[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”6369″ img_size=”full” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text] Headache by Hackler [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Hackler is the brainchild of Bart Hackler.
Headache is the first released track of a couple of songs Bart records at the White Noise Studio.
Bart Hackler asked me to record Headache, for which he planned to sing and to play guitar and bass.
He asked a few guest musicians to play on the track for additional guitar, keyboard / synths and drums.
On guitar Erwin van Oostenbrugge and on keyboard Rick Linzel.
Drums: I performed the session on a few the studio’s drums. The bass drum was the Pearl CZX 24″ kick, the toms were the 12″ and 15 inch Pearl Masterworks to,s. The recorded snare was a 14 X 5,5 inch Mapex Black Panther Brass master snare.
The cymbals were the studio’s Zildjian A-customs for ride and crashes and the old 14″ Tosco hihats.
I played the drums on this track. Bart asked me pretty much last minute, so this meant my preparations for the track were minimal.
Bart named Foo Fighters as an inspiration for the track and I felt something in the vein of Dave Grohl drum wise would fit.
Bart explained where he wanted drums in the song and with which kind of energy they should be performed. The track features accents on the off beat and on the 4-and which I decided to emphasize with the bass drum. The snare is kept pretty much on the backbeat. In the few verses with drums you can hear the bass drum really follow the accents. In the choruses, played on ride cymbal, the accents were accentuated with the ride bell on 2-and and 3-and, just before the backbeat. Guitarist Erwin suggested a feel for the part under the guitar solo for him to play over.
After a few playtroughs we kept the best drum parts and fixed some beats where needed before proceeding to record the guitars.
Bart recorded a guitar part at first to be used as backingtrack and guide for the rest of the musicians to add their parts and improvisations.
Guitarist Erwin already came up with a few parts, melodies and guitar solo to play, which meant this went pretty quickly and we could focus on the performance.
Rick’s parts on keys where different and mostly meant to add texture. The keys where put through some effects in Cubase to make them more abstract and spacey sounding. This inspired Rick to come up with his parts. He improvised mostly. The idea for this was to sift through what he played and keep the best fitting parts for the song. Which we did.
In the following sessions for this track, Bart overdubbed his bass, guitars and vocals.
We mixed the track on several sessions, because the recordings session were some time apart. Every time I mixed a part and tweaked later on.
The drums were mixed to produce power and pump, and relied heavily on compression to achieve that.
Besides having some compression on snare, kick and overheads, the drums mostly parallel compressed.
The parallel drum bus was heavily compressed to create a pumping feel and mixed in with the normal drumbus. The roommics got treated to have the smashed compressed sound too, but I made sure it didn’t add too much sustain in the sound to prevent smearing the overall mix.
Bart recorded his bassguitar via pedals and DI into cubase. We reamped with a bass amp + cabinet. The main sound of the bassguitar was the amp and a bit of the pedals for clarity in the higher frequencies. The bassamp and cabinet provided the bulk of the low end and body if the sound. The amp track was duplicated and one was lowpassed purely for the lowend which got automated and compressed to have a very consistent low end pressure. The entire bass got a little multiband distortion to get some extra drive and grit.
The vocals were thickened by duplicating one of the double tracked vocals and pitch shifting both a little bit to have a chorussy effect. This also created the thickening effect I was after. To give the vocals some space, a bit of room reverb was added. Automated delays enhanced words and vocal parts were needed. The overall mix of the vocal is kept pretty dry, to contrast the mayhem of guitars happening and not to end up in a big reverb fest.
The guitar mix started out with the guitartrack recorded as backing on the day of the drum recording session. I decided to keep the track and use it as center background guitar track. Reason for this is the guitar were very shoegaze stylewise and I wanted to create some of that wall of sound shoegaze has. Reverb and delay were added to the track to put it to the back ground and volume automated to fit all parts of the song.
The main guitar part played by Bart were the Vox amp and Fender champ amp. Mostly they were panned to the same side and treated as 1 amp, but for the tremolo parts they were panned on opposite sides for the stereo image.
Erwin’s guitar parts were more or less the leadparts. Recorded with three mics, they were first time aligned. The staccato parts Erwin played were made more staccato by adding a gate which shortenend the already short sustain a bit. A bit of tape distortion added grit and edgyness to the verse parts. Erwin’s chorus parts, played open with a ”The Edge” vibe were made stereo by delaying the more distant mic bij a few dozen ms. This added a delay and spaceyness.
For keys, we stuck mostly with the plugins added during the recording session.
The Roland Synthplus 60 was mangled with Steinberg’s Chopper and Bitcrush plugins, Ohmforce’s Ohmicide. Delay and reverb were added to place it in the mix and automated were needed to create additional movement. Rick’s Nord keys went through Steinberg’s Ringmodulater and reverb and delay were also added to have 3D movement.
The mix was passed through the D&R analog eq to set an overall sound , then imported back into cubase for additional mastering.