Pro Techniques from Powerman 5000

By Randy Alberts

Ten years ago, the loudest band wasn't Nirvana and they weren't from Seattle either. Powerman 5000's massive sonic attack was pure in-your-face industrial rap-metal when the band first took Boston by storm, a sound defined on releases like True Force, Mega Kung-Fu Radio, and Tonight The Stars Revolt! That sound is evolving once again with help from a new rhythm section, Pro Tools, and one of the best downstairs neighbors a musician could ever ask for.

PM5K paused from work on their new album last year to add a Norwegian bassist (Siggy Sjursen) and a drummer from Portland, Oregon (Adrian Ost), and to re-tool the band's unique blend of "action rock" for the masses. DigiZine caught up with guitarist Adam 12 (a.k.a. Adam Williams) sitting at his Pro Tools workstation in his living room to talk to him about the soundproofing of his Los Angeles apartment, the band's new direction, and a couple of nifty Pro Tools tips.

"It's been great since I've gotten my Pro Tools rig," says Williams about working with vocalist Spider One on the band's new material. "I can literally wake up and start working on an idea or listen to something I've done the night before with fresh, objective ears. My creativity doesn't kick in until later in the day, so, if I have time, I'll spend my mornings surfing or improving my work space. I've learned how to build bass traps and hang diffusers, and I'm always trying to learn as much as I can about acoustics and sound treatments."

Williams likes the songs and vocals the band has come up with so far in carving a well-honed demo to hand to prospective new producers. He's borrowed a Roland V-Drum kit and has converted a walk-in closet into a vocal booth to help Spider introduce more melody to his rap, rock, and chant lead vocals (see Tip #1 below.)

"The closet works great for vocals because Spider can have his own private space where he feels comfortable to experiment without scrutiny," continues Williams. "We're using my house just for the demos and assume that any producer we hook up with will want to re-cut the vocals. Everything sounds good and there are a bunch of performances that could end up on the record. We've been running the vocals through a Focusrite mic-pre and then straight into Pro Tools. It's also a stereo compressor that I use for mixes and stereo loops. Even if I use only slight compression, it fills out the bottom and just makes everything sound bigger and better."

Pro Technique 1 —
Learning new vocal lines from Orange Vocoder
One of the new tracks, "Song About Nothing," was sounding great but missed a strong melodic feel the band was trying to coax from the song. Spider usually chants the choruses and raps the verses when he's improvising and exploring virgin PM5K territory, but this time he leaned just a little bit on a bright orange plug-in to shake things up.

"He's doing a lot more in terms of singing and melody this time around, but it just wasn't coming up for him on that song," says Williams. "So I threw [Prosoniq] Orange Vocoder on his original raps in the verses and used a factory default setting that instantly created this great melody all on its own. I quickly printed that to its own track and then we looped it for Spider to learn the melody! The melody was something Spider hadn't thought of but now it's totally his own melody because he riffed off of Orange Vocoder, too."

Before recording the new vocoder melody to its own Pro Tools track and playing it back for Spider to work with, Williams had to alter the Orange Vocoder preset he was using to better fit their song.

"I changed the chords around in Orange Vocoder with the mouse on the little onscreen keyboard to match the song because those major 7th and jazz chords are too jazzy for what we're doing. We did the same thing on a song called ‘Hey, That's Right' where Orange Vocoder came from nowhere to help us. Siggy [bass player] had this cool rhythmic idea for it that moved up a minor 3rd, kind of like a bluesy feel. He played the mouse keyboard in real time as the take was recording live, too, which is another way to use Orange Vocoder for coming up with simple melodies."

Williams also recommends using Pro Tools and Orange Vocoder to select and process rap vocal lines a certain way. "You can bring in the vocoder on the last phrase or word of every line to accent what's being said, that upbeat on the end. The sound is great but if you use too much Orange Vocoder it wears out. A little bit goes a long way, but the melodic possibilities with it are endless."

Pro Technique 2 —
Using the pan/edit window to manually animate audio
Another one of Williams' favorite things is using Pro Tools' pan edit window to manually draw unique pan curves and slopes to better animate his audio. Often using mono drum loops panned left and right to various degrees to begin with, he then goes into Grid mode and typically selects a whole note beat near the end of a big verse build-up or a heavy chorus to perform some sick, yet subtle, automated pan moves.

"If a loop is on the right side, I'll just draw my own pan to the left through that whole beat or two beats with the pencil tool," says Williams. "I'll then have an opposing, criss-crossing loop from the left side do the same thing, but in the opposite direction, of course. It's a great way to create some excitement and movement as you're about to go into another section of a song, but only for that one or two beats and very subtly. I might then paste that same pan curve to a couple of other places in the song, say a shaker part or a short loop at low volume."

Williams suggests drawing a not-so-perfect pan motion curve out over the course of a beat or two in the selected waveform display. Copy and paste that same automation move elsewhere in the song to taste, preheat your range to 475º, and cool before serving. But why not just do the same thing with the rotary pan knob in the Pro Tools mixer?

"Although I do quite a bit of panning manually when writing automation, I like to quickly copy and paste pans as well because it lends itself to some interesting surprises sometimes," says Williams. "The best movement is created when the pans are staggered and subtle. Some of the coolest things we've come up with lately have been the result of edits that weren't planned."