Tag Archives: General

Guzheng Sessions with Bryan O’Connor!

 

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 underneath, the largest of which is more or less under the s

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.

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.

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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!

The mic shootout!

What’s Going on?

After listening to three mixes of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”, I decided to do some research on the original track. Here is a great read I found talking about some of the session details:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul11/articles/classic-tracks-0711.htm

They used an RCA  DX77 on the kick. I don’t think I will be trying that in the advanced class next year. I would like to try to use a couple U87′s as overheads though. Even though this track featured the tube sibling to the U87, the U67, I have heard that the 87′s do very well as overheads.

 

enjoy the read!

 

Tidal Wave

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This is another favorite mix of mine. This is Husky’s “Tidal Wave” off their 2012 album “Forever So”. Listening to this mix, It’s amazing how big it sounds. The vocals feature the mids/high mids, and are sopping with reverb. Even so, they succeed in occupying a very forward space in the mix. Listening to this before, I never realized how low the drums were in the mix. The whole album has the drums well behind everything else. Listen though, for a very wide assortment of instruments, percussion-wise.

One of my favorite parts of Husky’s sound on this album is the really wide acoustic guitars. It’s like someone is pouring a bucket of martin 000′s on my head(can’t you just hear those rosewood sides and back?). It’s such a warm, yet discretely articulate sound, especially on this first track. This track has two guitar parts featured pretty prominently though the entire song, and they are both panned hard out. Funny though, they don’t have that super isolated hard-panned sound. The Two guitars blend so nicely, it makes me think they might have panned the reverb to the opposite side for each track.

They didn’t exactly get ‘lucky’

I recently read this article talking about Daft Punk’s hit single, “Get Lucky”, off of their 2013 “Random Access Memories”. The article breaks down how the song works in terms of music theory, and talks about why we love that circular chord progression that eludes the natural tonic of the key. Check it out.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/03/daft_punk_s_get_lucky_explained_using_music_theory.html

Great Mix

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This is LCD Soundsystem’s “Time to Get Away” off of their 2007 album, “Sounds Of Silver”. Personally, this is a favorite mix of mine for a few reasons. It sounds sparse. There is a really tight drum sound, and a really close bass(sounds like a DI), and they both are just so clear. When we get to the chorus, an electric piano sound is added, nice and simple. All throughout the song, we get these little bits and pieces from percussion instruments, but it never starts to sound too crowded; it’s very easy to pick out each instrument. Another interesting thing to notice is that during the bridge(e.g. 2:34), the backup vocals are super wet with reverb, but then the reverb cuts out. Very interesting effect. Long story short, I love this mix because it is sooo clean, and everything can be heard. I usually listen to this when I am comparing speakers, and sometimes before a mixing session.

Recordinghacks.com

AKG-C-12-Tube-Mic-2

The AKG C12

In doing my research for my presentation project, I happened upon an incredible resource. www.recordinghacks.com is a wonderful blog site absolutely filled with information regarding microphones. If you have a question about any of the microphones we have been working with or talking about, search it on the site, and a pile of information will fall from the internet sky. Frequency response charts, feature details, general description, and more are available for all your information needs.

Understanding Audio

The API 1608 mixing console is a great piece of analogue equipment, when combined with Pro Tools, giving an Engineer greater control over mixes and recordings.  Tracing the signal flow is fairly intuitive, once you get past the initial shock of the learning curve, everything is right where it should be. I am excited to learn this console, and produce my own tracks.