As you probably are aware of, I’ve been playing around a bit with the new improved version of Stem Splitter in Logic Pro 11.2. If you’ve ended up here by chance, I recommend you read that article, if you can.
Anyway… In the 60s we had a fairly successful blues band called The Nazz, named after the Yardbirds song “The Nazz Are Blue”, where Mr. Jeff Beck makes one of his rarer attempts at singing. If his vocal performance was a bit questionable, there was no doubt that the guitar playing on that song was among the most daring produced during that decade (and well into the future). Therefore, it felt a bit like a tribute to that solo and Jeff that we took this band name. And note that this was a year before Todd Rundgren started the band Nazz (without The), but where Rundgren managed to get a record deal, unfortunately the Swedish The Nazz just trudged along without being able to release any of their own material.
OppoPoppa at Solliden, Skansen, Stockholm
The Nazz, however, participated in a large number of the pop band competitions that were frequent in the 60s and 70s. They became “Central Swedish pop champions” several years in a row, and they also participated twice in the Sveriges Radio competition on the program OppoPoppa. There are still some noisy tape recordings that one of the band’s friends (thanks, George Nordin!) recorded from the radio, and which were then copied a number of times before they finally ended up in my hands. I decided to see if it was possible to fix these using, among other things, the Stem Split function in Logic Pro 11.2.
The stem splitin worked perfectly, but there were a few minor issues in both songs. I already knew that the guitars in the first song “Rock Me” sounded more than just a little “off”. It was simply that the two guitarists were playing two different guitar figures, and these clashed horribly – minor versus major rarely works more than just that. In this case, it just sounded like crap!
You can here it for yourselves here:
The Original Recording
If you listen to this recording, the vocals, drums and bass sound perfectly fine, but the guitars… I have to fix something there, that’s quite obvious. By the way, the bassist pulled a cheeky trick on the sound engineer on site at Solliden. During the sound check, he played quite low; had the volume control turned down a bit. When it was time for the live broadcast, he turned it up to full. The result was that the bass sounded unusually good during the broadcast; significantly better than what used to be the case at the time
But what do you do with the guitars? The only possible solution was of course to replace all the guitar riffs and add new guitars. Thanks to Logic’s Stem-Split, I had vocals, drums, bass, and guitars on separate stereo tracks (even though the original recording was in mono). So all I had to do was record new guitars, and try to make them sound more or less like they did in 1968.
If I remember correctly, it was a white Telecaster that I had used on the original recording. (Nobody knows for sure. It was actually 57 years ago!) So I chose to pull out my number two Tele, which I built for MM’s series of building articles – a yellowish story with a nice fat maple neck and Lundgren pickups (the guitar, not the building articles).
Om jag inte minns helt fel var det en vit Telecaster som jag hade använde på originalinspelningen. (Vad begär ni? Det är ju ändå faktiskt 57 år sedan!) Jag valde därför att plocka fram min andra Tele, som jag skruvade ihop för MM:s serie av byggartiklar – en gulaktig historia med en skön fet lönnhals och Lundgren-pickups (gitarren alltså, inte byggartiklarna).
It should be possible to make it sound something like my guitar did back then. Well, I also no longer have the nice Fender Super Reverb that my old mother went into debt so that I could buy it on installments (Who thought that blues music was a lucrative business?). Instead, I had to pick out the next best thing: my own IK Multimedia TONEX ”sampling” of the Tweed Deluxe 5E3, which I soldered together with help from the excellent Bosse Hansén – also included in a series of articles for Musikermagasinet. Playing using the real amplifier was almost unthinkable. The neighbors would definitely complain.
Rerecording and overdubbing
I started by adding two new guitars playing the same guitar phrase (yes, you have to learn from your mistakes, don’t you?), and they were panned hard left/right. I then dialed in a slightly dirtier sound in TONEX, something that would work for the solo and fills. Just like in the previous Stem-Splitt attempts, I then used several of my favorite Relab Development plugins to get a more 60s-like sound on the different tracks.
I did two different takes of the solo guitar and let one of them be heard the most. In some places I gained up the second guitar – a bit like they sometimes did on some 60s records. There you sometimes hear an additional solo from Clapton or Beck left behind, just as if they forgot to pull the fader down completely. It turned out pretty okay, if you ask me.
On Dan Karlsson’s eminent vocals, I used both the Relab 176 and the Maselec MEA-2, and on the reverb side, I let both the Softube Atlantis Studio and, first and foremost, Relab Development’s QUANTX do what they do best.
On the delay side, I used both HOFA Colour Delay (great ducking function) and Other Desert Cities from Audio Damage, because it sounds so damn nice.
Here we have the new version of “Rock Me”:
Hey, Darling
As the second song on this occasion, we played Spencer Davies Group’s “Hey, Darling”. I was a little hesitant about what I wanted to do to fix that track. There was also a problem with the fact that the take was a little low in key. It was almost in D minor. I say almost because when I tried it with a normally tuned electric guitar it didn’t sound very nice. I decided to keep both guitars. We were two guitar players in the band at the time, and we almost always shared the solos. A bit like early Fleetwood Mac, if you know what I mean. But just before the broadcast, the other guitarist said that he didn’t want to play the solo on this song. He was simply too nervous. That happens, and it was just up to me to carry on as if nothing had happened. This is the reason why I play two full (and very long) choruses one after the other.
So… I left the guitars alone. Instead, I added an electric piano to complement the very cautious and modest accompaniment guitar that my bandmate had played. Unfortunately, I couldn’t turn up his guitar without my guitar becoming unbearably loud. Logic’s Stem Split unfortunately couldn’t tell the difference between my Tele and his Strata, but this will probably soon be added in an update from Apple. So the second choice was to pick Toontrack’s absolutely lovely Soul Roads 2 in EZkeys 2.
In EZkeys 2 I was able to lower the pitch so the Electric Piano matched the original recording better (-24 cents).
But what else can you do? I actually thought the drums sounded a bit dull so I decided to replace them with new ones. All I needed was a bass drum, snare and ride cymbal. I should be able to add that, even though I’m not a great drummer.
Using my controller keyboard (NI Kontrol S49 mkIII) I recorded two tracks for this. On the first track it was just the bass drum and snare, and on the second track just the ride cymbal. I only did one take. It had to do. I could have rerecorded it, or edited and tinkered with this, but I thought it was “good enough for jazz” so to speak. You are welcome to have a different opinion, but now it is done.
I also picked the drum sounds from Toontrack. This time it was Superior Drummer 3 and their new Reel to Real recorded in Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. Did I mention that those drums sound absolutely amazing? No, they do anyway!
Just like during my previous Stem-Split attempts, I have of course taken the opportunity to use a lot of plugins with different settings for the different tracks, not just because it’s possible, but because it works so well, and because the end result really doesn’t suffer.
This is what it sounds today:
Here you can read more about The Nazz:
And here we have another recording with The Nazz from the bluesy 60s. A recording that I haven’t tried to fix yet. Who knows, it might be my next project. See you around!
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