I recently had the opportunity to work with a new, up and coming band called The Poison Ivy League. Kevin Shell, the drummer from my band The New Outliers, also plays with this group and a few months ago he mentioned that they were looking to record a few songs for their presskit so that it would be easier for them to book gigs around town. After checking out the type of music they played, I jumped onboard to record and mix four songs for them last month. As is my usual recording procedure, the tracking session with the band was conducted at their rehearsal space (Kevin’s basement). There is already some acoustic treatment in the main room since this is also where TNO practices and I know the room’s general sound since I’m there almost every week. There’s also a little room off to the side (dubbed the “Tiki Lounge” due to it’s Hawaiian inspired decor) that worked perfectly as a makeshift control room during the tracking session.  

The Poison Ivy League is a 6-piece “garage” rock band who’s sound is rooted in early 60’s rock, punk, and soul. Aside from Kevin on drums, the band consists of brothers Matt and Jason Brown on lead vocals and guitar, bassist Courtney Donovan, second guitarist Jonny Cecka, and keyboardist Mark Bickerton. Their sound together is classic yet upbeat and is great to dance to.

When possible I like to record bands playing together and given the source material, I felt that it would best to get everyone playing in the same room as much as possible. We decided that the only overdubs would be vocals, some lead guitar parts, and the keyboards (due to Mark not being able to get to the session until much later on in the day). The main guitar amp was setup around the corner of the main room and I used a mobile go-bo to isolate its’ mic from picking up bleed from the drums in the other room. Both the bass guitar and second guitar were run direct since Courtney and Jonny had rigs that worked better with this kind of setup. Matt wanted to do his scratch vocals with the rest of the band, so I set him up in the middle of the room with an SE Electronics Reflexon Filter behind the vocal mic to cut down on room bleed. I also used a Shure SM57 for the vocal mic as it offers excellent rejection around the sides and back. While I had planned for those to be just scratch tracks, Matt was so happy with how they came out that we decided to keep them for the final lead vocal tracks. Even though they were recorded with a live drumset no more than six feet away, the mic technique I used provided minimal bleed so that the lead vocals remained punchy and present. The band was able to lay down all the songs within a few takes making it a pretty painless session (the best kind!). I can’t stress enough to bands that do not have a lot of recording experience how important it is to be prepared in this type of environment. I was very impressed with the speed and accuracy that everyone had when laying down their tracks.

After tracking was done I took the multi-tracks back to my mixing studio back home. The guys had expressed that they wanted the mixes to sound as vintage as possible. Since the music they play has a kind of lo-fi sound to begin with I wanted to make sure that that old school vibe was present in the final mixes as well.  In those days everything was recorded and mixed on to tape using all analog gear that adds subtle warmth and harmonics to the sound. While I do have a real 1/2″ 2-Track Reel-to-Reel to call on for this sort of thing, I decided to actually just use the excellent Slate Digital Virtual Tape Machines plug-in on both the individual tracks and the master bus. You can really drive the VTM plug-in to add subtle saturation without totally killing the overall tone of the mix. Around the time that I started mixing the project Slate had just released a Virtual Microphone Preamp emulation that contains modules modeled after vintage Neve and Universal Audio preamps from the 60’s. I used this plugin on several tracks to give the mix a crispy tone on the top end that really makes certain aspects of the mix really jump out.

After a couple of minor tweaks here and there, the final mixes were delivered to the band this past weekend. Everyone involved is really happy with the results and it was a really fun project to work on. You can check out a few of these songs on my Sounds page and then you can also get them direct from the band’s Band-camp page as well.

Photo Credits: Matt Brown