History
Round about 1998 my studio was little more than a car garage with a bit of furniture and some music gear, in fact it still had the roll up door. It was not at all set up for recording bands or anything else. But I was enthusiastic, and eager to get down and dirty with producing. Recording was something that has always fascinated me. A fellow colleague at the time, Tinus Lotz wanted me to record and produce a demo for his band, Mayonnaise. We were both system programmers at the same company and good friends too.
At that point I've manage to record a few bands already in my excuse of a studio, so at least I had a bit of experience. Today however, I just realize how out of place everything actually was, my lack of mixing skills back then included. Nevertheless I've always been proud of how those recordings came out, with what little I had. It is pleasant now to look back and talk about it.
I recall that I had a desktop computer with an early version of Cakewalk Pro Audio. It could do the bare minimum, for example live effects was not possible and had to be mixed wet. Also, I had 2 sound cards plugged into 6-bit slots of the desktop PC, each of a different brand. That in itself was tricky on the Windows system and plug-n-play only came in the next era. I had to do some funky IRQ tweaking for the system to be stable. One of the issues was that when I played back the recordings, track timing was processed differently between the two sound cards. Their clocks were slightly off and could not be synchronized, so post recording I had to cut one track a little every few seconds, to align with the audio from the other. And I had to solder most of my cables myself, mini jacks for those cheap sound cards. I just could not afford buying proper off the shelf stuff. I've even made my own a mic and music stands from junk. It was early days for digital home recordings on a small budget, unlike today where everyone call themselves producers, and have top notch stuff often for the cheap. At that point I have been the techie for years already in my Band, After Hours. I've already progressed from hardware (Roland MC50MkII) to software music sequencers, and a lot of stuff started to move into the digital realm. Being a programmer and tinkerer made a heck of a difference, and saved me thousands over the years.
I had a minimum of mics, which were not intended for recording use. But I managed, and mic'd up what I could. I had 2 tracks for the drums, one for lead guitar, and another for acoustic guitar. The bass was separate and finally Tinus's vocals had it's own track of course. I remember Tinus had bought a ribbon mic, which was unusual to me but very nice, and it had a retro look to it as well. Even today I think they are some of the best.
My wannabe studio was just this single room, with no isolation between the band and me. All I had to monitor and check levels, were headphones and the level indicator in the software. I think all of us had our ears ringing afterwards, the drums made sure of it. Of course that started a chain reaction of everything trying to be loud enough too, but we had a blast. So did our ears.
We managed to record the 3 songs for their demo and had to do the vocals separately - I only had 4 input channels (Left & Right from each sound card). I continued with mixing it in the weeks that followed. Those days were long before plugins, or virtual instruments / soft synths, so what the band did was what I really had to work with. The software had some basics regarding effects and EQ. Since I was the keyboard player for my band, I had some hardware (keys, sound module etc.) but I tried to not add anything extra unless it I felt it would really add value to the song. It was about how Mayonnaise sounded after all!
I remember Tinus being a nice guy, he was quite happy with the outcome. I also created the CD with a cover and label design for them, and color printed & packaged it. Yep, I did the recording, mixing and album art myself. I left the company we were working at, shortly afterwards and lost contact with Tinus.
Dusting off
Back then I kept a copy of the CD demo for myself, but at some point it was not playable anymore. The ink of CD insert has smudged as well. Around a year or so ago (end of 2020) I went through some stashed away CD backups I made back in the day, and was surprised to see that they still worked. Only a single laptop still has a working DVD drive today in my house, which is actually also my older backup DAW. I also discovered that the software I used, Cakewalk from Band Lab is actually freely available on the internet nowadays, and went ahead to install it. Parts of it is still like the original version from Twelvetones, but of course a lot has been changed and improved. But the best part was that I could still open those old archives from the CD in Cakewalk! Today I still have a soft spot for Cakewalk.
This then got me wondering what happened to Mayonnaise. I started searching the net, and found Tinus's outdated profile on Facebook, but could not get hold of him there. Luckily I managed to find some of his family from the Facebook friends list, so I shared the demo track with them. They were very excited, and I mentioned to them I might try to remix some of it. And so I decided from the 3 tracks: Stay, Queen Nicotine and Skin - that the one I am going to attempt to revamp, was Queen Nicotine. I just love the Grunge feel of that song.
The mix
Editing became quite an intensive exercise. Since the original projects were in Cakewalk, I decided that I will try to remix it in that latest version as it opened the original projects seamlessly. But soon I got frustrated as by now I am so used to working in Reason Studios, that I struggled to find my way in and around Cakewalk. The workflow was just too foreign to me now. After a few sessions, I decided the most practical option would be to export the raw original recorded tracks, and imported it back into Reason. But, in Reason it soon hit me that there was that timing problem between the tracks. Also, the band themselves being young and fierce, seem to speed things up a little at some points in to song as it was not recorded using a click track. So work began to align the recordings to the track measures. For this I had to split up each track into many sections and nudge it into place. Many of those sections had to be time warped (slowed or sped up) to match the set up tempo, Reason made this worth while. This took quite a few sessions, but I eventually managed to finish it without giving up. It was still not 100% but good enough to allow moving on to the next phase.
Another huge issue I had, was that there was so much mic bleed between tracks. On the 2 drum tracks for example, the electric guitar was clearly audible. Yes, 2 drum tracks only...for a complete drum set! There was no real way to tame a cymbal or hats in between everything else. It was mainly the bass drum on one track, and the rest on the other, with other instruments and vocals in the background caught across the drum mics.
The electric guitar was recorded as originally planned with a stomp box effect wet, so I had little control. At one part in the originally mixed demo you can clearly hear the noise as Tinus was toggling the guitar pickup switch for the next song section, which to me is just part of everything anyway. The guitar had a fat grunge sound after I routed it through a Soft Tube amp in Reason.
The bass had a lot of noise on it, hum, hiss and fret noise - again, it is what it is and not necessary a bad thing, and because of the way I set up my "not so well planned and understood" recording environment. I tried to clean up quite a bit this time. Timing was an issue there again at some sections, but hey - it felt human and I liked it. Reason has a "Slice Edit" feature that maps audio to beats, and I used that to improve the timing somewhat.
With Queen Nicotine, the one instrument that to me, spoiled it a bit was the acoustic guitar. It was just way too busy, and where it should have been be a feature at the breakdown in the song, it did not work at all. In the remixed version, I took it out everywhere else, and left in a more tamed version only at the song's softer parts.
For me, with all 3 songs in fact - the best was Tinus's vocals. In the remix I had a challenge with some soft distortion and saturation at some recorded parts, but his natural vocal tone made up for that. I really think this dude has quite a nice voice, and always liked it from that day I heard him sing the first time, now decades ago. I always thought one day his voice was going to take him to places. I used a stock Multiband Compressor Combinator in Reason, to give extra sheen this time round.
Queen Nicotine
So, that garage eventually got extended and became the studio you can see elsewhere on this blog, and over the decades I've learned a few things and went for a course of two - I got a diploma in 2010. I've mixed tracks for many by now. Producing has been a passion for me for as long as I can remember, and I wanted to challenge myself this time to see what I could achieve with Queen Nicotine. It is still the original recordings, and I'm limited in many ways because of what was not possible back then, and my own limitations on the material I recorded then. I've made some new changes, for example I've added artificial harmonies and changed the song structure, and guitar solo (I found the original solo to be just unnecessary long). I think it came out not too shabby.
Take a listen, and tell me your thoughts. It's been a pleasant trip down memory lane.
PS. I managed to get in contact with Tinus!
Queen Nicotine (original 1998)
