Creation Process for ЮГ/ Yug

Catedral São João Batista, Santa Cruz do Sul-RS, Brazil

Hello there fellow reader! I'm Daniel Neuwert from Лokomotiv, and today I'll talk a bit about our latest release "ЮГ/ Yug". This song was our favorite to work on so far, and I feel excited to share everything we did before releasing it. This post will be a more technical one, so if you're into music producing and audio engineering, go for it! Writing

This song was done in around 4 days. We first came out with a bass line, then the drum groove. I then composed the rhythm guitar (panned to the left), but it needed more post-punk vibes, so I came up with this cool lick (panned to the right). The verse felt too empty and we had limited time, so I came up with 2 new licks for the second verse. One (right) is inspired on the chorus's vocal melody. The other (left) is a lick with a nice delay (see mixing section). The lyrics are perhaps the most important and special part of this song, as it is inspired in the brand that crafts guitars, basses and picks for Motorama - our favorite band and main inspiration. They're from Rostov-on-Don, in the south of Russia, and we're from Rio Pardo-RS, in the south of Brazil (ЮГ/ Yug means South). We had help from our friend Anastasia from Moldova to get the words and pronunciation right.

Recording

Drums We decided to record all of the drum sounds for this song, but separately. For all cymbals we used Sabian XS20's series. Intermediate cymbals, but "ok enough" for our sound. The hi-hat was 14", crash was 16" and ride was 20" if I'm not mistaken. The 18" crash sounded a bit too off for what we were doing. For the kick we used an Evans EMAD Clear head, that was dark and punchy enough to fit what we wanted. And last but not least, for snare works we used a Mapex MPX with a Uno G2 head on the top and an Izzo head on the bottom. We recorded both top and bottom of the snare. Guitar

The guitar used was a Manson MBM-2H Sustainiac. I actually really enjoy the single-coil sound of the sustainiac pickup when the sustain itself is turned off. I mainly used this pickup but there is a section on the second verse and chorus where I use a mix of this pickup and the bridge one.

Bass

Finally something from our country! The bass used was Hericles' main gear, a Tagima TW-65. This one with the house pickups works better with more aggressive tones.

Vocals

I am a terrible singer and I hate my voice. But it works somewhat decent for goth stuff for whatever reason. I got inspiration from some darker groups like She Past Away and Twin Tribes for my way of singing our songs. The microphone used for recording vocals was the same one that we used for drums - an AKG P3S. If a kid asks his mom to have an SM58, and the mother answers "we already have an SM58 at home", the AKG P3S is the microphone they actually have. Fortunately it worked just fine with phantom power on.

Amplification

This time we used the same VST amp for both bass and guitar - Neural DSP's Archetype: Cory Wong. He's one of my favorite musicians and his plugin is one of the best Neural released. I think we used a stock setup for the bass with a few small modifications, but for the guitars it's a whole made-up setup I made myself over a few hours.

Mixing & Mastering The better the mix, the less mastering you'll need done. That's why I like to start mixing the track while I'm composing and recording it already. I mainly used SSL plugins for this mix, having at least one channel strip, one equalizer and one compressor for every audio file. For reverb I love to use Valhalla's Supermassive, so it was applied to drums, guitars and the mix bus itself with a low mix percentage.  I used an SSL compressor for recording vocals already so the "YUG!!!" at the chorus would sound like the rest without the need of too much post production. I recorded 2 voice lines, and panned each slightly to the sides, leaving the bass to take a nice space in the center. The other plugin to take care of the vocals was Mantra by Neural DSP. With this plugin I duplicated the double-panned vocals and made it 12 semitones (or 1 octave) lower, to support the main vocal line. This is a common technique used especially in pop music, but I think the result turned out to be amazing for the song's type of singing. I also used a TC2290 delay for the left panned guitar on second verse and extending to second chorus. That's my favorite delay for clean guitars. Final mastering was around -13 LUFs which is how it felt better on my ears.