Sled Dog Studios

As y’all know, Sled Dog likes to run our shows preeeeetty loud. We like to bring the boom and shake the room. As you engineers in the audience know, this brings a massive feedback battle.

For a while there, we ran into the issue where we were getting just a smidgen too much feedback for our liking. Now you should know, we don’t use a feedback eliminator. We don’t auto EQ. We use our ears. Tony Huerta turned us on to the problems those two devices can cause in a live setting. Sure, we use an RTA to be a bit more scientific about it, but auto EQs can stumble upon nodes in the room and boost in ways that _produce_ feedback. Similarly, feedback eliminators can make some strange choices and fight the engineer. Instead, we just run (digital) graphics on groups and outputs and use the two best tools we have: our ears.

Before we got our VENUE, we ran purely in the analog realm. Allen and Heath live board with outboard comps, EQs, and effects. In order to overcome the noise floor, we would gain to “maximize” the channel (while leaving room for plosives) and bring down our mains fader. Novel concept, right? Bring _down_ the mains fader. Oddly enough, this worked. _Very_ well. 

With the VENUE, we were seeing too much feedback for our liking, especially when dealing with outboard pedals, as typically used by smaller professional aca groups. Our solution…was to flip our gain structure on its head. We cut our input gains by roughly 10db all around. We are now seeing no feedback…period.

This leads us to believe that a) the Avid pres have a pretty high THD and b) we probably should have realized that with a 24-bit bit depth, there’s no reason to maximize the channel and there is no “noise” in the digital architecture.

Moral of all of this: If you are working on a digital console, turn down your gain.

Hey Everyone,

It has been a great couple weeks here with the Free Track Friday program.  We collaborated with some great names in a cappella, pushed ourselves and pushed some boundaries.

However, with the school year starting up we are moving the Free Track Friday program to a monthly release.  This will give us time to put out the same quality everyone would expect during our busy season.

We’d like to thank everyone involved in these projects and everyone who downloaded these tracks.  We would not have been able to accomplish this feat without the continued support of all of you.

Thank you again for tuning in each week and we look forward to putting out some more great music for you!

Best,

The Sled Dog Team

SCIENCE!

For Free Track Friday #11 we bring you a creative mashup of Adele’s Rumor Has It with Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole arranged by Katie Riegal and Josh Goodman.

For Supermassive, we were excited to use a lady bass :)  To achieve this, we ran Leanne’s voice through a Boss OC-2.  The OC-2 is an analog octave pedal which produces two separate octaves below the root of the signal.  We chose to use this at the last minute and needed a reamping device (which we had ordered but hadn’t come in).  After pulling our hair out for a bit, we realized you can use a Radial JDI in reverse as a reamper.  Couple this with another DI (for us one of our ProDIs) and you have a complete reamping signal chain.  We also used an EBS Octabass for the single octave and a Boss MT-2 for the metal distorted guitar.

Weird noises!  and Science!  Sled Dog just received a large shipment of furniture.  In this shipment were these weird torpedo looking vases.  Well, if you strap a Schoeps CMC6 MK5 to a cable and carefully drop it into the base of this vase, it works as a pretty awesome reverb chamber.  You’ll hear this strange, sort of midrangy reverb on the kick on this track.

But Sled Dog!  There are weird noises in this track that COULDN’T have been produced by a human voice!  Well yes.  You’ll notice that the initial stomp rhythm was produced by some sort of drum.  It is actually a coffee table.  We brought the table into the booth, lifted it into a vertical position, miked one side with the CMC6 and the other with the MA-200 and proceeded.  We layered that with a stomp performed in the foyer.  The CMC6 pointed at the boots, the Blue Woodpecker at the top of the stairs gave a nice, big, reverberant sound.

Overall, it was great to get to work on some all-female a cappella.

Special Thanks:

David Longo (mixing) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Ted Trembinski (editing) @sleddogstudios @tedtrembinski
Nicole Milano (Adele) @nicolemariemil @sleddogstudios @cutoffacappella
Whitney Faison (Matt Bellamy) @whittlebee @cutoffacappella
Deanna Spiotta @cutoffacappella
Leanne Swaciak @cutoffacappella
Katie Riegal (arrangement) @kriegal @cutoffacappella
Josh Goodman (arrangement) @8beatmeasure @JoshyPGMan
Tat Tong (mastering) @t2tattong 

COLLABORATION

Free Track Friday #9 is Michael Bublé - Sway.  This track started with Dave emailing Tom Anderson from a wedding saying “You need to arrange Sway right now.  k thx bye.”  After a great deal of confusion, Tom created a BEAST of an arrangement.  10 parts, splits in 9 of the 10 parts.  At least 3 people on each part with doubles.  Massive….simply massive.

Once we received the arrangement a Dropbox folder was created with the arrangement in pdf, midi, mus, and xml, a pro tools session, and various guide tracks.  A message was posted on the CASA Facebook group and we subsequently received tracks from Los Angeles, Singapore, Wisconsin, and Boston.  A week of tracking, a weekend of editing, and a few hours of mixing and out came Sway.  If nothing else, this track certainly proved that you should shoot for the stars.  We got our first choice soloist from Los Angeles and JO ETESON of the Swingle Singers.

We couldn’t be more excited about the collaboration and the people involved in this track.  It’s one thing to make music alone in front of a keyboard.  It’s a whole different story to make music with people from across the globe.  A big thank you to everyone involved and we hope to put out more of these very soon! 

Special Thanks:

David Longo (mixing) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Andy Delong (solo) http://www.andydelong.com
Jo Eteson (violin) @JoEteson @SwingleSingers
Lo Barreiro @loloalexandra @musaevocal
Angela Ugolini @angelini34 @musaevocal
Tat Tong @t2productions
Grace Por @acappellaaddict
Katie Riegal @kriegal @cutoffacappella
Nicole Milano @nicolemariemil @sleddogstudios @cutoffacappella
Heather Newkirk @heathernewkirk
Mickey Hamilton @MickeyBluEyes81 @sleddogstudios @SmokingHotPipes
Ted Trembinski @tedtrembinski @sleddogstudios
Jon Brennan @bnoj13 @brickctysingers
Rohit Crasta @8beatmeasure
Ryan Belair @ryanbelair @8beatmeasure
RJ Pollard @8beatmeasure
Ryan Vazquez @8beatmeasure
Dave Magde @8beatmeasure
Josh Goodman (voxbrass) @8beatmeasure @JoshyPGMan
Tom Anderson (arrangement, percussion) @randomnotesLLC
Dave Sperandio (mastering) @diovoce

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Most of you may have been expecting to see Michael Buble’s Sway tonight.  Well, we received some VERY unexpected names on the track and as such wanted to take an extra week to really polish it before release.  Thus, this week we bring you a track from the Eight Beat archives of 2009, Jason Mraz’s Geek in the Pink.  This is the first track that Dave tracked, edited, and mixed EVER.

Geek in the Pink was recorded in the spring of 2009 in the Golisano Streaming Media Lab at RIT using a (now Six Dots’) 003 Rack+ and Rode NT1-A.

Again, this was Dave’s first real experience with mixing a cappella back in the day and as such, he experienced a bit of “experimenting himself into a hole.”  The song just got muddier and muddier and muddier.  After a VERY distraught email to Bill Hare, Dave received the advice: just raise your high pass filters.  Well…magically everything just clicked.  All of the mud was gone and out popped Geek in the Pink.   

Another interesting trick that popped up out of this track was the recording of the intro.  The intro was just recorded this week.  We put Roh in the booth and Dave spoke to him over the talkback mic.  Normally, one wouldn’t think to record the talkback mic…but the section tracks very quickly with this method.  Instead of just cueing talent, you are also capturing your part of the take.

Have you noticed there have been a lot of telephone effected drums thrown around music lately?  We couldn’t resist…  At the bridge you get a telephone effect on the drums and awkward panning: throwing the kit into the left channel.

All “scratching” on the track was done using Vari-Speed and Reverse.  Vari-Speed is an AudioSuite plugin meant to emulate tape-stops.  Carefully applying Vari-Speed and reversing the signal you can create a not half bad scratching effect.

All drums on this track are 100% programmed.

Special Thanks:

David Longo (mixing, announcer) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Rohit Crasta @8beatmeasure
Josh Goodman @8beatmeasure @JoshyPGMan
Ken Nagamatsu
Steve Haber
Neal Elinski
Rick Thomas
Rich Rockelman
Mark Holcolmb
Brian Lopipero
RJ Pollard
Joe Kaplan
Bradley Turnbull (arrangement) @BTArranging
Dave Sperandio (mastering) @diovoce

Original Composition!

This week, Sled Dog had the pleasure to work with the Smoking Hot Pipes on an original composition by Matthew Bielewicz.  You all should remember Matthew Beilewicz from his solo on Free Track Friday #5, Little Lion Man.  Percussion on this track was performed by Mickey Hamilton.  Background vocals were performed by the Smoking Hot Pipes.

Couple interesting things with this track.  There are no linear reverbs on the verses and choruses of this track except for the percussion.  Any ambience was created with delays.  This is our most stereo track from a purely technical, stare at the PhaseScope perspective.  Mono panned delays in the 20-50ms range cause the backing vocals on words to stay on the sides of the mix, keeping the center clear and open.  Dave Pensado covers this very well in his Pensado’s Place series.

Percussion is taken from a single track and supplemented with samples.  We went with a proper double kick configuration on this each panned center but with their reverb sends panned left and right.  Most of the cymbals are one or two samples using Waves S1 to shift the cymbal around the stereo field.

During the bridge we now get some reverb.  We also phase the heck out of everything.  There is no panning on the solo.  The solo was duplicated onto three tracks: one dry, two phased.  The two phased tracks are panned hard left and right with different LFOs to make the voice shift around the field.  

Special Thanks:

David Longo (mixing) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Matt Bielewicz (composer, solo) @smokinghotpipes
Mickey Hamilton (backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @MickeyBluEyes81
Adam Hawley @smokinghotpipes
Eric Traugott @smokinghotpipes
Josh Rinker @smokinghotpipes
Mark Goho @smokinghotpipes
Mark Mancuso @smokinghotpipes
Dave Sperandio (mastering) @diovoce

ORGANIC PRODUCTION

Quite a few people wanted to hear a more organic tune out of us.  Welp, here ya go!  Mumford & Sons: lots of banjo, driving kick drum, folky, powerful.  BTArranging: tongue twisting, rhythmic, wall of sound.  The result? spectacular.

This was our first project using Dropbox for remote collaboration.  Drop in a MIDI and PDF of the arrangement, let your singers know the tempo, and receive back completed tracks.  Simple.  The only issue is now you are no longer coaching these singers and what you get is what you get.  So, when you have syllables which can be interpreted in many different ways, you end up with many different results.  Lesson to be learned, be very, very clear with your requests.

Really the power of this track is in the arrangement.  Driving rhythms propel the song forward while a wall of block chords fill the sonic space.  The key to this oddly enough is dryness, something which is very difficult to convince yourself to do.  Instead of drenching a track in heavy reverb, try some delays sans feedback.  The brrungs are just some careful EQ with a nice slapback delay.  Another good trick is the use of nonlinear reverbs.  Nonlinear verbs give guitars space without muddying up the backs.

Special Thanks:

David Longo (mixing, announcer) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Matt Bielewicz (solo) @smokinghotpipes
Mickey Hamilton (backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @MickeyBluEyes81
Ted Trembinski (backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @tedtrembinski
Jeston Lewis (backgrounds) @sbhighcs @jestonlewis
Justin Bartlett (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
Rohit Crasta (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
RJ Pollard (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
Ryan Vazquez (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
Shaun Paduano (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
Joe Kaplan (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
Dave Magde (backgrounds) @8beatmeasure
Mark Holcomb (graphics) @8beatmeasure
Josh Goodman (percussion) @8beatmeasure @JoshyPGMan
Jon Brennen @BrickCitySingers
Bradley Turnbull (arrangement) @BTArranging
Dave Sperandio (mastering) @diovoce

When you start with a great solo, everything else falls into place.  This week’s track is Jessie J’s - Mama Knows Best.  First thing’s first…CHECK THIS OUT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y29eTcRFEl8

Mama Knows Best was arranged by Mickey Hamilton and arrangement edited by Tom Anderson.  The arrangement was mostly based on the original with some ideas taken from the live version.  We wanted to keep the song true to its big band form to see how well the voice could imitate this genre.

To our ears…the original is quite hot and crunchy.  Very analog.  So, we went overboard with tubes and analog sims this week.  Everything was recorded through a Mojava MA-200 tube mic and a Reso 873 (1073 clone).  We made liberal use of PSP’s VintageWarmer and McDSP’s Emerald Pack as well as SoundToys Decapitator.  We also ran Avid Heat across the mix bus.

As jazzy a tune as this one was caused us to sort of let the syllables flow.  The arrangement was provided sans syllables so as vocalists entered the booth they were simply asked to sing what felt natural.  We used this mix recipe as a starting point for our sax/horn sections.  A slapback delay with EchoBoy does wonders for saxes.

When recording jazz drums it’s typically good practice to use fewer mics than the modern treatment.  Typically a recording engineer will place a mic in front of the kick drum and two overheads over the kit as a whole and call it a day, versus the typical mic on every tom, snare, etc in rock miking.   How do you mimic that with a voice?  Well…our idea was to run a drum room reverb (we’re really digging the ValhallaRoom plug) on an aux and compress and treat it like one would a room mic.  We only supplemented with a kick sample on this one (true to the kick mic form), everything else is 100% live.

Overall this track became a simpler return to a more natural sound.  Our voice count was much lower for this one :P.  We hope you enjoy it!

Special Thanks:

David Longo (mixing, announcer) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Katie Riegal (solo) @kriegal
Nicole Milano (harmony, backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @nicolemariemil
Mickey Hamilton (arranger, bass, backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @MickeyBluEyes81
Josh Goodman (percussion, backgrounds) @JoshyPGMan
Tom Anderson (arrangement edit) @RandomNotesLLC.
Tat Tong (mastering) @t2tattong 

Scene 1: Roh and Dave occupy separate rooms in the “Eight Beat” apartment @ RIT’s University Commons.  Roh being Roh wanders around the apartment all day every day reciting everything from Bobby McFerrin to Lordi.

Roh: “Dipide Jipide Dipide JIpide Dipide Jipide Dipide Jipide”

Dave: “If I wrote you a symphony, would you say how much you mean to me”

Roh: “Dude, that’s the wrong song. It’s The Way I Are”

Dave: “What way are you? what?”

Scene 2: A week later in the “Eight Beat Apartment”

Roh: “Dipide Jipide Dipide JIpide Dipide Jipide Dipide Jipide”

Dave: “Now if I wrote you a love note, and made you smile at every word I wrote.”

Dave: “…”

Dave: “See what’s the point of waiting anymore? Cause GIRL I’VE NEVER BEEN MORE SURE”

Roh: “Dude seriously wtf, I’m singing The Way I Are.”

Dave: ”The Way I What?  That’s My Love…you know….Clefs?”

Roh pulls out his laptop and plays Timbaland - The Way I Are

Dave: “Oh.  Well all Timbaland productions sound the same.  Wait….”

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