A Day's Work

EDITS: Made a few changes to reflect the correct mic names below.

Pat and I spent Tuesday at Let 'Em In Music in Brooklyn to record "Aloud."  I'm very pleased with what we accomplished.  We managed to lay down all the basic tracks, leaving only mixing and embellishments to round it out.  Our engineer, Nadim, was both professional and amicable, demonstrating a good ear, knowledge of his gear and space, and a willingness to put in the extra time and effort to get it right.  This last piece was the most valuable to me.

As a newcomer to recording in a commercial studio, I  was concerned that I might be too tentative to demand the level of care I feel is required to deliver a satisfactory result.  Operating on the clock, at significant expense I might add, moves one to impulsively settle rather than persist in seeking optimum correctness, and to be sure there is a point at which dwelling on minutiae may become frivolous and impede progress.  The fact is that while I can identify a final recording that I deem "acceptable" in quality, I have yet to take part in sessions that have created one, and as such I greatly valued Nadim's feedback and help in triangulating where each component of the recording needed to be to lead to a finished product that will meet my overall standards.

At the last second I decided to bring my drum kit, reskinning the toms a couple days before.  I'm glad I did.  The old Samson kit is a real clunker, but I know how to get a good sound out of it and thought that minimizing the number of variables for the first session was a good idea.  Lo and behold the hunk-a-junk delivered a solid sound, combined with the studio's Black Beauty snare.  I tuned the rack tom to deep but articulate "doom" with ease; the floor tom took a bit more work to get an appropriate "gung" that delivered the low end I wanted with adequate articulation but without excessive boom.  Moon gels were applied amply to the top head.  The snare was tuned to a nice mid-range "thwack," not quite fat-back but with some body.  Took some adjustment of the strainer tension to prevent from choking off the sound without ringing too much, but we got it eventually.  The kick was tuned with just enough tension to be articulate on the batter head (an Evans EMAD provided ample muting) and I balanced the tension on the front head to focus the sound as best I could.  Tuning in an unfamiliar space was a small challenge but just required some additional patience to allow my ears to adjust and let the room tell me where each drum should be.

We miced the kit up with a pair of Beyerdynamics mc930s (small-capsule condensers) for overheads (model forthcoming), an SM57 on snare top, an attenuated RODE NT5 on side head, an Sennheiser MD421 on rack tom, an Elecro Voice RE20 on floor tom (really fond of this mic on floor tom for rock), another 421 on kick inside the small port on the reso head, an Audio Technica 4033 (large capsule condenser) outside the kick, and a pair of Beyerdynamics Cascade Fathead II ribbon mics, one in front of the kit and one in back, and a RODE K2 as a room mic.  We would later add another SM57 on the batter side of the kick for a little extra snap.  Whew, that's a lot of mics (12 in fact).  We even thought about adding a hi-hat mic but decided it was unnecessary.  I've gone back and forth over the years about whether many mics are required for a good drum sound.  With a great room they're certainly not, but used properly they can help achieve the right sound for a given song, and in the case of an upbeat rocker like "Aloud," we needed strong articulation on each individual drum as well as the lively ambiance of the room.  The kick ate up 3 mics itself, and I think that's gonna be common for kick if you want that real "thunk" with some chest thumping boom and a satisfying snap, certainly in a large room.  We tested it out and made some minor adjustments to mic placement, swapped out my 21" Zildjian rock ride for a lighter ride that was less washy and sits at a better place in the mix for cymbals, baffled off the kick and were ready to go.

All the while we set Pat up with his bass running direct through a DI and also into a vintage Ampeg that we baffled off to minimize bleed (of which there was little).  All accounted for, we started hitting tape (or hard drive).  We took three full passes of the song and decided that we had enough material to comp together a good take.  Relatively painless tracking I'd say.  The comping was a bit tedious, but needed to be done before we could move on, so after grabbing a quick bite we set about putting a comp together, with the possibility of doing another take if it proved necessary.  Pleasantly it didn't; I even managed to nail a notoriously difficult fill-in on one of the 3 takes, which pleased me immensely as I had recognized beforehand that I may have to go for something simpler if I couldn't land it in a timely fashion.

On to guitars it was.  Getting the right distorted tone for the guitar proved to be the most trying part of the process.  I had started out using the distorted channel of my Fender Prosonic combo, an uncharacteristically high gain channel for a Fender amp.  I happen to quite like the sound in that it's a bit unusual and kind of messy, but it's true that I've had difficulty picking it up in a pleasing way on tape, and we encountered that problem here.  Set up with an SM57 on one of the two 10" speakers and a Beyerdynamics Cascade ribbon on the other, Nadim found the hi-end way too brittle and not usable.  The way the open E string rubs against the higher notes in the chorus of "Aloud" exacerbate this effect quite a bit.  We played quite a bit with the EQ and tried lowering the gain too, achievable what would have been an acceptable sound too me.  But Pat pointed out that a bit of the "garage-iness" of the song was lost.  Finally we elected to try out my Suhr Riot distortion pedal, which I bought primarily for live use (so I could use house amps where possible and avoid the channel pop/ eq imbalance when switching between channels on the Prosonic).  Some more eq fiddling and we had a winner.  I'm really glad we spent the time getting a tone that works here.  I think your guitar tone does a lot to define the sound of your band and can also be one of the toughest things to find the proper space for in the mix and we got a tone that both reflects the music adequately and sits nicely in the track.

We switched over to clean guitar next, adding the K2 as a room mic.  My Music Man Axis Sport running into a Deluxe Memory Man into the Prosonic's warm clean channel is the just about the most pleasing sound I can produce and I think it came across well here.  It didn't take too much tweaking to nail that one down.

Notes on mics:

SM57 - I know I knocked this guy in the last post but he performed admirably.  I've also confirmed that it DOES in fact have the exact same electronics as the 58, even if my tests on toms led me to believe otherwise (there can be a slight change on the high end due to the grill, but I doubt that came into play).  A couple of explanations for my experience a couple weeks ago:

    a) I'm incompetent.
    b) I wasn't scientific enough about placement when switching mics.
    c) My 57 is screwed up.

I actually think there might be some legitimacy to option c.  I'll have to test my two 57s against each other some time.  While two mics might electronically be "the same," that doesn't mean there aren't occasional manufacturing deviations (next time you're clothes shopping, try on three pairs of the same pants with the "same" waist size and see for yourself).

Option a) is also a distinct possibility.

RIBBON MICS - I've never used these before, though I've heard quite a lot about them.  The fact is that on their own they weren't much much to write home about in our session, and can sound a bit toothless.  But because what they pick up is so different from your dynamics and condensers, they add quite a lot to your overall sounds, contributing all sorts of otherwise absent sonic information.

Vox were next after some guitar comping.  We shot it out between the Rode K2, a Shure SM7, and a Studio Projects CS1 (or CS5?) C1 for the hell of it.  The SM7 was thoroughly underwhelming, much as I've found the similar RE20 to be on my own voice, though certainly a very usable vocal mic in its own right.  The K2 was mediocre at best.  But the Studio Projects mic really shined.  We fussed with the preamp selection for the K2 a bit for comparison, but it was pretty much a slam dunk with the SP.  It accentuated frequencies in my voice such that it sat perfectly atop the mix in a way that I've never quite achieved before.  Who knew?  Go Chinese mics!  I think I'm going to have to pick one of these up at some point to have on hand for future recording sessions elsewhere because it just seems to be a match.

Getting the vocals down, we spit out a rough mix for me to deliberate over at home, then I packed up and left.  A truly productive and incredibly exhausting day.  Looking forward to meeting again on Tuesday for mixing.  I'm really excited about how the tune is coming along; it sounds like the real thing.

More soon,
T