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!!!!!!!!!
The
Brew are a 3-piece band from Grimsby in North Lincolnshire
and they play a blend of rock and riff based blues. They
booked two days in Fairview Studio to record and mix 3
songs, primarily to send to promoters in order to get
gigs. I think it’s important to capture the “live”
sound of a band for this purpose so we recorded the drums,
bass and guitar together. With each player in a separate
room (but with the interconnecting doors only partly closed)
there was sufficient separation to drop-in the odd repair
convincingly.
The
session First
up as always was the drummer and Kurt has a good sounding
kit with big shells nicely tuned so I wanted to get as
much of the resonance as I could. To help with this, in
addition to the close mics on each drum I put up a coincident
pair of AKG 414s about four feet in front of the kit at
about cymbal height which I compressed quite heavily at
the mix to add more energy to the sound.
There
were three rack toms but I decided to treat them as a
stereo pair and set up two Sennheiser 421s close in over
the drums. I started with the Bass Roll-off set flat on
these mics but eventually switched it one notch in to
reduce some unwanted ringing. Later at the mix I gated
the stereo Tom tracks with the standard Drawmer gates
but only attenuated them by about 10db just to reduce
cymbal spill.
As always I removed the fron t skin from the kick drum
and placed an AKG D112E about 6 inches inside the shell
and slightly off-centre. The mic fed through my TL Audio
2 channel valve mic pre-amp and Focusrite Red 3 compressor
set to just catch some of the louder peaks.The snare mic
was of course a Shure SM57 also into the TLA pre-amp and
slightly compressed via a Urei 1176. When tracking I often
use slight compression on drums not as a deliberate effect
but simply to even out the levels. We have some pretty
good compressors here in Fairview but this kind of compression
can be achieved with careful setting on any bog standard
cheap compressor and later on in the mix both the bass
drum and snare drum tracks were compressed again after
setting up a basic balance with all the instruments.
The overheads were a pair of Neumann U87s placed about
3 feet above the cymbal layout with additional focus on
the Hi hats and Ride Cymbal using Calrec CM1050 mics
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.
Tim,
the bass player, used a Peavey bass amp into a Marshall
folded cab and this was mic’d using a Neumann U47
fet mic placed about an inch away from the cab and slightly
off-centre. This particular kind of cabinet is designed
to “throw” the sound so close miking wasn't
ideal but moving the mic further away meant it picked up
more drum spill. The mic channel was EQ’d and compressed
through Fairvieiw's old Audio & Design Vocal Stresser
which is a pretty rare but very nice compressor!.
Guitarist Jason played into a Marshall amp and 4x12 cab
in the live room which sounded fine. I put an AKG 414uls
about 18 inches from the top left-hand speaker and slightly
off-axis, together with a Beyer M201 right up against the
cloth in front of the top right-hand speaker These were
recorded onto 2 tracks and monitored hard left and right
after checking the phase coherence. The amp was cranked
up loud bringing on some nice speaker compression so I recorded
the guitar with no outboard processing.
In the final mix I found the “in phase” stereo
guitar signal was too heavy in the centre and the “out
of phase” setting too hollow so I left them in phase
but switched in a high-pass filter on one side. With careful
manipulation this can widen a stereo sound without it being
too extreme. All down to different degrees of phase.We recorded
two or three takes of each song and settled on the best
of each. These were then touched up with any necessary repairs
by dropping in.
Vocals were then provided by Tim using a Neumann U87 into
the TLA mic pre and compressed with the Urei 1176.The second
day was used entirely for mixing with the bulk of the time
being spent setting up the sounds which would be used as
a basis for each song mix. After that it was a matter of
listening to each piece and highlighting odd guitar or bass
lines and drum parts to accentuate and levelling out the
vocals
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
