Frank Gryner: Maynard's tracking vocal chain on mer

[Frank Gryner]

Sadly, I didn't do any of the vocal tracking on that record. I recorded Josh's drums on 4 or 5 tracks. I believe Billy Howerdel recorded Maynard's vocals for most or all of Mer de Noms.

[wannaberocker]

Awesome drum sounds, some of my favorite!

You mentioned u used about 5 tracks to record them, could you explain how?

They sound so roomy to me, so spacious...man u guys are good!

Is the trick to control spillage and phasing? Do you need a big room? What demensions? any compression or eq'ing used on the tracking or mixdown?

Did you record the guitars?

Please feed me knowledge!

[trashman]

Okay, thanks anyway!

I don't know what tracks you worked on, but I listened to the record 3 or 4 times today and everything about it just kicks ass. Thank you.

[Frank Gryner]

Just to clarify...I recorded drums for 5 SONGS on Mer de Noms...
(The Hollow, Orestes, 3 Libras, Renholder, and Brena) ---as far as track count, it was probably 8-10. This was done at the Chop Shop in Hollywood where a 3 car garage was converted into a pretty bad-ass drum room. The way Scott and I tracked drums back then was fairly aggressive. Pre-blending outer and inner kick mics, committing healthy doses of eq and compression on most everything on the way in. As I recall, most of the mic preamps were 1081 or 1073s (for kick, snares and toms) and cymbals were straight into the Euphonix CS2000 that we had there at that time. Coles ribbon mics on the room and B & K condensers on the overheads. Because of the Euphonix' instant recall capability, tracking drums was very easy. I was always able to pick up were we left off and tweak the tones even further. So when Freese came in to track drums, he climbed behind our in-house kit and we tracked very quickly. Those 5 songs were done in an afternoon. I've had the opportunity to track Josh many times and he is one of the easiest (and nicest) guys to record.

[trashman]

Did you guys ever reamp the drums through loudspeakers? I read somewhere that this was part of the sound on that record. m/s mic'ing with a slight detune when mixing?

I really like the sound of the drums on on Mer ... Alice in Chains, Dirt has a similar thing going on. Perhaps it's the Neve? It has a squashed, thick, yet transient rich punch. I've been so brainwashed into thinking: drums=API ..... Are you a fan of API on drums?

Thanks again!

[Frank Gryner]

Originally Posted by trashman

Did you guys ever reamp the drums through loudspeakers? I read somewhere that this was part of the sound on that record. m/s mic'ing with a slight detune when mixing?

I really like the sound of the drums on on Mer ... Alice in Chains, Dirt has a similar thing going on. Perhaps it's the Neve? It has a squashed, thick, yet transient rich punch. I've been so brainwashed into thinking: drums=API ..... Are you a fan of API on drums?

Thanks again!

Not sure the fate of the raw drum tracks once they got into Alan Moulder's very capable hands for mixing. They may have reamped them to get a cohesive room ambience with the drums that were recorded at Sound City.
I definitely favor Neves on drums, but I'm a bit biased as most of my experience when I started in LA 16 years ago was on 70's era Neve boards. In a perfect world it would be nice to always have enough Neve and API's on hand to strike the perfect balance of warmth, body and mid-range presence for each element of the drum kit.