This article is a chapter from How Pros Make Hits by our friend Tom Frampton who gave us permission to share this section exclusively with The Production Expert Community, enjoy.
American alternative rock legends Kings Of Leon never expected their lead single from their fourth studio album ‘Sex On Fire’ would give them their first number-one single in Australia, Finland, Ireland, and the UK. It was so popular that in September of 2009 it was Britains second most-downloaded digital single ever. The song also propelled Kings Of Leon’s popularity in their native USA reaching number one on the Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart. Sex On Fire was also nominated for Best Rock Song and won Best Rock Vocal Performance By A Duo Or Group at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards in 2008.
Kings of Leon worked with record producer, engineer, and mixer Jacquire King to create Sex On Fire and the rest of the album. King has worked with an abundance of great artists including Tom Waits, James Bay, Modest Mouse, You Me At Six, Cold War Kids, and many more. He utilised traditional analog approaches combined with modern technologies to get an incredible sound for the artists he works with. Let’s explore this production and unearth the approaches that helped drive its success.
Experimenting With Sound And Committing To It
The records that Kings Of Leon has previously released had adopted a simplified, fast-moving approach. Their incredible musicianship meant they go into a studio, play live, capture the sound, and it wasn’t too far from the final sound. As they went in to record their fourth studio album, they felt it was time to be a little more experimental and switch up their approach.
Jacquire King facilitated this by carefully crafting the perfect sound for each instrument using the endless supply of gear available at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. He created a general set-up where the band could play live as they had in the past, and achieving sonic changes from song to song was just a case of changing a few amp settings, mics, and mic positions depending on what was most appropriate.
King believes that it’s essential to craft the sound you want before you record it, rather than keeping things safe and recoding a dryer more flexible signal. He believes this is an essential part of recording anything with meaning. Each sonic decision shapes the next stage of the production, and committing to sounds gives a better sense of where the song is headed.
Recording To Tape
The majority of people record to their digital audio workstation. The endless channels and adaptability is the best possible option for any project, right? Not according to King. He recorded Sex On Fire using 16-track analog tape, and in an interview with Sound On Sound, he gave two clear reasons as to why he did this.
Firstly, the sonic benefits of tape compression that enhance the transients. King enjoys the flexibility of tracking to digital, but he’s drawn to the beautiful sonic textures of tape. It improves drum transients in particular.
Secondly, King believes recording to tape puts the situation into a different frame of reference. He finds the musician’s performances are more focused and inspired. The permanent commitment of tape encourages them to pay more attention to capture their best performance, and this immerses them deeper into their delivery. There are no screens involved, so more weight is put on how it sounds rather than how it looks. The pauses that happen when changing a reel also allow a moment for reflection and conversation.
Capturing an excellent performance is everything, whether you’re working in the analog or digital realm. We don’t all have the luxury of recording to tape, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from creating an environment where the delivery is focussed, inspired, and based on what we hear and feel.
Jaquire Kings Opinion on Sample Rate
Sample rate is a heavily debated subject in the audio community. The sample rate will capture frequencies at half of its amount. For example, a sample rate of 44.1Hz will accurately represent frequencies up to 22kHz. Some argue that humans cannot hear above around 20kHz and therefore, higher sample rates are unnecessary and take up too much hard drive space. Others argue that high sample rates add nuances to the recordings and capture a quality that gives a better experience. Sex On Fire was created with the latter school of thought.
When King transferred the Tape to his DAW into a 96kHz session, they made some A/B comparisons and decided that 24bit and 96kHz gave the best results. He then mixed the project at 88.2kHz as it folds down more easily to 44.1kHz, making it easier for the mastering engineer. He also feels 88.2kHz gives a better stereo image and gives the listener the best possible sonic experience.
Stereo Separation
Sex On Fire is an excellent example of a classic rock mix. The majority of the track is built in mono with the guitars and cymbals adding some width. There are only four musicians, so adding noticeably more channels than there are musicians would fray from their established and recognizable sound. Having a smaller arrangement in this sense (comparatively to modern pop record where there is no limitation on arrangement) means there is more space in the mix for each element to occupy significant space. This leads to rich and substantial textures.
An interesting feature of the mix is that the lead guitar is panned hard left (it’s inaudible if you only listen to the right channel). It paints a picture in the listener’s mind of experiencing the band on stage while adding clear separation between the lead and rhythm guitar. When engineers take this approach, they often do it with the whole band and give each instrument its place on stage, but in Sex On Fire, it was only done with the lead guitar. It’s an exciting combination of classic rock mixing and a more accessible modern approach.
We can also hear that the upper-bass harmonics have been pushed up to 1kHz to give it some bite in the mix. There was a Distressor and TG1 compression used to beef up the bass sound and level out the tonal balance. King used a Sound Toys Echoboy to add a delay to bass to give a touch of width without having to use reverb which can make the bass sound muddy. The powerful sub sound was created using the DBX Disco Boombox, which gives more weight to the low-end using subharmonic synthesis. There’s a lot of space for the bass to have weight in the low-mids too as the guitars begin around 250Hz.
Looking at the drums we have the kick, snare, and hi-hats all spanning a relatively large bandwidth of frequencies. Each drum channel is producing a dense and fat sound. It works as the mix is relatively sparse and the transient drum hits compliment the vocal, bass and guitars. Notice how low the kick goes. There’s a lot of information in the sub-frequencies, a feature of the mix that people with full-range speakers will enjoy.
Technical Details
We can see below EXPOSE is showing that the intro to Sex On Fire is very lopsided. The lead guitar makes the mix feel very unbalanced and overly left focused, but the other instruments balance it out when they enter. Other than that the technical details are quite straight forward. The loudness range shows a lower reading of ~4LU, showing a constant drive of loudness from start to finish. The dynamic range of ~7.7DR shows that the drums poke through the mix from start to finish. The LUFS readings show that the original file was relatively loud but not suffering from over-compression.
What Did We Learn?
Craft the sound you want before you record it, rather than keeping things safe and recoding a dryer more flexible signal.
Each sonic decision shapes the next stage of the production, and committing to sounds gives a better sense of where the song is headed.
Recording to tape can give a warmer sound that enhances transients, particularly of drums.
Recording to tape puts the situation into a different frame of reference making musicians performances are more focused and inspired. The permanent commitment of tape encourages them to pay more attention to capture their best performance, and this immerses them deeper into their delivery.
We don’t all have the luxury of recording to tape, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from creating an environment where the delivery is focussed, inspired, and based on what we hear and feel.
Do A/B comparisons to see if you prefer the sound of higher sample rates.
Panning a channel hard left or right can create the illusion that the listener is experiencing a
live concert. Peppering this approach into a more conventional mix can add a different flavour.
If you decide to add dramatic panning to an instrument, be sure to pan the other elements, so the majority of the song feels balanced between the left and right speaker. Too much-lopsided
listening is uncomfortable for audiences.
Want To See More Songs Decoded?
This blog post is one of 40 chapters in ‘How Pros Make Hits’, an eBook created by Mastering The Mix.
Music surrounds us. It’s everywhere. Your music has the potential to connect with millions of people. Don’t produce another second of music without first learning how these pros did it to give yourself the best chance of success.
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