The
Ribbon mics continue to impress with a great new acoustic session from
Graham Hodge CHECK IT OUT. The
BIG IDEA is to run a studio recording materclass weekend. Look out for
details!!!!!!!!!
Graham
Hodge is a guitarist/singer/songwriter based near York in the
UK who spent three days recently in Fairview Studio recording
a mixture of covers and original material for his new album. I’ve
known Graham for a number of years but only recorded him once
before when he was guesting with a band adding some acoustic guitar
and vocal overdubs. Graham is a really nice player and singer
and on this session he really wanted to capture an intimate performance
by recording the guitar and vocal together. No overdubs. We had
been getting some great results with the AEA ribbons so they were
tried out first as figure 8 mics are great for this kind of job.
By careful positioning you can align the null points of the mics
to cut out much of the vocal spill on the guitar mic and visa
versa.
.
The
session
First
of all I set up the two AEAs with pop shields, one on the
guitar and the other on the vocal, and spent some time experimenting
somewhat with position to achieve maximum separation whilst
checking the phase coherence. The ribbons went through a
Focusrite isa 428 and Graham was particularly happy with
the sound of his guitars.
In addition to the ribbons I put up a pair of spaced Hebdensound
omnis about 4 feet apart and about three feet in front of
the performer at head height to give me some natural ambience
to add if needed. So the basic setup was the ribbons providing
a full-bodied rich sound with the omnis adding some nice
spatial content and brightness. The whole thing came together
really quickly and all the mics were routed flat and uncompressed
to separate tracks on our Otari Radar system. That's about
it really as once I was happy with the set-up we spent the
rest of the first two days recording takes for 13 songs.
At the mix I compressed the vocal track through a Urei 1176
and the guitar through an Audio Design FX769 adding a small
amount of reverb via our AMS RMX16 on a plate setting JS
To
hear the audio files above simply double click on
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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
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paste them into a new project for you.SEE VIDEO.
The
song
Tom Waits wrote the song "Georgia Lee"
as one of the tracks on his 1999 Album Mule Variations in
response to events that happened near his home in northern
California when a young 12 year old girl was kidnapped and
murdered and her body
dumped in a nearby patch of trees. The opening line references
the hymn Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,
famously recorded by Blind Willie Johnson and Waits was
disturbed at the possibility that cases involving kids like
Georgia Lee don't get as much press coverage because they're
too poor or too black or they're not photogenic enough.
No suspect was ever caught.
