Darwin Deez

stuff i used on my first record:

squier strat, mid 90’s. four strings. parents bought it for me when i was 11. still has a killer, loud neck pickup sound that i like.

crate practice amp – inherited after a party, formed the rhythm guitar sound of the self-titled album

audio technica AT-3030 mic – relatively cheap, i think i paid $200 for one used

behringer eurorack mixer (preamp) – not sure if this thing contributed to the harshness of my first record. it was more likely crushing and smashing things with Waves L1 that made harsh frequencies build up in the mix. or maybe it was that i mixed it on earbuds (and large home stereo speakers.) or just general lack of expertise. oh well, i seem to have gotten away with it.

tower PC with acid 4.0 and waves plugins – i traded a technics DJ mixer to nicholas van young for this thing. last song i made on this machine was hey mom. after that it was so garbage that i threw it out on the street corner

vintage pyramid mixer with fake wood side panels – this thing had a delay sound that i used on the bedspace lead riff. it also had a cool FET sounding preamp that i could overdrive by cranking the parametric eq and plugging my guitar straight into it. used that to get the distorted rhythm guitar sound on ‘lights on’ and it was my main rhythm guitar sound for attic attack, the album i made before my self-titled debut.

red plastic tambourine – extra splashy sounding. given to me by alby roblejo, a tambourine man of sorts. since ages it’s been broken so i just shake the pieces.

most of this stuff is pictured in the CD/vinyl liner notes.

stuff i got and used on my second record:

adrenalinn iii – has some decent amp sims and unique effects. got this after becoming obsessed with shredding blues licks via john mayer’s live DVDs. he uses the pedal on “bigger than my body” and for the intro solo of “i don’t trust myself” i used it for the twinkly chords on alice.

whammy pedal – i use this on YCBMG to play open string pull offs in A pentatonic as if it were E pentatonic. it transposes the guitar up a fourth. i also use it to play the verse chords on redshift.

macbook pro 15” with Logic and waves plugins. 

aiwa home stereo – bought this thing for $20 at goodwill and it has been my studio monitors ever since. horrible speakers but i’ve no illusions about them being accurate and by now i like to think i know them well. not sure if they’ve contributed to my constantly overemphasizing 300 Hz in my mixes or not.

shure sm7b – the “michael jackson mic” also i heard john mayer used it on his debut. 

apogee duet 2 – i bitch a lot about this thing not turning on when it’s cold but the sound is great and once it’s on it’s pretty reliable. 

hiwatt custom 50 with reeves 2×12 cab – the thing that makes this sound so good is the attenuator circuit that was modded into it by the previous owner. never mess with a fender amp without a hotplate or weber attenuator. you just have to get it too loud to hit the power tubes otherwise. this amp is my baby though. i bought it on ebay after some research at boutique guitar shops on the LES because the crate practice amp was too quiet to mic up on stage.

tubulator overdrive pedal

reason 4 – alice bass. this software sounded even better than the little phatty that moog let me borrow. dial up a bass sound and run it through that scream 4 overdrive thing. i was really impressed with how analog it sounded. wish i still had this. i used it for alice bass sounds and moonlit bass sounds (chorus only, the verse was the little phatty so you can compare them directly in that song). i really miss reason. i want it back!

double down:

Logic Pro X drummer. Used that for all the acoustic drum sounds.

ik multimedia amplitube 3 – got lazy and used a bunch of amp sims on this record. nobody minded. they sound great. logic’s stock amp sims are garbage though, stay away from those.

Voxengo plugins – drumformer on the logic drums did wonders for me.

audio technica AT4047 – yeah i did the vocals on this $600 thing except for two tracks which i sang on a $10k mic somewhere else. can you figure out which two songs i used the good mic on? regardless, i never use this thing anymore. it’s really fucking sibilant, even with a pencil taped to the front. probably some of the worst money i ever spent on gear. maybe if i sing far away from it or very quietly it’s okay. i just felt like i should upgrade from the 3030. but at the moment, i prefer the sm7, which is 1/3 of the price. what a workhorse.

lots of the waves 1176 on my vocals and guitars.

technique: boost 200Hz on all snare drums. punch, power and thump. discovered that on this record.

LP4:

new macbook pro 15”  mid 2015 – got this after composing the first 3 songs when my old one stopped booting up reliably.

fabfilter plugins – proQ2 is my goto and i used saturn to give my vocals some sass (anna maria).

melda production MCharacter – i use this to effectively boost the fundamental frequency of my vocal as it moves around from note to note. that way i don’t lose all the low end when i cut the lows off the vocal.

Waves C4 – i use this to tamp down the low-mids on my vocal without cutting them completely out. low-mids = “power” so you need a little bit to poke through on the attack portion of the sound, without occupying the power spot the whole time (so other elements of the mix can). i don’t actually know what i’m doing though. #reaching

Waves PuigChild – this went on the mix bus of many tracks on the album. adds a tiny bit of compression but also boost lows and highs according to jacob collier (i didn’t hear that consciously, but he could when i played him some of the mixes).

izotope vocal synth – harmonizer vocal sound on world’s best kisser

izotope ozone 7 – i don’t use this for mastering, especially not now that mastering is not so much about loudness per se, but i like using the exciter for distortion, the imager is my favorite of the plugins that do the “stereo-ize” effect, and i played with the tape sim and vintage limiter a bit, too. 

xfer cthulhu – saw deadmau5 using this on youtube and it looked fun. i used it to control vocalsynth and play the arpeggios at the end of kisser as well as the synth arpeggios on “too shy”. fantastic software. best arpeggiator. don’t need any others. except maybe the one on the juno-6.

dmg audio limitless – another cool thing i saw deadmau5 use. pretty sweet. bye bye L3. he also got me into the melda production plugins. i used this for mix glue on queen of spades, but by the end of the record, i had stopped using mix bus limiters in general in favor of parallel compression. #loudness_war is over.

melda production MPhatik – I used this to dirty up the guitar sound on “too shy” 

not so much gear but a trick i started using a lot: SSL bus-style compression (waves SSL emulation or logic’s vintage VCA) in parallel on the entire mix (often sidechained through a high pass filter to lessen the bass so that the kick and snare are hitting it equally hard). 30 ms attack, 100 ms release, 10:1 ratio, ~6 dB gain reduction, blended in with the dry signal to taste. got this approach from jonvilleproduction.com, whose mastering guide blog post i’ve thoroughly digested.

sennheiser hd-600 headphones – only bought these after i’d written and recorded everything. really needed something with a frequency response flat enough to trust. saw a mastering engineer, jonathan wyner, on pensado’s place. his recommendation seemed super trustworthy so i went with it. they helped me sort out some bass issues instantly and i’ve been tweaking mixes on it non-stop since they arrived. hopefully it’s $300 i’ve spent for a lifetime of pristine listening. (turns out they’re pretty bright compared to most other speakers but still much more trustworthy than anything else I’ve ever owned.)

Massive – found, used (and probably tweaked) some presets for the anna maria synth bass and for the twinkles at the end of daddy always

carbon electra – used this for a lot of basic subtractive analog sounds. mostly bass sounds. the whole record is synth bass, no bass guitars were used; and most of those bass sounds were from this cheap and enjoyably-not-over-complicated virtual instrument. goldilocks level of complexity in a soft synth, for me. has the controls i need to get the sounds i know i can get, and not too many wild LFO envelopes.

reaktor 5 – i used this old instrument call the gobox to generate clicky whirry sounds on getaway and runner girl (b-side). jam on it for 10 minutes and then drop it into a song, keep the serendipitous parts and push the other stuff around til it’s all good parts. very fun.

ats acoustics sound absorbing panels – five 2” and four 4” thick 2×4 panels. long overdue. only bought these after everything was already tracked. $600 that i will hopefully have invested for life. now i can actually buy real studio monitors. before my bedroom sounded terrible and would never have been worth trusting/investing in nicer speakers. still using the aiwas though 🙂