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Dorkfest. Recording junk. May include lengthy details of electronic circuitry or the innane. (Just like every other blog) Mostly the whatsit and whosit of whatever audio and recording related things I'm working on but I want you to participate. |
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wTuesday, December 07, 2004 |
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the splints - overdubs fri/sat 12/3 & 4
greg got a new tape machine for the studio. after work fri i went down to the house/studio to calibrate the machine and get a quick lesson on what's different from the mci. the thing auto calibrates, and took like 10 minutes to do what took an hr on the mci. it can also record backwards, which i didnt get to try out. it's also supposedly great at spot erasing, but again - i just stuck to the utilitarian punches . i even did a couple fake vocal takes and practice punches with greg singing over the band's takes. greg played the role of primadonna singer crossed with a beligerant english guy. pretty classic stuff, but out of consideration for the band i erased it before leaving. the routing on the console was still somewhat foggy, mostly because my brain was fried from work. around 9 i went home, and i was feeling pretty exhausted from a shithole workweek. i was planning on going out but i ended up falling asleep on the couch instead: lame.
saturday i woke up and rachel and i went to lula for breakfast. i showed up around 11:30 and refreshed myself on the routing, everyhing made a lot more sense on a nights sleep and a good breakfast - i was feeling excited and dare i say "chipper". the band showed up and we set up the gtr amps in the dead room. i wanted to try some new things (for me), so i miced the 4x12 (fender solid state head - grey carpet - mental note, write these things down) with a beyer 160 and gefell um70, both about 6" off the grill. on-axis to the cone, at the edge of where the inner round thingy bends up. i should probably know the techincal name for that but i dont. both mics went into the hardy pres then to tape.
we did all the gtr overdubs for the 4x12 setup, then there was one song with slide guitar into what i think (need better notes) was a peavey version of those fender champ reissues with the yellow cloth. for that i put both mics up front (aborted the initial idea of an ambient um70 and close 160 so it'd be faster mixing since we were trying to work really fast). when i checked it out it kinda sounded like ass. totally hollow. flipped phase on the 160 and it sprang to life. quick lesson in remembering phase coherency. that track was fixed to tape but the others needed to be fixed in mix. i made a mental note to pay special attention to the fundamentals and not forget them in the rush.
finished guitars. started to do the samples (a few records through an old beat up stereo system, miced with the UM70, sounded pretty cool) then a couple off cd which were just line in.
on to vocals. i had up a 4033 and a rca bk5 as close mics. greg had mentioned earlier he liked that on some male vocalists recently. i had only tried ribbons on female singers before and wasnt as into it. i was really interested in doing something other than a large diapragm condenser, and my backup other choice was going to be the shure SM7 if the BK5 didn't work. both close mics go to the hardy pres. spaced pair 4051s into sony pre > tc delay @20 ms to tape. the BK5 went through the dbx 160 at probably 4:1, -10 threshold, probably +5/10 makeup gain. probably fast attack and release. i know i wrote that down somehwere. the 4033 went to a dynamite comressor with similar settings. listening back the 4033 is really present, bright, annunciated, brittle maybe, in other words, cuts through the mix well. the rca is smoother and kinda sounds like it recedes and sits *with* the mix rather than on top of. after a quick chat we decide that's better for the way the songs are going. the 4033 still goes to tape, but i always have it muted. we do 2 songs and there;s a big pause. it turns out the singer left his lyric book at home and brought math notes instead. after much deliberation, we decide to try and regroup tommoow.
i feel kinda bad because it's a short day for the band and i end up staying a few hrs later working on different mix ideas, mostly involving multing out channels and trying different compression/eq on the multed channels and folding them under the tape channels. i work out a relatively dry mix (no ambient mics) that's heavy on the compressed overhead signal in a sort of ...trail of dead way. at the same time i spend a lot of triple checking phase issues on the drums. some pretty simple stuff really makes the toms pop out quite a bit.
also they wanna try and mix so i get the 2 track ready. put on tones/leader. eventually i go home and later on meet up with liam, greg and andrew at the hungry brain. we have too much makers mark and pabst - generally having a good time carousing.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 6:32 PM
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