Steve
plays a Shechter C4 Bass with Active EMG-HZ Pickups running
through a Hartke HA4000 Head and 4x12 and as ever the bass
guitar cab was miked with my trusty Neumann u47fet...right
up against the speaker grill and slightly off centre of
the speaker cone. Compressed via another old Audio Development
unit. I recorded the bass flat but did some quite heavy
eq'ing at the mix to get it to cut through the guitars.
Rich the guitarist has an amazing setup with PRS guitars
running through his custom pedalboard into a Soldano Decatone
head fitted with Groove Tubes. The Soldano 4x12 guitar cab
was miked up with another Sennheiser e609 right up against
the top left hand speaker (these mics are specifically shaped
to do just this) and a GoldenAge ribbon about 15 inches
away and slightly off axis of the top right hand speaker
with, of course, a pop shield in front of it. I recorded
these to separate tracks and monitored them left and right.
When these channels are in phase they produce a good stable
centre image but not much width. For those people who want
to hear a radical phase difference effect then pan them
left and right and invert the phase on one of these mics.
You should immediately hear that the centre information
disappears and the familiar “hole in the middle”
becomes apparent. If you leave them out of phase and pan
them both to the centre the signals all but disappears completely.
There was a track with a guitar solo which suffered from
this phenomenon but the name escapes me. (Ha Ha, Jr..private
joke)
The GoldenAge R1 mic gives a big rounded warm mid range
while the Sennheiser provides some brightness.
The clean guitar part which starts the song was left as
the two mics panned extreme right and left and
we ended up double tracking the main rhythm guitars so at
the mix the two original guitar mics were summed to the
left (though not in equal volumes) and the double track
mics similarly to the right.
We tried a number of vocal mics but ended up with a Golden
Age ribbon mic compressed with the Audio Development limiter.
The vocal was recorded flat and processed with just a little
delay at the mix. A harmony part was added in the verses
and recorded in exactly the same way.
Geeetar Stuff:
Soldano Decatone Head fitted with Groove Tubes
Soldano 4X12 Angled Cab fitted with custom tweaked Soldano
S12X Speakers
TC Electronic G System
Fulltone Full Drive 2 Mosfet
Zex Ooh Wah 2
Zvex Fuzz Factory
Ernie Ball 6166 Volume Pedal
PRS guitars - 513 Rosewood, Custom 24, Singlecut and McCarty
Gibson 1957 Les Paul Goldtop
Elixir and Planet Waves Cables
(To record Polaris guitars used where PRS 513 Rosewood,
PRS Custom 24 and PRS Singlecut)
With
sessions like this where you have very little time, speed
is really of the essence and making the right decisions
at the tracking is vital. If you get it right it means that,
like this session, the mix was mainly about compressing
detail and finding an overall balance to get the style of
the song across JS
|
