Victory - The Country Star Sessions

[Mathieu Benoit]

I just wanted to reserve a spot to discuss the sessions for Country Star 2009. I'll get into it in detail when I have some time at work this week. I'm seriously blown away by the results.

I'll discuss the session in detail throughout the week. I'll also post some pictures.

[macrae11]

Yeah despite some hurdles, the finished product, was quite satisfying. Can't wait to see some pictures when you get some time Matt. I was there, but hardly saw any shots.

[Mathieu Benoit]

I'll start with the technical back story.

3 months ago Alain and I started preparing for the sessions by gutting the control room and make multipins to connect everything straight into the patch bay on the board. Our intention was to streamline everything. We ran into a roadblock after that though. The console, having satt there unused since the Ken Tobias session had some major bugs with it. There was a pretty major noise floor throughout the whole thing and just having the board on made it nearly impossible to get any real work done. Being short on time we decided that we'd just mix it in the box instead. The control room came a long ways this summer but we figured we'll attack the board this fall when we have some more time.

Andrew came by the week prior to the session to do a dry run and make sure that everything was working right. Well, everything was NOT working right. Our intention was to use the HD24 along with PT LE. Right out of the gate we had a major sync issue that I still don't think we have figured out. After about 8 hours of troubleshooting we ended up dropping the HD24 all together. I mean if Alain and Andrew can't troubleshoot a digital sync issue it just means that something is really broken. So here we are off to a bad start.

Then we fire up the board and introduce noise into the room. Andrew says he can "deal" with it, but I wasn't really convinced. We didn't even get to do much more than get lines run and do line checks. We were off to a disheartening start, and I could already tell that Andrew was starting to wish he'd told me to go fuck myself. The board is severelly screwed. The only thing that works at this point is the onboard patchbay and even then, barely...

The one redeeming thing is that we had a great song, along with some of the finest musicians around these parts. So we just needed to make sure the studio didn't get in the way of the other two things.

At this point my stress level is through the roof. I lost my session drummer weeks earlier and one of my guitar players went MIA (or so I thought). I was going to need a miracle to get this to come together at this point I thought. The only thing that kept me going was that if this bombs, I'm responsible. It's all on me to get this right. I made a commitment to deliver excellence to the radio station. With a functional studio or not, it had to work. At this point I'm not really willing to call the random collection of gear we've got going on a "studio" per se, but we'd have to make it work.

I realized that I had to put faith in Andrew. Before he left that weekend of the dry runs, I asked him one simple question: Can we get this to work? More importantly, I said, "Can this be done well?" He said that it'll take some work, but yes, we can do this.

He successfully managed to calm my nerves.


To be continued...

[Malcolm Boyce]

[Mathieu Benoit]

Unfortunately I will be brutally honest about some things. Some people worked out, some people didn't. It's all about people in the end.

The role of a good producer is to pick the right people to involve in the project right from the word "go". If you have the right engineer, assistant, and musicians. Your work is 80% done. If you don't pick the right people you could be fighting an uphill battle.

I knew who I wanted right off the bat for everything. I wanted either Jon Goud or John Collier on bass. John Morrison or myself on drums. Both Jean-Francois Goguen and Aaron Currie on guitar, and finally Rob Sakell on keys. I don't want to talk about my choice for runner-up on keys quite yet. I was going to play my choice of BG vocal singers by ear so that I had some options. But these musicans could handle any style and they needed to be booked. Unfortunately I lost many good men along the way. John Morrison heard that I had said some stuff about him that was bogus, from someone that really just wanted to bust my gears. It took my 4 weeks to get a hold of him to confront him about that, and then he finally tells he at the same time that he booked something else weeks ago. That really upset me because he didn't tell me as soon as he found out, he left me hanging. I needed guys I can trust. He had done this to so many other people but I always gave him the benefit of the doubt until he did it to me. Rob Sakell was booked for the SJ Idol sessions but couldn't make the country ones. His replacement for the country session, James Dalzell was a person that I was fairly familiar with anyways so I figured it was fine. Had I realized how much trouble it would end up being, I would have reconsidered. It wasn't anyone's fault, we couldn't have predicted this, I think the studio just isn't his thing. Then I lost contact with Rob and went ahead and booked his replacement for both gigs, I regret this now. Jon Goud could only make the SJ Idol session so I got Johnny C for the country session. Can't go wrong with Johnny C though, I tell ya.

My two guitar players were both stunning, but I lost touch with Aaron Currie and I thought we'd have to do the session without him. Thankfully he made contact a few days before the session. I'm starting to wonder how we could have done this session without him. He's too good at this, it scares me how good he is.

So the players are all in place, now the studio just needs to hold it's shit together.
____________________

Anyways, sorry about the tangent. Back to our story...

Andrew arrived the following week around 6pm that Friday, the evening before tracking had begun. Nick (aka Nick on M-A) was hired as an assistant to Andrew and I, so he and I took some time Friday afternoon and started getting mic lines to the drums based on some decisions that we made the previous week. Andrew had already made a spreadsheet with a signal chain from source to tape for everything to do with the bed tracks, so Nick and I got as much of that set up as we could. Andrew was bringing in a couple of his own mics and his Daking IV preamp. So we did everything short of that and headphones. So by the time Andrew showed up we were in a decent spot to start with.

We weren't able to get most of the musicians in for the setup Friday night, but we were able to get Aaron in around 10pm. Holy shit...this kid (he's 18) absolutely floored me. I've played with him before, which is why I hired him, but the licks he was coming up with in the context of the song, just as we were getting tones from his amp made me giggle like a junior high school girl seeing a penis for the first time. This guy was about to make the session, whether he knew it or not.

Anyways...watching him play made me really start to feel something special was about to happen. We spent the rest of the night getting drum tones and then tried to get some rest as we had a big day ahead of us in the morning.

Next post I'll start getting into the gear being used and what all was involved during the tracking. For now I have to get back to work.

To be continued...

[RoadDog]

[macrae11]

Matt's a much better story teller than I am, but I'll chip in with my two cents here and there.

Right out of the gate we had a major sync issue that I still don't think we have figured out. After about 8 hours of troubleshooting we ended up dropping the HD24 all together.

This one still has me scratching my head a little. We didn't have time to fix, or even really find exactly where the problem was, but we did find a workaround for the session. After we look at it again, if we still can't figure it out we might get you to have a look at it sometime Malcolm, just to see if you might have any insight. The real annoying part of this problem, is we've used almost this exact same setup numerous times without a hitch, so something new seems to have cropped up.

I could already tell that Andrew was starting to wish he'd told me to go fuck myself.

Well no more than usual.

The board is severelly screwed. The only thing that works at this point is the onboard patchbay and even then, barely...

The patch bay actually worked fairly well. The only two issues is that there had been some internal changes to the preamp rack that hadn't been labeled yet, and there were a couple of the protools outputs that were swapped from where they needed to be.

The one redeeming thing is that we had a great song, along with some of the finest musicians around these parts. So we just needed to make sure the studio didn't get in the way of the other two things.

Indeed. Amazingly I'm still not sick of the song.

The role of a good producer is to pick the right people to involve in the project right from the word "go". If you have the right engineer, assistant, and musicians. Your work is 80% done. If you don't pick the right people you could be fighting an uphill battle.

Well we did pick 80% of the right people, so we were at least 64% done. But that other 36%......

We weren't able to get most of the musicians in for the setup Friday night, but we were able to get Aaron in around 10pm. Holy shit...this kid (he's 18) absolutely floored me.

Absolutely. I can only think of a handful of players in this neck of the woods that play with Aarons chops, and with good taste(The most important part). As a bonus, he was easy going and a joy to work with. A producers dream.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Before continuing with the "story", I think it's a good time to discuss the signal chain and the gear being used. Starting with the sound source, then going to mic(s), preamp, comp/eq, then finally to "tape". I've included links. For gear that we have that's vintage (1176, DBX 160x, ect.) I've included a link to it's closest still-living relative. I'm not covering conversion in this list. If you are curious you can just ask.

Sonor 22"x20" Force 3007 Kick (w/Onyx head) --> M88(in)/414EB (out) --> Midas XL42 --> DBX 160a --> Tape DBX 160 wasn't actually used on the kick in.

Yamaha 14"x8" Brass Snare (w/Super Tough head) --> 441 (top)/AT4051 (bottom) --> 512c (top)/ADA8000 (bottom) --> 1176 (top) --> Tape

Sonor 12"x9" Force 3007 Tom (w/Onyx head) --> MD421 --> ADA8000 --> Tape

Sonor 14"x12" Force 3007 Tom (w/Onyx head) --> SM7 --> ADA8000 --> Tape

Zildjian K Mastersound Hi-Hats --> AT450 --> ADA8000 --> Tape

Various Zildjian A CustomsCrashes/Ride (OH) --> 414B-ULS --> Daking IV --> STC-8 --> 2055 --> Tape

"Fur Storage" (Stereo Room) --> AT4050 --> Millenia --> 1178 --> Tape

"Fur Storage" (Mono Room) --> C3000 --> ADA8000 --> Tape

Johnny C's Washburn 5-String Bass --> JDI --> 737 --> Tape ***Bass was re-amped using an SM7, back through 737. The amp used was our 8x10 Ampeg rig.

Aaron's Various Electric Guitars --> STD --> Fender Bassman --> e609 --> Daking IV --> Tape

Wawa's Godin Electric --> STD --> Mesa --> Blueball --> 52270B --> LA4 --> Tape I thought we ended up using a 57 on this?

K2600XS --> Fireface --> Tape (Cubase)

Percussion --> SM7 --> Fireface --> Tape (Cubase)

Vocals --> SM7 --> Daking IV --> 1176 --> Tape

BG Vocals --> 414EB --> Daking IV --> 1176 --> Tape


This is the signal chain for everything we tracked to the best of my knowledge as I don't have Nick's notes in front of me at the moment(Andrew may have a better memory than me, so he may add to this).

Now I'll continue with the story of the tracking itself.

To be continued...

[Mathieu Benoit]

The board is severelly screwed. The only thing that works at this point is the onboard patchbay and even then, barely...

The patch bay actually worked fairly well. The only two issues is that there had been some internal changes to the preamp rack that hadn't been labeled yet, and there were a couple of the protools outputs that were swapped from where they needed to be.

I finished labelling all of the onboard patchbay last night. The preamp section is up to date now. Also Nick and I labelled the wall patchbays all over the studio as well.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Indeed. Amazingly I'm still not sick of the song.

I listened to it 31 times last night and I'm still not sick of it.

A producers dream.

Correction. A producers wet dream.

[macrae11]

I made a few edits to your post Matt. I left them in red, just so you'd know what I did.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Awesome! Thanks man... My memory is a little off. Also I'm not sure what we ended up going with for Wa's guitar. Maybe you swapped it out for a 57. I'm not sure anymore. Nick would probably know. I may have been in the drum room while that conversation happened. I missed a lot of conversations while I was up there I bet.

Nick? If you are looking for an opportunity to post something, here's your chance!

[Nick H.]

Awesome! Thanks man... My memory is a little off. Also I'm not sure what we ended up going with for Wa's guitar. Maybe you swapped it out for a 57. I'm not sure anymore. Nick would probably know. I may have been in the drum room while that conversation happened. I missed a lot of conversations while I was up there I bet.

Nick? If you are looking for an opportunity to post something, here's your chance!

Well, to be honest, that's one of the few that I don't remember, but at least I'm posting something...

[Mathieu Benoit]

FYI... The single (along with an interview with Alain and April) will be aired on 94.1 FM tomorrow morning at 8:40am.

[macrae11]

Any chance of someone recording that? Even if I was in SJ, I won't be up by then.

Also why Al? How come you're not in the interview Matt?

[Mathieu Benoit]

I'm gonna get Bobbi Lee to get me a recording of it.

Simple, I'm not planning on being up that early either, that and i just don't want to do it. It's also an opportunity for Alain to say nice things about me...

[Mathieu Benoit]

I'm going to start a new thread about what happened during the premiere, no sense tainting this thread.

[Mathieu Benoit]

So on to the tracking portion of the story.

We got settled in and got headphone mixes worked out. By the time we were ready for tracking it was 1pm. This was a little later than I had anticipated, but it was acceptable. If I were to do this again, I'd have everyone come in the night before to get headphone mixes and go over the song a few times to get comfortable. That way the day of tracking we show up at 11:30am and start tracking at 12:00pm sharp.

The bed tracks went a little worse than I expected. We went through a good 10 takes (at least) before we had to take a break and re-evaluate. I was getting upset because it's almost impossible to produce from the drum kit. I can't see the forest for the trees. Meanwhile Andrew is literally punching the console and swearing because he knows exactly what is going on but can't tell me as honestly as he'd like because we're all on the same cue mix.

After our break (close to 3pm now) We do one more take with all of us. Then it hits me. James is almost a 16th note ahead of everyone. I ask him to sit the next take out. I have Aaron play the lead line that used to be a keyboard part and we try again. In the verse the keyboards start up again. I again tell him not to play and this time ask him to wait for us in the control room.

The first full take we did after that was stunning, and the next take was even better. We had our keeper in that second take. No edits whatsoever in the bed tracks. One bass note we changed out of the end later on just because of it not sitting well with an overdubbed part that we liked. But seriously... Not one mistake that got fixed off the bed tracks. Now, that is what I call a group of real professionals. John Collier's groove in the song is just sick. I was really lucky to be able to get him on this, we are lucky to have guys like him around town. Aaron and Wawa were both amazing as well.

Next we got Wawa to lay some acoustic parts. He did well, a couple of timing issues at first. This was the first time I've seen Wawa play any less than perfectly. However he's got 5 kids, 2 full time jobs and goes to university, in some kind of nuclear medicine program. So I'm willing to cut him some slack. Besides his performance was still better than most people have in their daydreams so, I'm totally cool with that. I just love having him around, he's such a positive source of energy to have around.

Next we got James to try overdubbing some keyboard parts. After about an hour, we told him we had what we needed. I paid him and tried to usher him out of the building while he tried to stay. I asked him again to go and told him that I would have his keyboards delivered to his door.

Once he left it occured to me that he just cost me 2.5 hours of tracking. Plus another hour tomorrow that I need to learn and perform his keyboard parts. I think Andrew worked out the cost, studio time, musician time and everything. Andrew figures that James cost us almost $1000 in the "real world". Now that's not my actual cost, however, I need this done, soup to nuts, in under 48 hours. I can't afford 3.5 hours of time to simply dissappear.

Once he left things started picking up speed. Aaron was up to bat with layers upon layers of overdubs. I couldn't even keep up with his ideas. He would have some many great ideas. Everything about this kid was golden. He rarely played anything that wasn't a keeper. No one on this forum should ever do another session without Aaron Currie. He's THAT good. As great as Wawa is, he left after watching Aaron for a bit and said to me "He's in his element, I don't want to get in his way. He's got IT."

Once Aaron was done blowing our collective minds. We stopped for supper break, while I called the singer and BG singer to schedule them in for late evening.

By this time it was already almost 8, and we had to try to get a vocal track done with someone who really isn't a strong singer. She had a nice voice but she didn't understand the detail of her craft, I mean she's only 15 years old. I also had a BG vocalist Allison Goss, who herself is only 16 to bring in after. I bet you can start seeing how much I'd want that time back that I wasted in the early afternoon.

We start testing microphones. Her voice is in rough shape as she's been fighting a cold. Alain walks in on his way to the movies, we all look at each other wondering how we could make this work. Doesn't matter it had to get done.

To be continued...

[macrae11]

Honestly I can barely remember this session now, after this past weekend. I'll try to draw some recollections and post something useful.

[Mathieu Benoit]

Honestly I can barely remember this session now, after this past weekend. I'll try to draw some recollections and post something useful.

Somehow I'm able to keep it all straight in my head... This weekend that just passed was longer but somehow more fun.

[macrae11]

Meanwhile Andrew is literally punching the console and swearing because he knows exactly what is going on but can't tell me as honestly as he'd like because we're all on the same cue mix.

This is not even an exaggeration. Nick is the only one who can truely attest to this, and he's sworn to secrecy. Nick by the way is an awesome assistant, and getting better every day. I hope to have him on many future sessions.

The first full take we did after that was stunning, and the next take was even better. We had our keeper in that second take. No edits whatsoever in the bed tracks. One bass note we changed out of the end later on just because of it not sitting well with an overdubbed part that we liked. But seriously... Not one mistake that got fixed off the bed tracks. Now, that is what I call a group of real professionals. John Collier's groove in the song is just sick. I was really lucky to be able to get him on this, we are lucky to have guys like him around town. Aaron and Wawa were both amazing as well.

Indeed!

Once he left it occured to me that he just cost me 2.5 hours of tracking. Plus another hour tomorrow that I need to learn and perform his keyboard parts. I think Andrew worked out the cost, studio time, musician time and everything. Andrew figures that James cost us almost $1000 in the "real world". Now that's not my actual cost, however, I need this done, soup to nuts, in under 48 hours. I can't afford 3.5 hours of time to simply dissappear.

$50/hr/session player x 5 session players x 2.5 hrs =.............. $625
$75/hr studio time x 2.5 hrs = ..............................................$187.50
+
1 hr rerecord studio and session time = ................................ $125
...... ................................................................................. $937.50

Once he left things started picking up speed. Aaron was up to bat with layers upon layers of overdubs. I couldn't even keep up with his ideas. He would have some many great ideas. Everything about this kid was golden. He rarely played anything that wasn't a keeper. No one on this forum should ever do another session without Aaron Currie. He's THAT good. As great as Wawa is, he left after watching Aaron for a bit and said to me "He's in his element, I don't want to get in his way. He's got IT."

Absolutely. I've never seen such intuitive playing at such a young age. I honestly can't wait to see what this kid will be able to do in 10 years. As it is he's one of the most user(me) friendly session guitar players I've ever worked with. I've already got him in mind for a session I'm doing in October.

We start testing microphones. Her voice is in rough shape as she's been fighting a cold. Alain walks in on his way to the movies, we all look at each other wondering how we could make this work. Doesn't matter it had to get done.

To be continued...

Luckily the slight raspyness added a nice edge to her voice that worked with this song. Would have been a different story if it were a soft love ballad.

[Malcolm Boyce]

Aaron Currie played at the ANE backing up a few people. I remembered having worked with him before. You are correct.... Crazy talented and tasty player. Loved how when he played Gary's acoustic guitar it sounded like a completely different, "better" guitar.

[Mathieu Benoit]

...


So Alain takes off to go to the movies with the wife. He wasn't sure that we were going to get anything done as it was already almost 9pm by this point.

We got to work right away, we went line by line and sometimes syllable by syllable. The thing is that she has a naturally nice voice but she wasn't much of a singer in terms of experience and knowing how to sing and staying in pitch. The great thing is that Andrew and I can explain that stuff to her line by line. What we can't coach her on is to have a nice voice (a problem that we ran into the following week.) We went line by line starting with the verses then the chorus and the bridge. She refused to take a break and was a real trooper. The fact that her voice was tired added a grit to her performance that worked out rather well. When Alain came back around midnight he started to think we could get a vocal performance out of him even. Needless to say we were all very happy with the vocals. The rest of the song could be stellar but if the vocals don't work then you've got nothing (which again we realized the next week.)

The BG vocalist for this was Allison Goss. She made top 8 in SJ Idol this year. I felt bad for her because she was a decent singer but forgot some words and I think she felt embarrassed and called in "sick" the next week. Mary Beth Marks was friends with her so I decided to contact herand see if she was interested. Allison did really well, and I would like to see her with more experience under her belt because for a first timer she was great. She was a lot of fun with tons of energy for that time of the night. She's 16, so she's got plenty of time to develop her voice and I plan on using her for a lot of projects just to get her the experience. She wasn't really nervous at all, and made the last little part of our 16 hour work day a lot of fun.

So now it was time to go to bed, we had to edit and mix this song the next day and it was already pushing 3am by the time we left. Andrew still had to get back to Fredericton because he had to go back to his regular job Monday morning. So we needed to be done in enough time for him to get home. Maybe Alain was right, this schedule is retarded.'

To be continued...