How to Record a Masterpiece in Your Bedroom

so what we're about to watch is my favorite Studio performance ever it is Radiohead doing weird fishes one of my favorite songs in fact the reason I own this microphone is because of the video we're about to watch and I'm gonna react to it and I'm gonna try using my ears and whatever I see on the screen to figure out at least some semblance of what's going on that makes this video so great and then I'm gonna try and recreate it to the best of my ability using a bedroom studio and using more affordable gear I can't promise the most affordable gear I will use whatever sounds the best but it will definitely be more affordable than their gear we're gonna talk about the drums first and then we'll move on to the guitars [Music] so what I always notice about the drums they are incredibly clean and Incredibly dry and it almost feels like they shouldn't be and the reason it confuses me is if we look at the microphones that they're using on this kit we're seeing a stereo pair of Kohl's 4038s some of my favorite microphones on the planet they're ribbon microphones they're pretty dark and mellow but also importantly ribbon microphones work in what we call a figure eight polar pattern that means you're getting what's in front of the microphone but the nature of a ribbon you're also getting what's behind the microphone meaning these coals right here and right here they're recording what's above them as well so you might get a lot of bleed from that not only that but it looks like we have a mono overhead a Telefunken u-47 or Neumann u47 and then we also have condensers on the toms which means a lot of what's being picked up in this drum sound I would imagine is bleeding into each other looks like there might be an sm57 here I like how in his gear list he just says unknown microphone on his list and the drum tone is definitely really dry on purpose so that's definitely something to try and aim for as drive a tone as possible whenever we're doing this in our bedroom [Music] foreign [Music] thing I love about the guitar is here you have to remember there are three guitars they're quite wide and they're encompassing a large portion of the mix and because the drums are kind of subdued and a little bit tighter they really make this huge stereo image that allows you to kind of swim around in it and on top of that all of the guitars are in 3-4 and the drums are in four four so you can imagine not only do we have a 4-4 drum part we have a three four guitar part and all of those guitars Venture off into their own chords and reconnect after a different amount of measures so all of these instruments are kind of going on these separate but connected Journeys on different parts of the stereo image as well so I suppose whenever we're trying to emulate this what we're really going to be trying to do is kind of vary the different tones that we're getting along the stereo image I might use this guitar and a kind of a darker more subdued tone we'll have that on one side we're going to use a different guitar I think Ed uses a lot of Hollow Bodies I might try and use my hollow body and maybe my other Strat uh for Johnny's partners [Music] so one thing I want to point out with the guitars here I think they're all using Vox Vox AC 30s you'll notice that the guitars are primarily miked with u67s or u87s u67 u87 obviously legendary microphones looks like it's a 2x12 meaning there are two 12-inch speakers inside of there and they're placing the microphone pretty much dead in the center of the cone if you've watched my sm57 recording guitar video you know that's definitely the brightest option and it is very close mic'd at least on this Vox it looks like they're getting the most amount of sort of harmonic information from it possible with fishes oh here we go that vocal is just insane man [Music] it's definitely an artificial Reverb so we will do the same let me tell you why I love this choice of microphone the re20 for this occasion look at Tom right now Tom is right on top of the microphone he's kind of eating it like this and the really great thing about this microphone especially in a circumstance like this is an re-20 is designed to not have a big proximity effect what that means is if I get closer to the microphone you'll notice it gets deeper louder and a lot more low end if I would have done that into a different microphone like an sm57 it would have been a lot more intense because this microphone is designed to eliminate some of that proximity effect so when Tom decides to do something like that grab the microphone it's not going to be quite as extreme and it keeps that consistency even when Tom is kind of doing his Tom York thing and moving around and varying his distance from the microphone or completely eating it like this [Music] God man it's just unfair it's over by the world right we got our work cut out for us for sure so we're gonna record drums first and a buddy of mine's Studio this is Michael be sure to DM him if you need any help with any production projects especially drums he's also starting his own YouTube channel so go give him some love and then we will add on to that in the spirit of this production let's get going all right it is a long time since I recorded that last part of the video and everything is done and hey if you made it this far consider subscribing because clearly you care a little bit about this and this is where the fun begins I literally never ask anyone to do this but I'm proud of this video and when people subscribe it helps the video so thank you and I'm gonna have some cheaper alternatives to these microphones appear on the screen if you can't afford or don't have this nice of gear okay so let's start with drums okay so let me explain to you a little bit about like what's going on here Michael has all of these diffusion and absorption panels all around the room so it is very dry which is great because this drum tone is incredibly dry as well we also have a sound blanket here right behind the symbol we have another sound blanket and then we have one covering the window here's the bed as promised it's a bedroom we used an AKG c414 and an OC 818 as our stereo overheads so those are replacing the Kohl's 4038 and it's not really true to the tone of the 4038s but importantly here we were able to mimic that figure eight pattern using those microphones and with some EQ adjustments we were able to match it pretty well we placed a loud and Clarion in the middle of the stereo mix right where that u-47 was in their original video it's facing down towards the snare and the Clarion will give us that kind of annoyman-esque kind of smooth darker mid-range tone one interesting thing about the overheads is they're really close we noticed they were less than a foot away from the symbols so we made sure to mimic that as well and that might have led to the more intimate tone and that also might have led to a more full snare because they're definitely capturing a lot of snare now we found out one of the reasons why the drums sound as dry as they do it's likely because well they didn't actually play Toms on the song so we just cut that out of the mix that sounded much more faithful to the original recording so I would assume that's kind of what they did too check it out for yourself [Music] next we stuffed a bunch of fabric and Mattress padding inside of the kick drum that gave us a nice dead thump rather than a rounder more resonant tone it was really tight and it actually took the compression really well actually if this video does well enough and you would like to see I'm happy to do a part two where we break down the mixing process as well so get subscribed like it share it all the things that will help this video if you'd like to see that next was the sm57 and that actually even though it's a pretty standard snare mic we made sure to make the positions of these microphones pretty exact what they were in the video so it's a pretty interesting position for the sm57 it's more facing the rim of the snare than the center of the snare next is the base the base absolutely nothing fancy we do what most people do when they're working in a home studio and just di the bass it looks like maybe Colin was playing through a compressor an outboard compressor or something like that but it's hard to tell based on the footage so just di for me which is the only thing a home studio guitarist knows how to do with a bass next are the guitars as mentioned earlier the guitars were marked with a Neumann u67 or u87 it's hard to tell and the mic position is actually pretty peculiar to me whenever I'm using a condenser to mic a guitar amp I usually put them a little bit farther away than I would a dynamic and then I put the Dynamics right up to the grill but we're matching the positions that they used in the video so I made sure to place my lauten Clarion which is the closest microphone I have to the u67 tone I made sure to put that only a couple inches off and then pointing down towards the floor and a similar angle that they had in the video let me talk for a moment about recording guitar though because it was a lot it was very hard as mentioned the track is in 4-4 on drums and three four on guitar and the timing is very this was really hard for me to get the hang of especially in the bridge where the drums completely drop out but watch any breakdown on the internet and you'll learn this this is about production so how does that translate to production well guess what when you're a bedroom musician your guitars are not set up as well as radioheads okay it is um it is day two of recording guitars and the biggest struggle and the biggest frustration I've been dealing with is guitar intonation despite my best efforts I would consistently be out of tune with myself because all of these instruments are intonated slightly differently that basically means that they go out of tune at different intervals higher up the neck even though a guitar might be perfectly in tune at the nut at the very top of the neck doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be in tune at like the 12th fret so this was knocking the harmony parts of this track off tune if just a little bit slightly just a couple cents but it was noticeable to me and it was probably noticeable to you know your average audio engineer I even tried detuning the guitars off by a couple cents thinking that up higher on the neck they would be in tune and this helped but not all the way so 50 takes in and three frustrating days later we decided to basically tune and Pitch the problematic notes inside of Ableton thank you [Music] would the average listener have ever known probably not but I like to think subconsciously it makes a difference vocals were actually really simple we used an ra20 and we placed it near the middle of the room slightly off axis from Center also hit up Ethan if you'd like any help with any production projects and he also has his own channel so go check it out I have this video talking about how you can set up pretty decent vocals in an untreated room I just followed my own guide there and Ethan knocked it out of the park and a couple takes so did Michael actually it was me that did a ton of takes and with that said let's check out the performance thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] but I don't really see your eyes [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] okay so this video uh is a big jump for me in content style and it's a big risk so if you liked it please subscribe please like it uh share it if you can and I'll see you in the next one hopefully another one of these so watch it and share it so I can do more of this goodbye

Channel: AudioHaze

Views: 98,356

Keywords: Radiohead basement sessions, Radiohead video essay, video essay radiohead, Radiohead weird fishes tutorial, radiohead tutorial, Radiohead basement sessions reaction, radiohead reaction, radiohead, basement sessions, video essay, tutorial, audiohaze, audio haze, AudioHaze bon iver, bon ive, bon iver

Id: LV5xb3A0S1A

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023