Mixing The Dirty Nil

I love rock, in all its glorious forms.

When I was a teenager I was listening to bands like Beastie Boys, Fugazi, Bad Religion, Dino Jr, Helmet and Nirvana. Pretty much anything with guitars, aggressive drums and attitude.

Last week I had the absolute pleasure mixing a record for a local Hamilton Band called, The Dirty Nil. They are three younger guys, 20ish, inspired by the 90's (and everything before it) like I was by the punk movements of the 80s. It is awesome and innovative stuff.

The record was recorded with a buddy of theirs up at a cottage drinking beers and rocking the hell out. They armed themselves with a stack of fuzz pedals, some big ass amps, bags of chicken fingers and a remote controlled vaporizer with a built in alarm clock.

The beds were tracked live off the floor. Now, for those of you who don't spend much time in the studio, with a band this young getting great takes off the floor is next to impossible. But that is clearly not a problem with these guys, check out the tracks Bruto, Verona Lung and Fucking Up Young to hear what I am talking about.

We met about a month ago to go over some of the rough mixes, break out the tracks on the console and to see if things clicked between us.  The first couple meetings with an artist or a band are really important to me and to the overall process, because that is when I get to listen to the ideas being shared, get into a bands artistic mindset and start to figure out how I can get them what they want, how to develop a plan and if I am lucky come up with a couple surprises. The first thing that caught my attention was the rawness of the tunes, the fucking huge guitar and bass sounds mixed with Luke's raspy/aggressive yet musical sounding voice and the pop sensible arrangements. So after a few hours of talking and listening everyone felt good about the project and booked off a week to mix.

It took three days to pass through the album and complete the first round mixes. Normally when you are mixing a record the key to fidelity is to not allow for the mix to "go into the red". What that means is this. All Professional recording equipment is designed to work within certain tolerances, and sometimes they are built to be abused. Many people in this business care about these things greatly and these people should be avoided at all costs. As far as I am concerned this attitude is making conservative and boring records, especially in time period where digital is king and is inherently clean sounding. Fuck the squares!  So I had no problem overloading the console, it was fun to push it actually. The master fader was down ten db and the meters were almost pinned. It gave everything a pleasing and aggressive sound....it sounded like a rock record, duh, winning.


The drums were the biggest obstacle with this mix. They were very lifeless and slightly boxy. The first step was to ditch the room mics, they revealed the fact that it was recorded in a cottage too much. The overheads sounded fine and took to compression quite well. I ran them through my overstayer and airfield liminator. The overstayer gave them a really gritty American rock sound that had a great splat sound on snare hits. With the use of the attack and blend controls I was able to dial in something aggressive and usable.   The airfield helped to give the OH's a polish and pumping sound. The snare was the biggest problem. Normally I would replace it with samples but lately I have been avoiding them like the plague. There is nothing wrong with using them, but I have recently discovered some other techniques that present results that I like more....ok back to it. The snare sounded pretty shitty and out of tune. I used the transient designer to remove most of the sustain and the distressor to keep it under control and to add some mojo. But I was still stuck with a weird and small snare sound. After playing around with some different options I found a great solution. I used a software reverb and bused to it ITB (in the box) from the snare channel. This verb room sound was then brought up on a new channel where I cranked the trim up on the console and completely over-drove it creating a really fucking badass sound and because the snare was such an odd duck to begin with...it sounded completely original. Never assume anything. Sometimes the snare sounded like it was a shotgun going off in an oiltanker....wicked, bi-win!

The bass was a breeze...I ran it through my 1176 with about 4 db of compression...only kicking in when it needed too. The consoles eq sounded great on it...I always enjoy the low end sound it has. I think it was a mic'd cabinet with a 421 on it. The guitars were also a breeze...I ran them through the api 2500 and eq'd using the board.

The vocals had a great sound coming in that I cant take any credit for. The engineer that tracked the session had taken the time to send every vocal through a shitty old tascam 4 track cassette machine. It was really distorted...but was clearly tape. The only trick to them was pulling out the unusable frequencies that were mucking things up and making the words unintelligible. Luke writes some great lyrics that would be a shame to be missed.

After that i broke out all the stems and spent the next couple days combing through everything adding verb here and there and just nudging all the songs to get some continuity. At this point the ideas had been recognized and developed, so had all the sounds, now it was really just about the surgical/detailing shit.  It is this time that makes a recording sound like a real record. The only effects on the album are the sound toys echo and decapitator(yes sometimes we wanted even more distortion). Most of the verb was either d-verb or the UAD 140.

Once everything was over we got together and passed all the tunes through the chandler tg-2 (reissue preamps built on the EMI console the beatles used), airfield liminator and the api 2500...there isnt too much compression going on at this time...really i am just trying to get the songs to have a sound of their own. I really wanted the record to sound like its own thing.

Aside from that technical stuff we spent a week drinking a lot of coffee, eating coma inducing amounts of granddads donuts (I had four in one sitting) and hanging out talking about music. The guys will be coming in some time in a couple weeks and we will go over whatever loose ends we didnt catch and that should be it....I cant wait for people to hear it.

Michael Keire