Notes from the Underground: Diploid – Mantra

Last year I had the pleasure of heading down to the late great Head Gap recording facility to track Mantra, the 18th release for Diploid. This was the 3rd time we had worked together collectively on something, so Diploid and I have developed quite the bonhomie.

Principal tracking was an ensemble of drums, guitar, bass and vocals at Head Gap with additional guitar recording and mixing performed at my facility Underground Audio up at Meanjin. For those unaware, Head Gap was recently completely razed by a devastating fire. After close to 20 years of being a critical resource to the music community it’s looking like they will hopefully be building from scratch again at a different premises, but for now it is quite heart wrenching. As a studio owner I can’t imagine the loss, but it’s been reassuring to see Finn and Rohan move onward and keep the ball rolling.

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Head Gap always stood out to me as a defining marker of Naarm’s musical identity. It was one of the first studios I ever worked in, and it cracked something open in me technically and creatively. The ideas, the workflow, even the way I approached acoustic design in my own space were all somewhat shaped by that room.

The drum recording for this record was akin to how I normally approach congested music. The difference with Diploid is they routinely have parts that are so fast that the transients are almost blurred into each other, directly littered amongst atmospheric 50bpm sludge. Capturing this is about tuning the drums for the right amount of resonance, which is actually not much, and balancing strategically placed close microphones amongst various distantly spaced room and boundary microphones that have automated pre delays (taking advantage of the Haas effect).

We didn’t use any drum samples or guitar amplifier modelling on the record as Diploid generally shoot for a raw aesthetic. The words “raw” and “organic” are used habitually in the arena of aggressive music, further in the camp of DIY spaces where it’s almost worn as a badge of honour to not enhance or manipulate the ensemble performance of a band in any way.

I personally have no rules against drum samples, guitar amp modelling or any of the numerous procedures undertaken in most modern productions. What I want as a listener and what many of the artists I work with want out of a record is for there to be a connection between their personalities and idiosyncrasies and what comes out of the speakers. For me this usually means not using samples and other enhancements, but there are no clear cut rules.

This argument often gets flattened into a binary: either you make something hyper-polished and synthetic, like it rolled straight out of a laptop, or you chase the grit of something raw and lo-fi. But for me, there’s a whole terrain in between and that’s where I tend to work. With a band like Diploid, the goal is for it to feel like you’re standing dead-centre in front of their best performance. That’s what they want too, which makes the recording process feel intuitive and straightforward. At least, for me — the one behind the desk, not the one purging demons. I’m sure for them it was anything but easy.

I’ve worked on records where we made things neater and tidier, and it just felt less urgent and less dangerous, which for a band like this, would be the worst possible outcome. I grew up going to shows that were claustrophobic and sweaty with an imperfect wall of sound which all the individual personalities bled through. The way the drummer’s hand drags strangely between fills, the guitarist mashing their hand onto the pickup, pinning the strings to wring out shrieking, unhinged feedback. Vocals clipping the inputs of a little Behringer mixer, distorting in a horrible way. These are the signatures of a group of people making something together. It doesn’t mean the record has to sound exactly like a live show. It just means my job is to find those specific mannerisms and characteristics and make sure they’re not lost. Otherwise, we risk making something that just dissolves into the stream of homogenised, sanitised contemporary heavy music.

I’ve included an input list below for the primary tracking, which doesn’t amount to anything too out of the ordinary. Something of note is that I don’t use much compression or limiting with a drummer like Scarlett. I will however limit the overheads to tuck the snare drum in, which is commonplace for a drum sound where I will be using the close microphone sound source of the snare drum more than usual. Despite the tom microphones having a nulled effect, there are so many open microphones that I end up gating these manually. I don’t experiment much with microphone preamplifiers, I just favour transformer coupled preamps for full bodied close sources such as bass drum and snare. Tracking Scarlett is a pleasure, she really is a fantastic player (and vocalist).

Recording guitar and bass

The bass we ended up using was an EGC series 2 bass guitar into a Verellen Meatsmoke. For the kinds of bass and guitar tones Diploid pursue, it’s about pushing volume into the amplifier to tighten up the sound and make it go chug. I’m not a fan of high gain metal amplifiers that go chug by themselves as they always sound boring tonally. I’d rather find the right open sounding mid voiced tube amplifier and stack a pedal or two in front of it. I’m not a pedal snob and have had luck with fancy boutique drive pedals and $50 ALDI crunch pedals. It’s about being free of noise and pushing the desired mid-range textures into the amplifier, which is doing most of the heavy lifting.

The guitar we used was a Caparison Dellinger 2 into a Hiwatt DR103 or a JMP copy by Ceriatone. Again, various RAT pedals auditioned until the right chip was talking.

Recording vocals

For the vocal tracking, everybody contributed but we ended up using the same microphone for all vocalists, a Neumann U48. I routinely use room microphones with a pre delay and expander inserted, but this may have only occurred for the first song on the record. These microphones are usually in the same as the drum rooms so that it sounds like vocals are happening in the same space and time as the ensemble tracking. This is common for me with guitars and even bass guitar.

I’m proud of how far Diploid have come, not just musically, but as people. A healthy band is one that doesn’t get lost in the minutiae of gear and tech, but instead channels its energy into making the most honest and compelling music possible. They’ve stayed focused on that, tuning out the shifting trends of the scene, the market they’re often boxed into, and the external expectations of what success is supposed to look like.

* Note that the bass drum starts on track 3 and 4. This is a custom of analog recording in which the edge tracks (track 1 and 16, or 1 and 24) tend to be thinner sounding. We tracked this record into a computer but it’s a habit that I tend to fall into absentmindedly.

You can catch Diploid on tour in the States this month and listen to the record here.