Mix engineer Greg Townley and Jeff Fayman mix their version of “21st Century Schizoid Man” at Immediate Music.
Photo: Eva Fayman
“The Human Experimente” (www.thehumanexperimente.com) is a music collective started by Emmy Award-winning musician/composer/executive producer Jeffrey Fayman (also of commercial music company Immediate Music, Santa Monica, Calif.) to cross-pollinate musical talents and styles. Their first release, a re-recording of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” features guitar work by Crimson’s Robert Fripp and vocals by Maynard James Keenan of Tool.
“I recorded Robert Fripp’s guitar parts and an orchestra along to my basic temp track at Studio X in Seattle,” Fayman says. “I [used] those initial stems to begin building the [track] at our Immediate Music production facility. But first I had preliminary conversations with engineer Greg Townley about my goals for the direction of the tracking. I wanted this iconic anthem to sound huge, cinematic and with a fantastic amount of aggressive punch.”
Ultimately, the recording included multiple vocalists and complex instrumentation that, by the final mix, was “over 90 tracks wide at 96k,” Townley says. “I ran subgroups of the mix through a Neve sidecar, giving the tracks some analog warmth. To get things sounding close, I used GRM Tools’ Bandpass filters and Waves’ SSL EQs. To push things back, I used a custom space for all the tracks, so I spread things very wide and generated wonderful front-to-back imagery.”
