Pro Techniques 9.2003

 

The Loading and Reloading of St. Anger
 Engineer Mike Gillies talks about studio and touring life with Metallica

By Randy Alberts

    
   
" St. Anger is sonically and musically unique," says Metallica's engineer and go-to Pro Tools guy, Mike Gillies, about the band's latest Bob Rock-produced release. "The aggressive tone that an all-high-resolution recording process provided us, at 88.2kHz, was perfect. It was very different from the sonic depth and wide stereo field of the earlier albums. Pro Tools|HD made the guitars sound as if the NS-10 monitors in the control room were Mesa or Marshall cabinet speakers! Very in-your-face and aggressive sounding, and the same results with drums. The natural dynamic range and sonic clarity of Pro Tools|HD suited the album perfectly."

Metallica tours hard and often, and since Pro Tools|HD captures every moment of every live show, Gillies is on the job 24/7 regardless of his global coordinates. We caught up with him somewhere between Ireland and the legendary Leeds and Reading festivals in the UK, and he took the time to share some of the Pro Tools techniques he uses to capture the sound of this legendary rock band.

The Audio Photography of Metallica
 "Instead of calling it recording, I refer to our process of making a record as 'musical photography,'" says Gillies, who has "photographed" every Metallica record since 1996's Load, in addition to working with The Cult, Tonic, Our Lady Peace, and Mötley Crüe. "On this record, the band met around noon each day to talk about what they wanted to do. Then they'd go into the room with Bob [Rock] on bass directing them, and jam loosely until 4 p.m. When something cool came up, it was pursued further later on by Bob, Lars, and myself, sometimes for as long as nine hours per session. Every minute of it was recorded. Instead of using Pro Tools as a fixing and enhancing tool, we chose to use it as the ultimate creative tool for the recording and mixing of St. Anger. No songs, riffs, melodies, or lyrics were written beforehand and brought into the studio, because the goal was to not replay, overdub, or fix anything."

    

Mike Gillies
 
According to Gillies, Pro Tools helped facilitate the band's creative and decision-making processes during the capture-the-moment St. Anger sessions. More than 2.5 terabytes of audio and a million files were generated while recording in this wide-open fashion. When reviewing the keepers and deciding how to best pare down and comp the tracks, everyone in the room used laser pointers to point out the killer riffs, drum fills, grooves, and vocal runs in Pro Tools on a huge 46-inch plasma screen display.

"Everyone learned to read the graphic nature of the Pro Tools Edit window," Mike explains. "We used the pointers to quickly indicate where to extract the cool bars and sections, how to comp various arrangements, loop riffs, and such. But despite this later editing, everything you hear on St. Anger was a first take. We tried different things and variations when the inspiration struck, of course, but it never sounded as good or as spontaneous or as exciting as the first pass. Even the vocals were cut on the fly, typically right in the control room without using even headphones or isolation. It's all about free-form thought and the flow of consciousness and relying on our instincts, not our fears and insecurities. This entire process could not have been possible without the current technology and the features of Pro Tools|HD."


Withstanding Every Earth Element: Mike Gillies
     
   
On tour, Gillies records every Metallica show with a Pro Tools|HD rig-to-go. He claims his one flight-cased rack takes the place of an entire remote recording truck, and costs the band about $80.00 a night in recording media. But it's the way Pro Tools|HD has weathered it all, and not withered from a typical Summer Sanitarium tour, that he appreciates the most.

"In some shows, I was so close to the pyrotechnics and the vertical dragon flamethrowers that I had to throw a towel over my rig and move for cover!" Gillies laughs in recalling some of the Sanitarium insanity that is Metallica. "I'd come back to my position and everything would be covered in ashes from the explosions. Add to that the heavy sheets of rain in Atlanta and the severe heat in Europe during the open-air summer shows – it got as hot as 104 degrees in Imola, Italy – plus the usual rough travel and handling found on any tour, and amazingly everything still worked! Now it makes me feel kind of silly for all the worrying I did when conditions were less than ideal or something got bumped in the studio while recording St. Anger."

 

Pro Technique 1 —
Using SoundReplacer and "Remove Track Silence" for Phase-accurate Drum Builds and Fills
Many mixing engineers use snare and kick samples to enhance existing drum tracks. Gillies used to do this by triggering samples to a copy of the drum sound's source audio. Though useful, this method often created unwanted flams or multiple hits as the volume threshold dictated when a sample trigger occurred. He'd have to manually control dynamics to avoid a "machine gun" effect on drum builds and fills.

"Then Pro Tools came along and allowed samples to be lined up perfectly to the source track, and the dynamics could be controlled with volume automation. This was much better, but still very time consuming – and what a waste of time if you later decided on using a different sample! SoundReplacer proved to be a faster method, and the dynamic control was great, but I was frustrated by the peak align feature. Softer hits with a later peak resulted in flams and phase problems, due to the inconsistent trigger. You can turn off the peak align in SoundReplacer, but noisy source tracks with high leakage still produced lots of false triggers."

What to do? Mike suggests the following tip, using a snare track as his example, to generate an optimal trigger source for those mixers who still prefer to trigger samples by hand.

First, create a new track in Pro Tools, then copy/paste the snare source audio onto that track. "Let's call this track 'SnareTrigger,' and place it directly under the source track for a good visual reference," he continues. "Highlight the 'SnareTrigger' audio and select Remove Track Silence from the Windows pull-down menu. Play with the settings to get the most snare hits possible without too many false triggers being created from any leakage going on. Then go to the start of the SnareTrigger track and zoom in to a larger view. Using the Tab-to-Transient function, quickly go through and trim the heads and tails of each snare hit to be consistent with whatever start/end points you're using. I use the start of the transient and leave only enough of the hit to allow SoundReplacer to determine a dynamic level."

    
   

Next, says Gillies, compare the SnareTrigger track to the source track and delete any false hits that occur, such as those generated by tom or kick drum microphone leakage. Also be sure to add any missing lighter hits. "Once you've tabbed through and checked everything, you can make more copies of the SnareTrigger track, as needed," he says. "Then use SoundReplacer with the peak align control turned off and the threshold set down to zero to create your sample tracks. Zoom in again, check phase, and if you were consistent with your head/tail trims, you should be able to easily slide the new audio around for the best results. For you old-school trigger people out there, just slide the SnareTrigger track forward to accommodate your sampler's reaction time, and you've got a rock-solid trigger source."

Pro Technique 2 —
A Quick Fix for Controlling Intermittent Leakage on Ambient Tracks
 Recently, Mike was asked to do a ton of quick live show mixes for a series of Frantic B-side releases in different countries. That's 48 mixes in three days, to be exact, with no time to prep the individual multitrack recordings before each remix session. His primary concern was controlling ambient leakage from the eight open vocal mics onstage. He says this simple trick helped him immensely during those hectic live remix sessions.

First, create a copy of the problem track, and assign its output to an open bus in Pro Tools. Slide the copied track forward in time by 200 milliseconds. On the original track, insert a Digidesign Gate plug-in and activate the external "key."

"Use the bus output from the copied track as the key source, and voilá!" says Gillies. "By playing with the threshold and the ADSR values in the Gate plug-in, you'll control the leakage without cutting off any audio. The gate can be set to open and close very smoothly. This tip works well with tom tracks, too. If you have a lot of compression on the vocals and leakage is still a problem, use volume automation between words with about a -4 dB to -10 dB duck/decrease where needed. This basic envelope shape can also be copied and pasted across an entire track in order to help speed up sample placement."

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