Saturday, October 17, 2009, 09:14 PM
Posted by Administrator
I recently was contacted by a guy named David Smith that had to write a paper about a well recorded record and he chose Buckcherry's Timebomb. He asked me how the record was recorded which jogged my memory.
I thought I may as well repost it here if anyone is interested.
We recorded to BASF 900 tape to a Studer 800 machine at Sunset Sound Studio 3 on their custom Demideo console. The tape machine had 16 track headstacks on it and we were running it at 15 ips with no noise reduction.
The kick drum mic was an altec salt shaker mic, the snare had a 57and an electrovoice 666 mic on it. 421's on both toms, km84 on the hi-hat, the overheads were two u67's.The room mics were sony c37a's. The guitars were 57's and 421's plus some old funky mic that Jason Corsaro found in the Sunset mic locker and wanted to use (pretty sure it was a ancient ribbon mic)
The assistant was Geoff Walcha, the tracking engineer was Jason Corsaro and I engineered all of the overdubs, though Jason wasn't there for 'slit my wrists' or 'Slammin' both of which were engineered by me and assisted by Geoff. At the end of the record Geoff said he was going to quit the music industry as he couldn't get a break so I gave him an engineering credit to help him out. He ended up staying and not going back to school (not sure if he wants to thank me about that now with the state the industry is in these days)
For amps we used mainly some Marshalls that Keith and Yogi owned and a Soldano SL100 and a Burman amp both of which are mine. There were a ton of other amps around as both Keith and myself are avid amp collectors. Yogi also had a Gibson and and Fender amp that may have been a protoytpe that may have made it onto a few tracks.
The guitars used were mainly Les Pauls, a couple of Telecasters and the occasional Gretsch. Bass was tracked through two SVT's one set for a clean tone one distorted, we may have also thrown an old Ampeg B15 into the room too for flavor. The bass was a 52 or 53 p-bass that JB owned that sounded amazing.
Vocals were cut using a fet47 running through two compressors and two eq's. The voacl sound was definitely a Jason Corsaro call and I would probably have to ask Geoff if he still has his recall notes from the session before I could accurately state what the exact set-up was.
The tracking was really fun and everybody got along really well. I still talk to all the guys and am really happy they are doing so well now. One thing I do remember was that one day while we were tracking overdubs a car hit the light post outside on Sunset Blvd and took out all the power on the block. Luckily we were tracking to a Studer and not a computer, so we didn't lose anything.