"Ricordati di santificare le feste” is the second work of Flowers And Paraffin, a band from Montoro I had worked with with their first release. Between records they hired a second guitar player, Aldo which has articulated their sound further more. Since the band wanted to record the album live as the former one and since I clearly become addicted to the reverb of my studio corridor on drums I needed a lot of channels to get the sound I was looking for, so I managed to borrow a Motu interface that I connect through ADAT to my RME FF800, having 18 channels at my disposal. The main tracks and the ones who required more gain were recorded with my 8 channels of Daking preamps, then some other channels went in the Sytek MPX 4aii, and the less important, like the hihat (sorry man) were recorded using the built in preamps of my RME.
For the recording session which took one day for the instrumentals and the following one for the vocals (tracked with an Electrovoice RE20). we had a friend of mine, Riccardo Alfano, a great drummer who used to play with the band from Salerno “Captain Swing”, as a drum tech. I always liked his 70’s Premier drum kit and the way he tunes drums, he was very happy to join us and ended up very handy for the recording process! For bass we used a late 70’s Gibson RD artist, with active pickup, a very rare peace of gear, famously played by Krist Novoselic from Nirvana. With its active electronic designed by Bob Moog (!!!) It’s a very versatile instruments, being able to deliver a very aggressive sound, but also very mellow tones, it was notably one of the main bass used for the recording of the beautiful Beck’s “Sea Change”. We tracked straight to a UA 610 changing pickup setting according to the song. Guitars were a MIM Telecaster Thinline ’72 and my Gibson Les Paul R6 that Aldo was very happy to use! I set up the amps and the guitarist in two different rooms, so that I didn’t have any bleed from the drums and viceversa, so that I was able to record the drums’ reverb in the corridor. Amps were my Victoria Bassman Replica miked with the Coles 4038 with the Tele plugged in and a Jet City for the Les Paul, miked with a 57. I have to say I’ve been underestimating this mike for a long time, maybe having the silly yet easy prejudice that such a cheap mike is always gonna “lose” against some more expensive counterparts, but the reality is that with the right amp and in the right spot the 57 is great on guitar cabs. We spent some times on each song to get the delay times right (analog cons) since, as you can understand from these pages, I try to print as much fx as I can to avoid plugins later on and also to have the musicians shape their tone with me.
Drums were miked with a recorderman (no wonder is my favourite OH technique) with 2 MJE-K47H (U47 Fet Replica), snare 57 top - 57 Bottom, kick RE20 in - MJE-K47H, 57 on rack tom, D12 on floor tom, a small modded condenser on the hihat, same guy as a mono room circa 3 m from the kit, and a couple of modded Oktava sdc in the hallway outside the recording room, that ended up the drum verb on the final mixes. Just for one song I placed a mike up the stairs (you can here it in the final of the first song) that I used as a special FX (cool, isn’t it?).
For the keyboards I recorded the Microkorg mono in a line in of the interface, saving the preamp input for other important channels. I printed the midi out as well, so that I sent it back afterwards in the Microkorg and rerecorded it in the Daking preamps or in some cases, obviously with the benediction of Antonio, I programmed some new synth sounds altogether, using Monark, a great Minimoog repro by Native Instruments, and the TAL U-NO the emulation of one of my fav polysynth, the Juno 106.
I mixed itb with my Quested S7, then Davide Barbarulo at 20hz20Khz mastered the whole project.
The album was published as a coproduction between La Fine, Macrostudio and Controcanti. If you’re into shoegaze, punk, emocore and screamo, you should definitely have a listen to their music. And check the videoclip of Cosmo below!
