Producer Profile

THE FRONTMAN OF SYDNEY’S OWN BLACK RHENO BREAKS DOWN THE ART OF RECORDING A TRICKY METAL SUBGENRE: SLUDGE.

Black Rheno found themselves in a good position when they were ready to record their groovy, sludgy and downright heavy debut, NosieSmasher. Their vocalist, Ryan Miller, happened to own a little studio called Housefox, where the they regularly rehearsed. But rather than get someone else to work the desk, Miller decided to handle recording and engineering in-between vocal takes, while everyone in the band lent a hand elsewhere during production.

Aside from the mix – which Converge’s Kurt Ballou took care of – Miller had his hand in every piece of the pie, leaving him with a broad understanding of how to create a gritty, hard-hitting, high-energy, balls-to-the-wall groove metal record that’ll make your eardrums bleed.

There’s a lot of recording wizardry going on in NoiseSmasher, but one defining feature is the grimy, sludgy, almost filthy tone that pumps through it. How did you manage to convey that feeling?

I always feel that you need to go for the sound you want in the mix right from the start. Our chain was a Gibson RD, DS1, HM2 clone, ABY splitter, Matamp LX 60 with a Matamp cab, and Orange OR 50 with an Orange cab. We had two mics on each cab – the Matamp had a Heil PR30 and a TLM 102, and the Orange had an SM57 and a TLM 102. We had a Neumann U87 set up in omni as a room mic capturing both speakers, but there were different variations in gain and so on depending on the track.

I kept things pretty simple for guitars in the control room. We started off running them through my Neve 1073s, but ended up going with my console – a Soundcraft MH4 – instead, because it just sounded a bit more open and aggressive. I had a touch of EQ coming from the desk, too, just to make sure we didn’t get too deep in the mud.

And how do you make an album sound big and intense without relying on volume?

Record things with dynamics and build that into the production, so that when it comes time for mixing, you don’t need to squeeze the life out of something to try bring it up – unless it calls for a good ol’ crushing, of course.

There are a million different ways to go about building a mix, but using automation – not just on volume rides, but also on saturation and effects channels, mix knobs and things like that – help create some dynamics without just turning guitars up or down. It also allows you to push something pretty hard in the effected channel while maintaining the dynamics in the original source, so you’re bringing that effected channel up underneath it.

It leans into distortion a lot too, across guitars, vocals, and even the drums to a degree. How do you work with those harsh sounds?

One neat trick is to pop a high pass filter on the miked up amp track with the distortion – say around 150 hertz or something – then grab the DI track and pop a low pass filter on it at the same EQ point. This helps keep the bottom end tight and leaves the distortion work to the miked track with the amp.

You can also side-chain your bass drum track to the DI track with all the low end to duck just a smidgen every time the drummer hits it, allowing the bass drum’s low end to come through without making the whole bass line completely bop down and up.

Guitar distortion is pretty common, but putting it on vocals seems like an entirely different beast. How did you wrangle that?

I really like the U87, and just large-diaphragm condensers in general, for hardcore vocals. You put them through some nice EQ and they just sound crisp. Then, with some compression and a bit of added crunch in mixing, they become super aggressive and present, even when they’re turned down.

Finding a cool compressor – one that has super slow and fast setting – can give you a nice spitty vocal, too. The Soundtoys Devil-Loc has some pretty extreme settings. The Decapitator is also a pretty great tool.

Speaking of compression, the LP has a tonne of punch to it. What role did it play, aside from the vocals?

I only used compression on the room mics for drums – there was no compression on the close mics at all. It still plays a pretty big role in lots of different ways, though; you might have a parallel channel going to the kick and snare that hits a compressor together. Then maybe another channel with another compressor receiving the snare, kick and toms that gets hits a little harder and brought up underneath to suit. An overall parallel compressor usually makes its way in, too. I used a DBX 160, 1176, Distressor, Waves Puigchild 660, Waves Pie and SSLs.

So now that you’ve finished the album, in your experience, what’s the art of sludge?

Choose the right guitar, amp, pedals and EQ. Then get Nano, our guitarist, to play the absolute hell out of them – then tweak to perfection. But really, don’t pull back on the gain, distortion or anything like that just because you’re in the studio. Play things as messed up and dirty or ugly as you would live, and if something starts to get too muddy, fix it. But just don’t hold back. Be ugly!