So this week, I'm back up at Rockfield with a band called Skinny Lister! A six piece British folk band. A big contrast from last week's metal session, you've got to be constantly adapting as a studio engineer!
So it's mid July as I'm writing this, but we're recording a Christmas song. Kind of weird but we're all feeling the festivities and on our last day in the studio and the track is sounding fantastic!
I am assisting Tristan Ivemy, a well established producer who's credits include Frank Turner, Tubelord, Towers of London and more. It's great to spend some time with him and learn his perspective on the song creation process.
Day 1
We spent the whole day writing and tracking drums. We isolated the drums in one half of the live room, with the rest of the band in the other half, behind a glass partition. This allowed the band to play together and perform as they felt comfortable whilst capturing an isolated drum recording. The importance of allowing the band to play together can't be underestimated. capturing that human connection through a recording is the basis for a great piece of music.
Tristan went for a fairly basic recording setup on the drums. Regardless, it still sounded great, which illustrated the importance of a quality microphone placement over the quantity of microphones used. This approach also prevents a lot of phase issues that could be a massive headache down the line. So here's the drum recording microphone list and setup.
Kick: AKG D112
Snare top: Shure sm57
Snare bottom: Shure sm57
Toms: Sennheiser DM421
Cymbals: Neumann KM84
Overheads: AKG C12a
Mono Overhead: AKG C12 (modified clone)
Kick
One of the most striking aspects of this simple drum setup was the single kick microphone. I asked tristan how he was going to get any body or heft out of the kick? I later found that he would trigger a sine wave tone to act as the low end. Although I would always opt to capture the actual low-end of the kit, this was an effective way to avoid multi-microphone phase issues.
Tristan felt that there was too much snare and cymbal bleeding into the kick drum microphone, so we created a drum tunnel out of some heavy curtains and blankets. Not the most elegant looking but hey, it worked!
Snare
It was a hard decision to get that perfect snare sound. Luckily, we had a selection of the highest standard...
The Snare was recorded using two Shure sm57's. Just about as basic as you can get, but it sounded great! Tristan then sent the top snare recording through the echo chamber. This is a tiled room in the courtyard at Rockfield with a speaker and two microphones. I got a massive kick out of the thought of capturing a real reverb space as opposed to the artificial reverb that is so prevalent in todays productions. It sounded so good and inspired me to use more natural space in my own productions.
Overheads
The C12a's are a valve microphone pair, and they sound superb as overheads. The top-end sensitivity and detail are like no other microphone i've heard before. They capture every nuance of the kit and left us with a very accurate picture of the drums. The Mono overhead was very useful for capturing the power of the kick and snare and placing them firmly in the centre of the drum overhead image.
The stereo C12a overheads were sent through the Tube Tech PE 1C Pultec style Equalisers.
This added a broad 12KHz boost and a slight attenuation at 20KHz. This brought out that delicate top end detail whilst filtering out the painful hiss frequencies at the very top of the spectrum. This was then sent to an Alan smart C2 compressor, which emulates the famous SSL G-Buss compressor. This further excited the equalisation artefacts and helped the drums cement their place in the mix.
Patch bay spaghetti...
The most exciting aspect of this session was the use of the Studer A800 tape machine. We hard patched the output of the tape machine into a Pro Tools 192 analogue to digital converter. This meant we could run the output of the console through the tape and reproduction heads and capture that beautiful analogue signal path in the digital domain. This was literally getting the best out of both the analogue and digital formats, as we were capturing the natural compression and saturation characteristics of a tape recording and instantly archiving it in an easily transferable configuration. It also meant that we only had to use one spool of tape as we could just keep re-recording over the last take for overdubs. This was a very simple but highly effective method of bringing the analogue recording sound in to the digital domain.
What a fantastic day of working with some incredible musicians and a highly experienced producer. Every day is a school day in this job!
Keep your eyes peels for Vol. 3 of the 'Studio Diaries' as I'll be covering piano, guitar and vocal recording techniques.
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Big Love
Jack
