K2 – “Sta Giannena” Production Diary
K2 is a 4 piece band coming from my hometown Ioannina (or Giannena) playing southern, heavy rock/metal music with a spice of stoner/doom rock. Great lads who really enjoy what they’re doing in a very pure way.
On video below you can watch a 35 minute documentation of the production of “Sta Giannena” album. You can find out how everything was done and probably have a laugh as well. We had a blast with these guys! In case you want to know more technical details before watching the video, just keep reading.
I think it was early 2020 (probably January) when guys approached me to talk about the production of “Sta Giannena” and I was excited to do this. I knew they were great to hang out, easy goin’ people but most of all they know how to compose great songs while keeping it straight forward and simple.
What was really good about this album is that the band already recorded some pre-production demos by themselves. Lyrics were also available so I was able to listen and make some plans on how we could move on with the recordings.
At first we scheduled the recordings for April 2020 but the f**king virus had other plans… we ended up starting the sessions during the first days of August.
Recordings Drums
Unfortunately there’s always a budget to respect so we only booked the recording studio for 2 days, once again in Noisyland. We had to be fast and with the help of Panos Papakostas we tuned the drumset and started miking in the first Saturday morning of August.
1-2. Kick Drum In/Out
3-4. Snare Top/Bottom
5-7. Toms/Floor
8-9. Overheads (spaced pair)
10-11. Ride/Hi Hat
12. Dick Mic
13. Shoulder Mic
14. Hose Mic
15-16. Room (spaced pair)
Drumset and miking looks quite straight forward except maybe 12, 13 and 14. The “dick” mic is always great for the drum beater and snare. It’s placed right above the kickdrum and right below the snare drum facing the drummer’s genitals. I also wanted to place a shoulder mic facing the snare drum and see what happens in the mix. The shoulder mic was a Copperphone that is very interesting to use with it’s weird sound. As always, we also added a hose around the drum set ending up to an sm57 as our special mono room mic.
I was also planing to do a classic Blumlein for capturing the room ambience. We placed a stereo pair of Ribbon mics but didn’t sound good at all. Panos’ advised to simply do spaced pairs and placed them left and right with a 2-3 meters distance from each other facing the drum set. That was it! These ribbon room mics are actually the loudest mics on the final mix. They really captured a complete, huge, stereo image of the drumset and room. After passing through a JDK stereo compressor they ended up really tight and punchy as well.
In the end of second day we also added a combo Koch to the drum room to record the intro of the album called “The Gathering”. Needed that live feeling on it and planned to add overdubs and extra parts in my studio. The next days after the drum recordings I had to organise my projects, create my markers and do some editing with the help of K2’s drummer, Antonis.
Tracking Guitars
Now it’s Alekos and Dimitris time. I decided to track 2 rhythm guitars on the left and 2 on the right. I think we finished that quite fast thanks to Alekos and moved on to the lead guitars. Dimitris brought out some nice stompoxes, an e-bow and a slide. We had a great day experimenting and tracking his lead/solos. Later I reamped two more guitars through my Kemper using quite different settings so I can have even more guitar sound to layer on the mix.
Tracking Bass Guitar
I used a TECH21 overdrive/DI box and split the signal to track it in 4 different channels: clean DI, DI with a little bit of tube pre-amp passing through a 1176 compressor, a Bass amp and full overdrive. That ended up quite well and finished after 2 days.
Tracking Vocals
I set up a MXL condenser mic with an aggressive tube pre-amp and some light Fet compression on the channel strip. Guys had already printed out all lyrics so I can follow while tracking. That is very important for the process and was also a nice guide for me to create all cycle markers in the projects based on the arrangements and lyrics.
After 2 days we started recording some doubles for the choruses and some special vocal arrangements to spice it up.
Recording Extra Stuff
The recording sessions were complete in approximately 2 weeks. The last two days we had some real fun. We moved on to a bigger room and set up an omni mic in the middle. We sat down altogether with the lyrics printed and went through all choruses and various parts of the album to sing along and scream as a crowd. I also wanted to try out recording some acoustic guitar chords in “Bad Luck Attitude” chorus and gladly we kept that on the album mix as well.
Mixing
In early September I got back from my vacation time and started doing the pilot mix. Started with “Chain Of Command” which is really a killer track and opens up the album. First thing I did was to bring all drum mics in phase with the awesome Soundradix auto-align plug in and moved on to levels, panning and basic EQ. After that I did some hit-point detection (kick and snare) and converted to midi. I didn’t know yet if I’ll use any drum samples to enhance my original kick and snare but I like to be prepared for anything and always have available some midi tracks if I need them. 
I started mixing directly with my favourite gear on the master buss: Tegeler Manufactur’s Creme buss compressor. What I also love on this peace of gear is its Pulteq style EQ where I can always boost a little bit the low and high end.
On the drum buss I used a TK stereo compressor which I had just bought. I compressed the shit out of it and used it’s blend knob directly for parallel compression. 
The drums sounded punchy and huge while the two ribbon mics ended up really high on the mix. As most of the times, I used my SPL Vitaliser on the cymbals’ stereo buss to widen up the stereo image, compress, saturate and brighten them up. Cymbals ended up loud and clear on the mix and decided to keep them that way for an aggressive approach refusing to keep up with the trend that wants all modern rock/metal productions having really soft cymbals.
After that I moved on to using some compressors and envelope shapers in snare, kick drum and toms. I set up a plate verb for my snare and tom and a gated reverb for some tom parts. No need for roomy verbs, I already had that from my room mics.
Guitars were easy to mix, had 3 different stereo busses to play with and find the right balance between the 3 sounds. I never use much compression on guitars, just some EQ and room-verb.
Concerning bass guitar mixing, I love to use the Arousor by Empirical Labs and Quadrafuzz by Steinberg for saturation. I also use FabFilter’s Saturn and Decapitator (by Soundtoys) to saturate but lately I mostly use Quadrafuzz 2. Sounds more natural and it is quite versatile. I think people avoiding giving a chance to stock, cheap or free plug-ins are idiots. 
For the rhythm guitars and bass I only set up one stereo FX buss which is a small convolution reverb just to get some natural room and glue everything together. I also set up two hard panned mono verbs for very specific moments: when one side of the rhythm guitars is not performing I use the opposite side reverb to fill the empty space a little biy and make it feel like the sound is travelling to the other side of the room. Check out the intro of “Bad Times” for example.
The lead guitars though are always ready to be send to a ping pong delay buss and Echoboy by Soundtoys which is by far my favourite delay plug in.
On the vocals used an LA-2A style compressor, a limiter, plus a plate reverb, delay throws and automation on backing vocals to give that extra energy in every word, sentence and choruses.
Mastering
I finished mastering in the box with Wavelab using only the mastering rig. Sometimes I prefer Izotope’s Ozone maximiser compared to Wavelab’s maximizer especially when targeting to a very loud master but not this time. I ended up with a slightly louder version than the Spotify standard since I liked it that way and wanted to use only one version for CD and all platforms. It’s really sad to watch new engineers obsessed with loudness units. It’s like being obsessed with watching the meter on the console rather than paying attention to what is coming out of the speakers.
Release
“Sta Giannena” premiered in December 18th (2020) via 666MrDoom’s channel and is available in all digital platforms. CD will be soon out as well.
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