Apologies for the lack of new material but the mobile and the studio are so busy at the moment that weve just not had time to put any new stuff up. We have some great new sessions waiting to go up and a sneak preview of a fantastic new compresser but thats all to come!!!!! In the meantime have a read about the first in our series of great mics under £100
For
my sins I still play with some old mates in an R and B band, The
Fabulous Ducks. The band consists of a bunch of guys in their
40s (and 50s) who have been playing around the area for over 20
years and a few of us have spent some time in pro outfits (drummer
Hugh Whitaker-The Housemartins) The band gets wheeled our for
parties and anniversaries and generally are known as a great live
outfit playing 50s R and B covers. The band has made a few recordings
in the past but never seemed to capture that live feel so I set
about making a recording that would capture the near frenzied
hysteria of a Ducks gig! The band were set to play at a local
club one Saturday night so I suggested that we go into the club
and set up in the morning and record the band playing live through
the day with no audience but to concentrate on getting takes that
just felt good without the problems of real live gig (i.e. Beer).
Then on the night I would record the real live gig but just use
the intros and outros of each song to create the perfect live
album!
The
session
The
basic idea was to capture the grooves of the songs by all
playing together on the stage and I decided to limit the
recording to 10 tracks as that was the number of mic pres
I had in one rack (a Behringer AD 800 and the two pres in
the MOTU 828) with the option to maybe overdub the vocals
or fix any mistakes back in the studio. First up I set a
pair of Rode NT5s in ORTF on a single stand and put it behind
the drummer about 2 feet above his head to get the top of
the kit. Whenever I think a band are going to play some
swing type material with brushes I like to use a Sennheiser
441 on the snare as I sounds less rocky than the SM57. I
always take the front skin off the kick and I tried a couple
of mics including a Shure SM7 but ended up using a Sennheiser
421 just laid on a pillow on the bottom of the drum. That
was the drums: Hugh is a great player and knows how to balance
his own sound. I never, ever, ever worry about spillage
between mics and with careful placing it's pretty minimal.
H-Bomb Lewis' guitar was a Gibson Les Paul running through
a Korg Tonelab (I love them) into the clean channel in a
Fender Concert and the other guitar was a 60s Strat through
a distortion pedal into a Little Rock top and into an old
Marshall 4x10 cab. Both guitars were recorded with ADK A
51TLs set to cardioid and really close miked. The bass is
a really crap Steinberg copy going through a small Laney
amp and generally sounds pretty flaky and though I tried
a DI, I ended up miking it with a Sennheiser 421. John Senior
the piano player is a great player but always gets blown
away on stage so I recorded the keyboards as a Midi track
as I have some great piano samples back in the studio. Lastly,
Keith the singer and harmonica player was using a Shure
SM58 (what else?) and I figured that I would have to replace
him back in the studio but it just sounded great and so
we kept the track spillage and all. In the end we recorded
18 songs in the afternoon just going until we had a take
with a great feel then moving to the next song.
The whole session was recorded in Cubase on a laptop and
I decided to mix the whole thing in Cubase with the help
of the Waves collection of plug ins.
To
hear the audio files above simply double click on
them and they will play in the media player you have
set on your computer. To download the files, create
a new folder on your hard drive and then right click
on the files above and choose "Save as Target"
to your new folder. When you have downloaded all the
files open up Cubase or a similar audio programme
and create a new project. In Cubase go to Import<audio
files and select all the MP3s in the folder. Cubase
will ask you if you want them on the same track or
separate tracks. Choose separate tracks and it will
paste them into a new project for you.SEE VIDEO
As far as mixing is concerned,
virtually everything was EQ'd with the 6 band Waves REQ:
A cut around 500hz and adding some top. The kick drum was
pretty heavily EQ'd and compressed with the mighty Waves
TransX and I split the harmonica out onto another track
so that I could apply different EQ and compression to the
vocals. Everything had a slap delay around 100ms and I used
bits of Waves RVerb plate around 1.5 seconds to get things
to sound more like the Club ambience. H-Bomb was unhappy
with his guitar playing on this track so we replaced the
entire thing back in the studio coming straight out of his
Tonelab effects processor. If you solo tracks and listen
to the bleed you will hear his original guitar but you can't
hear it in the mix. The piano Midi track went through Halion
with a very posh Steinway grand piano sample which I EQ’d
a bit and added some longer reverb, For the piano solo I
duplicated the solo section and detuned the copy a 5th to
give it more clout.
As soon as I started mixing I knew that I would use a lot
of the audience Buzz track which I recorded early on in
the evening in the club as people were getting ready to
see the band and by pasting in the real intros and outros
from the gig on the night the whole thing sounds like a
pretty good "live" recording.
