Ataraxia

Ataraxia (2019)

This was the first record I made professionally and the experience can be summarized as rushed and misguided... Well, not exactly... The lack of experience, songs rehearsal and preproduction led to poor communication, bad performances and a lot of editing to make everything sound cohesive...

I'll try to give some insights on the production process, but it's been a long time since we made this and I don't remember all the details.

Virtual instruments:

All the drums, piano, strings and brass sounds are MIDI programmed with Logic Pro's built-in instruments.

Drums

The drums were quickly programmed with Logic Pro's drummer. The kit was the SoCal kit (I think it's the default kit).

Honestly, writing drums with Logic Pro's drummer was such a great idea, it allowed to write a whole instrumental in a matter of hours.

Bass

The bass used for the recording was a Harley Benton DIY Jazz Bass.

The DI was run through some built-in bass amp presets in Logic Pro. I think I used an Ampeg SVT emulation and a RAT pedal for the distorted parts.

Guitars

The guitar used was a 2017 NK Headless guitar and all the tones come from Positive Grid's BIAS Amp 2.

Rhythmic parts were quad-tracked, two performances went through an Orange amp and the other two went through a Plexi styled amp, both amps with matching cabs and a SM57 + Ribbon mic combo. There was no particular reason to take this choice, I just started quad tracking and later on had to commit to it.

No pedals were used for this record. For cleaner sections, I turned the gain down; for high-intensity sections, I turned the gain up.

For the solos, I used a JCM800 emulation.

And for the acoustic guitars, I used the Focusrite starter pack microphone pointing at the 12-ish fret.

Vocals

We recorded vocals with a Focusrite starter pack microphone.

Due to inexperience at the point, we only recorded one single vocal performance for all the songs. All the double takes and background vocals were artificially created by copy-pasting the main vocal take and detuning it.

Furthermore, the band requested to not use any kind of pitch correction tool. That was a poor decision as the singer's pitch wasn't stable at all... I tried to sneakily autotune the vocal performances but at some point I was exhausted and stopped fixing them.

Mixing and mastering

Back then, I had a fair theory knowledge about mixing but the lack of experience made me consult a lot of tutorials instead of trusting my ears and my gut... I think I copied most of the processing that Nolly explains in this series of videos.