If you can read my notes at all, they’re actually pretty handy!
Category Archives: Session Notes
Guzheng Sessions with Bryan O’Connor!
What an instrument. Wonderful to play, and such a beautiful sound. Impossible to not enjoy.
This session was held by a student in the advanced class last year to work on a recording for the ESMP. I was asked to sit in and potentially play some drums, but we just ended up only recording the guzheng. This guzheng was such a joy to play, and no small feat to record. Though not the engineer for this session, I did make a few suggestions to the effect of the final mic setup. The guzheng has three soundholes on the underside, the largest of which is more or less under the saddle, on the plucking side, about where my right hand is here in this picture. The second largest is in the middle of the underside soundboard, and the smallest is under the achor points of the strings, rightmost in this picture. Bryan wanted the thing to sound absolutely huge, and really have a “surrounding” quality to it. Sometimes a request like this has a simple answer: surround the damn thing with microphones and use them all. Doesn’t always work, but it did this time, and it went like this: Two Shure SM57′s on either side and above of the guzheng, pointing in from about 1′ 6″ from the edges of the instrument. You can see one of them looking in to my right, next to the lamp in the picture. One Shure SM7B underneath, looking at the main soundhole under the saddle. I believe it was set to flat with no pad. It was about 3″ from the hole. One Sennheiser 421 underneath the center soundhole, set to “M”. Also about 3″ away. One TS-1 overhead, about 5 feet off the surface of the instrument on the atlas stand. There was just something magical about this setup. Hearing the recorded material it really did sound huge. We noticed that just speaking in the center of this mic mess sounded pretty incredible as well, so when it came time to use vocals(this was after I left, so take hearsay as hearsay), they just moved the SM7b up to standing level in the center of it all, and went to town. I don’t know if they ended up using all the mic tracks for the final vocals in the mix, but I know it sounded great. The track can be found here: http://blogs.evergreen.edu/esmp/2014-album/ It is titled “Humor Melody”, and it is track #4. Check out the rest of the album as well; some really great work was done last year for this album. I was fortunate enough to sit in on quite a few sessions, and even more so to be asked to play on several tracks. I played drums for the first track, “Love Way Down”, the tenth track, “Bees”, and the Thirteenth track, “Silver Line”, which is a Noodlebird song.
The Multi-track Mix Project
This is where it all happened… the music room. I had been using an old Dell Pentium 4 system before this, but I installed the Cakewalk on the Asus i7 laptop for this project, thinking it would work better. It didn’t. Apparently I have to adjust some settings to take advantage of the other cores available. It still worked fine.
Next came the drum track(s)… courtesy of the Technics KN-1000 workstation. I only had to mess with it a little…
I played the bass line (which is a combination of two bass line which I completely ripped off from the Batman and Peter Gunn TV show themes) on this Epiphone Viola bass. It’s similar in looks and sound to the Hofner bass played by Paul McCartney of the Beatles. As a guitar player, I really like the short scale and light weight. As part of the “producing” side of things, I must admit that I had to go into the bass track and move some (a lot) of the notes around to keep pace with the drums. Generally, I play guitar in a way that pushes on the tempo a little, but the bass has to be in the pocket to get away with that… doesn’t work for bass at all. You get what you pay for… and the check I wrote to myself bounced.
The guitar tracks were played through a direct box directly into the board. The track was recorded clean with an 8:1 compression. The distortion was added later with a Sans-amp patch. This track was pretty good, not too much to fix here.
The piano track was added through the auspices of the Technics KN-1000. I passed piano proficiency in college (the first time around) but I have never been what you would call a player… more of an operator, really. Anyway, I was attempting to add a kind of Lynyrd Skynyrd/Dr. John kind of rhythm part which I think worked but could be played in a higher register.
The vocals were all done with this mic. It’s a Studio Projects B-1, a cardioid, large diaphragm condenser. I recorded two main vocal tracks and 12 total for the back ups, 3 parts, 4 times each. They got mixed down to three total, one high, one low, and one high and low for the oohs in the middle. I used 6:1 compression with a low cut filter to record them and removed the filter and added a slight chorus effect and some reverb to set it back some.
And here is the result of almost 100 recorded and/or attempted tracks…
I wrote this song a few years ago and have never recorded it. It makes me happy to hear it after all this time.
Classic Tracks Remix Project
I chose the Doobie Bros song “Long Train Running” mostly because I’d always performed as an acoustic jam and thought it would be a great version. I used all the tracks except the electric guitar and drum kit. As you can hear, there was plenty left over to get a fun mix.
Notes
They may be hard to read, they’re definitely messy, I guarantee they’re confusing. These are my notes.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/127288779@N02/sets/72157646560437218/
Shootout!
We did a Mic shootout on the last day of class, and got to play with some reeeeeally nice stuff. Personally, the U47 just had the funk all over it. I was trying to come up with a way to describe the sound, and all I could think of was “gold”. This mic has the gold, and it really brought it home for me. I was also a huge fan of the c414, Though i have used it before so I’m a little biased. I just find it to be a very forgiving microphone when it comes to recording vocals. It has some gold as well, but not as much as that German bombshell of a microphone, the U47.
I have never been a huge fan of the U87 when Ive heard it in the studio, and up against some of these mics, i felt like it didn’t really hold. Aside from the Royer, it might be the last mic I’d choose out of this lineup to use as a general choice for recording vocals, though I’m sure some would throw me to the dogs for saying it.
The Big Thermos. I dont know much about this one. It sounded..big. It sounded nice, it had that soothing crispness too it that I love so much about the U47 and C414. When I heard Terry’s voice though it, I immediately wanted to mic up a bass cab with it. Serious chunk would ensue I’m sure.
The PPA build. This one sounded hot. I wasn’t at the board, so I don’t know we were set up trim wise, but this one sounded spicy. It had a similar goldness to it as the U47, but I think it might be a little bit brighter in the highs. sounded great though, and with a blue LED, what could go wrong?
the Royer sounded smoother than the velvet case it came in. I want two royers over a kit in a blumlein. I want a Big Thermos just outside the kick. I want a unidyne 55S on the snare. And then I want to record some drums.
I dont really remember the U47 fet specifically. We had a lot of mics up, and it was hard to pay attention. sounded good though.
Left to right we have: a Giant thermos sized microphone The TS-X(a U47/M49 modeled mic) The Royer R121 The U47 FET The C414 B-ULS The U47 The TS-2 The U87
The mic shootout!
My Studio
Slowly I have been making progress on my own studio at home, I found that I really enjoy mixing with two screens, so i now have a dual monitor system. I also have a M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8. Here is a link to it’s guide. http://www.m-audio.com/images/global/manuals/080715_FTU8R_UG_EN01.pdf I have also assembled a desk for it all […]
Favorite Microphone
I appreciate it’s rich mid-range and forward focus. They unfortunately do not make them anymore. Now the company makes a KM-184 which is supposably it’s clone but better. I also read an article that claimed the MK-012 would be a contender against the KM-84. MK-012 Premium Electronics mod – Hear it vs. a KM […]
Thrivealike: The TESC Sessions
After setting up 5 different mic’s we unanimously decided to use the Chameleon Lab’s TS-2 as the vocal mic with excellent results.
Nicole centers herself before another vocal take.
In the control room, making it happen.
Guitar overdub
These images are from a session we did for some Noodlebird Track. We wanted Caleb to just lay down a few takes of guitar on every track we have. We got it sounding good, and just let him go to town.
In order to really go for the gusto, we decided to set up some rear mics for the cab. Since we were only overdubbing, bleedthrough was not an issue, so we could’ve setup a mic anywhere in the room and played with the sound. We chose to set up an NC pair, six inches apart, and about ten feet away from the cab. We panned them hard, and got a really pretty stereo reverb from the room(curtains open). It blends into the mix(of the guitar at least) quite nicely. Looking left, in black, is the AKG 460(all settings normalized), and looking right, in silver, is the Neumann KM84. They’re spread just a tad wider than 90º.
This image is just to give an idea of distance between the amp and the rear mics.
“Let’s throw up a bunch of mics and see what happens!”
That was generally the idea here. From left to right we have: TS-2(cardioid), Sennheiser 441(music, no pad), Beyer M160, and a Cascade Fathead. Personally, on this amp, I love the ribbons. The TS-2 sounds great here , pulled a little way off the cone, and given a little off axis coloration. I wasnt the biggest fan of the 441 here, but I think with some different placement, it would have given us the sound we were looking for all on its own. Funny thing, we ended up using all four of these in the front.
Caleb rockin on a 1970′s Morley Power Fuzz Boost.
Caleb is just unbelievable.