A Dip in the Muse Kitchen Sink

DEMO DAYS

The working method described by Colliva sounds sensible enough… until that last sentence. Why spend two months recording what are essentially demos in one of the most expensive studios in the world? Air wouldn’t say, but comparing it with the world’s other top facilities, Air Studio 1, with its 72-channel custom Neve/Focusrite desk (it has 56 Neve 31106 and 16 Focusrite ISA110 channels) is likely to cost north of $1000 per day. Spending $40,000 (or whatever deal the studio offered) on six weeks rehearsal space, however deluxe, seemed like a throwback to the excess-all-areas eighties and nineties and not very 21st century at all.

Colliva was almost able to hear the raised eyebrows on the other end of the telephone, and explained, “The band wanted to be able to do things in a very modern way, including the abilities to edit things and try different arrangement in ProTools. But they wanted to be able to do this without anyone around. If Adrian and I had been there, it would have been more expensive, and also, the days would have been standard production days during which they’d have felt obliged to go to the studio for at least eight hours a day. Instead they could go to the studio whenever they wanted, whether just for two hours or longer. It gave them a lot of freedom. It’s true that with the mics and signal paths that I had set up it would be possible to track any band and get top quality results, but when we switched to the actual recording process in November, with Adrian and I there, we really stepped things up. We changed the miking of the drum kit, we put up many more room mics, we used different guitar and bass amplifiers, and we used a PA to enhance the drum sound. In September and October the band was busy writing and sketching out arrangements, and in November it was a matter of: ‘Okay we now know what the songs are, now let’s get the exact sounds we’re after.’

“Yes, we did replace almost everything they had recorded during the rehearsal phase, apart from some of the soft synth sounds, because Matthew had lived with them for months, and it would have been hard to abandon them. The main three soft synths they used were ProTools’ Vacuum, Native Instruments’ Massive, and Rob Papen’s Predator. We also had a separate computer dedicated to samples from VSL and East West. Many of the drum samples came from Battery, and East West’s Stormdrums and RockDrums, with the last one only for demoing. With regards to using the PA system to augment the drum sound, it’s something that I had done when working with Afterhours, one of Italy’s leading alternative rock bands, and when Matthew asked me for ideas, I suggested it to him. The setup consisted of Roland triggers on the drum kit connected to a Roland TMC 6 trigger-to-MIDI converter, that fed a MacBook running Native Instruments’ Battery, with our own sounds in it. We ran these through the PA, and recorded them via the drum kit microphones together with the live kit.”

SPLITTING THE CREDIT

During the seven months of tracking, Bushby and Colliva had fairly well-defined roles, with Bushby mainly responsible for the actual recording, ie. mic choices, placements and signal paths, while the Italian manned the ProTools rig. “I was, in fact, doing two things,” said Colliva. “One was handling everything that was digital, meaning Pro Tools, samples, synths and so on, and the other thing was coordinating everything else that related to the logistics side of production, meaning moving instruments around, making sure everything that the band needed was there, and so on. That was a lot of work when we were in LA, because we didn’t have the same degree of support from Muse’s management and the bands touring crew was far away.”

Colliva’s logistic contributions were one reason for his additional production credit, which was also given to Bushby who said, “I think we received the additional production credits because recording The 2nd Law was more a group effort than The Resistance had been. We were five in a room, and when decisions had to be made, everybody put in their opinions.” Bushby is a London-based engineer, mixer and producer, who has worked with My Bloody Valentine, New Order, U2, Placebo, Smashing Pumpkins, Dashboard Confessional, Depeche Mode, and the Foo Fighters, and has won two Grammy Awards, one for his engineering work on The Resistance and one for recording the Foo Fighters’ Echoes, Silence, Patience, Grace. He has a formidable reputation for his awareness of sound, and he reckons that Muse involved him “for the sonic point of view.”

From his state-of-the-art studio in North London (see sidebar), Adrian Bushby gives his side of the goings-on during the making of The 2nd Law, first of all clarifying that, for him at least, the seven-month production period for the album wasn’t a nose-to-the-grindstone, 16-hour a day, 7-day a week affair. “It was always a matter of working for two or three weeks and then I’d have a few weeks off. Having breaks like that meant that we didn’t get too tired. The approach was a bit different than with The Resistance, because when I arrived in Italy for work on recording that album they had three songs ready to go and the rest was very sketchy. But when I turned up at Air, there was a whole wall with write-ups and details of tracks that were ready to be recorded. In either case Matt always knows what’s going on, which is incredible, considering the complexity of their music. He always knows what has been done and what still has to be done, and where he is going.

“When they were rehearsing and doing pre-production, they pretty much recorded the songs as a band, with everything miked up as if they were tracking for real. When we were recording them they regularly played as a three-piece but they also did many individual overdubs. We used the recordings they’d done during pre-production as a template. Sometimes we used the guitars and pianos that Matt had recorded for the demos as backdrops for Chris [Wolstenholme, bass] and Dom [Dominic Howard, drums] to play to. We made sure that everything was well separated, so we could overdub without spill. Chris and Matt’s amps were in different booths and rooms, so everything was very isolated. Also, the band works with in-ear monitors, which meant that we didn’t have any problems with things blaring from monitors. They control their own headphone mix with a 16-channel mix system by Aviom. They also use that live, and they’re really happy with it, which made my job a lot easier!”

According to Bushby, on his and Colliva’s arrival in November 2011, one of the first things they did was adjust the recording space: “The live room has a glass dividing wall, and during pre-production they had closed it and placed the drums behind it so the drums didn’t sound too loud in the room. But for some reason the drums sounded really uncontrolled with that partition closed, I think because there’s so much glass. It sounded really big and trashy with no focus on the cymbals. So we opened the doors and turned it into one big room, which sounded much better. It gave the extra close microphones on the kit a lot more focus. In general we carried on from where they had left off during pre-production, trying out new setups with different amps, and putting up additional microphones for a more in-depth sound.”

DRUM REINFORCEMENT

Adrian Bushby: “Whilst the band had been demo-ing, Dom had treated many of the drum tracks with plug-in EQs, going for very bright and attacky sounds. I decided to go along with that vibe for the drums. But instead of trying to record the drums very flat and natural and then EQ everything afterwards to get the sound they were after, I tried to get the sounds they wanted as they went down. I recorded the drums with a whole range of microphones, generally the same as most people use. But I always tried to have something interesting and different and set up lots of different mics in different places and gave them different treatments. Sometimes I used them all, sometimes only a few. I had some AKG D90s floating around that worked really well, a Russian Lomo mic, which is one of mine, as well as an SM57 and an AKG C414 on the floor behind the kit. There was also a Sennheiser, I can’t remember the model number, but it looks like a bullet mic, and it sounded great when put through an amp, just pulling it back from distorting. The drums for the track Unsustainable in particular were recorded with many unusual microphones.

“For more regular sounds I generally had a couple of mics on the kick, one of them the Shure SM91, as well as a Neumann U47 slightly outside the kick and an NS10 speaker mic. The snare mics were an SM57 on top and an AKG C414 underneath, and I also had a contact mic on the floor. I recorded the toms with Sennheiser MD421s on top and Neumann U47 Fets underneath and I had AKG C451s for the overheads, which I hadn’t used for a long time, but they gave the cymbals in that big room at Air some more focus. There also were a couple of Sennheiser MKH40 mics for closer room sounds and Schoeps from the orchestral setup at Air for ambience, stuck as far and high back in the room as possible. Like on the previous record we had a piano in the room, and I used the piano mics for additional drum ambience. It’s something that I discovered by accident and it works really well. Because of the resonance of the piano you get some unusual ambience that you don’t get from normal drum ambience mics.

“The PA system was in the room behind Dom and pumped out really loud triggered synthetic, dancey sounds while he was playing. I’d never done that before. The PA shifted a lot more air than just the acoustic kit, so we got this huge pumping sound in the room, which was very effective. The point of using the PA was to create a more dancey sound for the live kit, because they wanted to incorporate this dubstep thing. I miked up the kit as usual and obviously the room mics were going to pick up most of the PA. The close mics also picked something up, and altogether this added up to a bigger, very interesting sound. We occasionally put live bass and snare drum sounds through the PA, but mostly they were the synthesised sounds from Battery. We also recorded these Battery sounds dry, but generally speaking only used the sounds that had gone through the PA and that were picked up by the drum and room mics.

“Regarding the signal paths, generally speaking everything went through the Neve 31106 mic pres in the Air desk, with some Neve EQ and Pultec EQ on the bass drum and the snare drum groups. I don’t like to compress the bass drum too much when recording, yet the snare drum had some compression from a Distressor, but again nothing drastic. Most of the compression was on the room mics. I love compression on room mics, and we initially went for quite a compressed drum sound, but when we switched the PA on it obviously squashed everything down, so we tried to keep the room mics more open this time round. There were just a few close drum mics that were treated with some extra compression, while the room mics generally remained quite open.”

MACHINED BASS

Colliva: “Both Matt and Chris are very fond of their live sound, but I always feel that their live setups include pieces that are not really needed in the studio, so the challenge was for them to have the same functionality in the studio, but with shorter signal chains and better sound quality. I had a Radial JD7 Injector splitter, and we would have three chains for the bass, one clean channel via his Markbass amplifiers [MoMark and SD1200], and two distorted channels, one with distortion coming from some kind of Big Muff or Animato pedal sound and the other channel would have a more fuzz-like sound coming from fuzz pedals by ZVex, like the Mastotron or Woolly Mammoth. There would also have been a fourth chain with a hot DI if we wanted an aggressive sound. Chris may also have used pedals, which we automated if they were MIDI controllable. We’d do a take with Chris playing via a wah-wah pedal and getting it roughly the way he wanted it to sound, and we then sent the DI signal through a pedal that we automated to make the wah-wah sharper and faster than a human could play it. We did similar things with Matt’s guitar.”

Bushby: “Chris’s sound is incredible. He knows how to get his sounds, and that makes it much easier when you are recording him. The Markbass setup covered the clean sounds, I think we had two different heads and cabs on which I had an AKG D19 and an EV RE20 plus an NS10 speaker mic, and they all came into the Neve desk with an 1176 on the clean bass group. The more distorted bass sound was played via two vintage ’80s Marshall DBS heads going into two different cabs, placed in the back of the room, and on them I had a Shure SM7 and another RE20, panned left and right, and a couple of Neve compressors just touching things. When you have that much distortion on the track, you don’t really need compression. I didn’t want to squash the life out of the sound. Depending on the track we would sometimes change pedals and trigger different effects from the computer. Generally speaking we didn’t use the DI.”

STACKS OF GUITAR & KEYS

Bushby: “Matt used Diesel V4, Vox AC30, Marshall 1959HW and HiWatt 100 amplifiers and Mills 4×12 cabinets and a Roland JC120 and a couple of Fender combos as well, like a Fender Twin. I’d normally have two mics on the speakers, like a Shure SM57, a Sennheiser MD421, a Neumann U47 Fet, a Royer 121 (Matt really likes the sound of that), an AKG C414, or an AEA ribbon. The latter works really well because it can handle quite a lot of level. Generally every amp would have a Shure SM57 and whatever went with it to taste. We also had a couple of Neumann U87 room mics, which usually picked up the 4x12s, because they were in the big room, while other amps were screened away or in other rooms. I tended to use the desk Neve mic pres, and then a Pultec or AER EQ across the group, adding a bit more treble and bass overall. I EQ-ed the individual mics as well as the overall summed sound.

“There were many keyboards on this album, and most of them were soft synths. They went Native Instruments crazy during the recordings. They generally remained in the box, so it was mainly a question of miking up the piano and the Fender Rhodes. We went for the same setup as with the previous record, with a couple of DPA mics for the nice classical sound on the piano, and also a couple of Telefunken ELAM 251s, and then I’ll generally add a couple of dynamic mics to do something unusual. These would be a Shure SM58 in the sound hole on the sound board and this time round I also used AKG D19s. Obviously the sound of the dynamic mics would be different than the lush, open classical sound, and I’d EQ and compress the dynamic mic sound for it to be more interesting, and pan the mics wide. When you balance them with the posh sound you can add some nice extra character. The EQ was mostly done on the desk, and any compression would have been whatever was lying around. I can’t tell you exactly how I did everything, because I just experiment until it sounds right. There is no formula. The Fender Rhodes was recorded with a couple of Neumann U67 microphones.”

HEADING EAST WEST

Bushby: “I don’t know why we went to LA, but it probably had to do with the fact that David Campbell [Beck’s dad – Ed], who did the string arrangements with Matt, is based there. I’d never done any classical recording work in LA and it was an interesting experience. The Americans were incredibly efficient, quick and focused. They’d look at a score, play it through once, and you couldn’t fault what they had done. Sometimes you did a second take, just to make sure there were no errors, and that was it. The first sessions in LA took place at Shangri-La, where Matt did guitar and Fender Rhodes overdubs, while the strings and brass were recorded in February at East West Studio One, which has an 80-channel Neve 8078 Console. We recorded the choir in a separate session at Capitol Studios.

“I used Neumann U67s above each section of the choir, and we also had this sort of Decca tree thing, with a three microphone setup, and a stereo pair as well. The brass was recorded with Neumann U87s as close mics and Telefunken ELAM 251s a bit further away for a more classical sound.  I left the recording of the strings to the assistants at East West, because they do strings in that room day in and out and in my experience it’s generally best to go with their know-how. They used valve Neumann U47s on the cellos and basses and ELAM 251s on the violas and violins. There was also a Decca tree and a couple of room ambience mics, but I can’t recall what they were.”

SOLO VOCALS

Bushby: “Chris recorded all his vocals at his house with the help of Paul Reeve, and Matt recorded his own vocals. You just set Matt up with some gear in another studio, and he gets on with it. It’s amazing what he does. Generally I set up a Neumann U67, a U47 Fet, and a BeyerDynamic M88 and they went into a Neve-1176-Distressor chain and there also was an RCA ribbon mic, which went into a Mercury M72 Telefunken clone. Matt owns it, and it has a nice, warm valve sound, just like the original Telefunken. We set up these four mics with four stands and four different input chains, and he tried them out and chose which he wanted to use. He knows exactly what he wants. He’d say, ‘I’m going to do some vocals now,’ and you wouldn’t see him for the entire day, and then he’d come out with his vocals done, comped and everything.”

BOUNCING AROUND

Muse’s predilection for excess had a predictable effect on the size of the sessions. “Most of the sessions for this album were immense, off the scale,” remarked Bushby. “This meant that we regularly had to bounce things because we were running out of tracks and outputs. We did all the bouncing in the computer, so that the faders on the monitor side of the desk always remained at zero. We were always mixing what we had during the sessions, and this was a matter of whoever was closest to ProTools bouncing and balancing what was necessary. If I had just recorded four tracks of a guitar part recorded with four mics, I’d just grab them and balance them. Maybe they got tweaked later on, but the main thing for us was that we were always working to a mix, so we knew whether what we had was working, and whether what we were adding fitted. I wasn’t involved in the process of selecting the guys who mixed the album — CLA, Spike and Rich. They obviously each have a different slant on things and the band wanted to use that. It’s a taste thing, and I don’t get involved. The band knows what they’re doing, and nobody needs to babysit them to make sure they’re not doing something crazy.”

Amidst all that kitchen sink excess, seems a band that really does know how to keep track of the song.