record always begins even before placing any mics. It’s the mindset, the atmosphere, the songwriting and the communication. And we did many things right in retrospect.

“Riot In The Streets” was the song we anticipated the most, and we were very eager to hear a finished version of it. It reflects the aforementioned mindset shift almost to its full extent. A simple song, but very catchy, still with nuance and little things throughout that keep it interesting.

The drum recordings were done quickly. We chose a rather simple setup: a single snare mic, a single bass drum mic, stereo overheads, one room mic, and a mic for each tom. We used my Sakae Trilogy set on the EP, which was not ideal. I had to introduce a sample to the kick drum later on. The Sakae Trilogy is a very warm kit, with very thin shells that don’t have the projection and punch of thicker birch shells. That’s why I now own a Sakae Almighty Birch too, a story I may tell in another blog entry.

We recorded the bass in a different session, where we decided to go directly into a Neve 1073 SPX, which yielded a very nice and clear bass tone. This was particularly important because Ivo had some really nice bass lines up his sleeve, so we wanted to make sure that they were clearly audible even before the mixing stage.

For the guitar parts, I mostly used my vintage early-70s Gibson Les Paul Custom, which I had acquired shortly before the start of those sessions. I had some 70s Les Pauls before, but this one is special. My trusty Plexi was used as the amp, with lowered voltage for a more spongy response and a Fryette Power Station. I used a Bogner 2×12 cab with a Mojotone 25W Greenback variant, which sounds awesome and is very close to the old Pulsonic-style cones. I used only one SM57.

The first vocal bits were done with a DIY U67 clone. Later on, I chose a U87Ai because it sounded a bit faster and more aggressive. As a preamp, I used the Neve 1073.

Mixing-wise, the inspiration was clear with only one guitar track: getting as close to the Van Halen sound as possible. This meant that the guitar was hard-panned to one side, with reverb out of the other. I decided to keep the drums direct, with a good bit of drum bus compression to tie the whole kit together more. I spent some time automating things so that the chorus felt a bit wider and bigger than the verses. The mix came together pretty fast, and so did the mastering. I only did some minor touch-ups in the mastering, just some subtle things here and there.

This release really changed many things for me. How to approach things, how to fix things. It created a spark in me to get better and learn new tricks. This marked the beginning of a serious career in music.

Listen here…