Furrocious Visitor

Furrocious Visitor (2023)

Furrocious Visitor was the second work of my solo project. This may have been the fastest I've ever worked on anything; I wrote the three songs from scratch and recorded/produced them in less than two weeks.

I have mixed feelings about this EP... I love the tunes but I wasn't in the right state of mind when writing and producing these songs and it is reflected very well both on the recording and in the guitar playthroughs...

Virtual instruments:

Virtual instruments are the drums, a Native Instruments' piano and a clavinet + Logic lead synth for Blue Mayhem.

Drums

The drums were MIDI-programmed with GGD's P4 kit. In order to add some customization, I blended the P4 kick and snare with some of the Logic Pro's built-in drums.

For mixing, I copy-pasted some settings from a Nolly tutorial on drums mixing.

Bass

The bass used for the recording was a Marcus Miller Jazz Bass through a Suhr Koji Komp and a Markbass Micromark 801 with the VPF turned all the way up. This analog rig sounds amazing in the room but lacks definition when recorded; I committed to it anyways.

In terms of mixing, I only used an equalizer to remove unnecessary frequencies. In retrospective, I don't like how the bass sounds with the whole mix, but I admit I was too lazy when recording these songs...

Guitars

The guitar used was an LTD H3-1000 and all the tones come from NeuralDSP Archetype:Plini X plugin.

Rhythmic parts were double-tracked. I didn't bother to look for a matching tone, I looked for a preset that sounded nice and committed to it for the whole record.

Acoustic guitars were recorded with a Focusrite starter pack microphone pointing at the 12-ish fret.

For the solos, I messed around with different presets until I found one that matched the vibe of the section. I made good use of the double utility of the Archetype:Plini X plugin.

For mixing, I copy-pasted some settings from a Nolly tutorial on guitars mixing.

Other production aspects

This is an old mastering plugin chain, I've used it on both Furrocious Visitor and Calima EPs and while it fulfills its function well, there are aspects I don't like about it...

  1. I apply the EQ curve before mixing. It gives a boost to the lows and adds air from the beginning, so it prevents doing extreme EQ moves to every track.
  2. I used an SSL-style bus compressor with slow attack/auto release to glue the mix together.
  3. I used the UAD Verve plugin to give a nice saturation to the mix.
  4. Lastly, I apply a limiter to prevent peaks coming from the snare or other hits and special effects.