RedRoom Featured in EQ Magazine

Tuesday, 03 February 2009 00:00

RedRoom Recorders was featured in the January 2009 edition of EQ Magazine. The article highlighted Wes' role in

engineering Porcupine Tree's Fear of A Blank Planet album.

THE PROG-ROCK PROCESS OF PORCUPINE TREE AND MAGENTA by Will Romano
EQ Magazine, January 2009

"We are a post-digital technology kind of band, and we'll get the sounds we want by any means necessary," says Porcupine Tree guitarist and studio hound Steven Wilson about the plethora of digital and analog guitar tones he crafted for his bands 2007 releases, the full-length Fear of A Blank Planet [Atlantic], and the Nil Recurring EP [Transmission].

"Steven is very experimental within the digital realm, but he combines that expertise with organic staring points," says John Wesley, who co-produced Wilson's guitar tracks for both releases at his RedRoom Recorders in Tampa, Florida. "Steven demos his ideas on a Line 6 Pod, and he is so skilled at getting tones from it that we kept some of those original tracks for the final mixes," says Wesley. "It was almost like Steven threw down the gauntlet and dared us to eat the sounds he created with the Pod."

At RedRoom, Wilson started out old-school, layering savage, slick, and subtle guitar tracks with a Gibson Les Paul, a PRS 20th Anniversary Singlecut, and a '71 Fender Telecaster (loaded with Joe Barden pickups), as well as a combination of amps that included a Bad Cat Hot Cat 30 combo, a Diezel Herbert, and a Marshal 6100 30th Anniversary head. At this point, some good old stompboxes were utilized for most effects, with Wilson using a GigRig Pro-14 switching system to select or combine different pedals. The most-used processors included a mid-'70s Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress, Klon Centaur, SIB Echodrive, and a mid-'70s MXR "script logo" Phase 90. Wilson also fired up a Boss RD-20 Rotary Speaker Simulator and a vintage Leslie cabinet to create some aural squalls.

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We had an early '70s plexi Marshall head driving the Leslie, which was miked with a Shure SM57 on the high rotor, and a Sennheiser MD421 on the bass speaker," says Wesley. "We placed the SM57 near the edge of the cone, and the MD421 was positioned a bit further back and outward. To avoid phasing issues, we placed both mics on the same horizontal plane."

To introduce some vintage-style coloration to the Leslie tracks, Wesley employed a Vintech X73 mic preamp that's based on the design of the classic Neve 1073. "The Vintech helped us achieve the kinds of classic-rock guitar sounds Steven and I grew up with," Wesley says. "We didn't even need to use the preamp's onboard EQ -- in fact, it was switched off -- because we dialed in tones by routing the SM57 and the 421 to separate tracks. Then, if Steven wanted a brighter, more rippin' sound, we would bring up more of the SM57. If he wanted the sound to be darker, we'd bring in more of the 421."

Once conventional recording wrapped, Wilson digitally manipulated his guitar tracks in Apple Logic Pro 7. "Cheating the Polygraph" [from Nil Recurring] is a good example of how you can get even more creative by editing guitar tracks," he says. "I took a guitar chord with a long sustain, copied it, reversed it, pasted the copy to the front of the original chord, and executed a crossfade. The backwards track morphing into the 'normal' guitar chord created this mmmorrwoow sound -- it was almost like a sine-wave tone from a vintage synthesizer.  It sounded particularly nice with the sweet, warbling Leslie, and I used the part to start the song."

Rob Reed, the driving force behind Magenta, also deployed an outside-the-box mentality during the recording of 2008's Metamorphosis [Laser's Edge] - a four-song, 54-minute concept album documenting the violent unraveling of a serial killer's damaged psyche.

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"I had 100 tracks to work with," says Reed, who recorded the bulk of the record at his Porth, South Wales, home studio. "I'd record a couple of chords into Logic, and then loop them, which wouldlead to constructing some basic chord structures. Due to the album's subject matter, I wanted it to have more aggressive guitar sounds than our previous keyboard-based records, so I'd search for the most discordant chords, all the while building up layers of guitar tracks. Initially, I was layering the tracks using some filthy, over-the-top heavy metal models from a Line 6 Podxt. Those models sounded great in isolation, but I found the tones lacked mids, and they sounded a bit 'mooshy' when other guitar textures were layered on top of them. I kept wondering why I couldn't get good signal separation. That's when I decided to mic a real amp, and I never looked back."

For the miked guitar tones, Reed plugged a Fender Telecaster into a 100-watt Marshall JCM900 4100 and Marshall 4x12 cabinet, and positioned a Shure SM57 three inches from the center of one of the speaker cones. The Marshall delivered the midrange punch Reed desired, and, ultimately, he felt the amp models and miked amp tones complemented each other very well.

"I love that big, chorused guitar sound," says Reed. "So I double-tracked many of the guitar parts, and I used an Eventide Eclipse to add some chorus and delay. I also brought in a Universal Audio 6176 preamp to add valve warmth and Urei 1176LN-like compression to the tracks. in the end, the signal chain created this vibrant wall of guitar sounds."