Strange Tales - musings of a sound monkey

When I was a kid, the epic live album was always an event. Some of the best loved albums of the heyday of raw rock music are still some of the most interesting and powerful recordings to date. Thin Lizzy - Live & Dangerous, Rush - All the Worlds A Stage & Exit Stage Left, Genesis - Seconds Out, countless recordings at the Budokan, Alive even made Kiss sound halfway thumpful as I was never entirely convinced they came across that well on studio recordings.

The rise of digital recording systems and hugely affordable storage has meant that multiple-tracking, constant tweaking and hyper polishing have become the norm; I’m just as guilty as anyone, in fact possibly worse as predominantly I work as a solo artist so don’t have band schedules, external studios and restrictive budgets to worry about, so I constantly get tempted to worship at the altar of Tweak in the church of Limitless Tracking.

I was approached a while ago to record a demo for some good friends who are in a six piece classic rock band. I’ve done a bit of live engineering for them in the past and had always been blown away at how tight they were live. Great rhythm section, solid lead work, surprisingly good  at giving each space to play, and topped by really versatile and powerful vocals.  Though the natural instinct was to set up channel after channel and drag the guys in one by one and take forever over it and really polish it beyond sparkling, I stepped back a little bit and plucked up the courage to ask the band if we could just do the recording in one take for each track as I really wanted to capture the energy and pace of the band all bouncing off each other. So a couple of weeks ago we decamped the mobile rig to the guys’ rehearsal studio. Due to the size of the band, sadly the Traveler was going to run out of inputs really quickly and so Rig B was pressed into service which is based round a stripped back PowerMac G5 running Digital Performer v5 via a MOTU 24i/o which gave us inputs agogo.  The rig is really stable, and DP allows legacy files to be really easily imported to DP7 so there’s no problems with getting the files back into the studio for processing.

The drummer has a great sounding Mapex kit and so I took a second risk and just put 4 mics on it, kick snare and 2 Rode overheads. To be honest, I was almost happy enough with the overhead sound on it’s own, but the kick and snare are almost essential insurance policies and give crucial definition to the sound. A good friend of mine does frequently record jazz drummers with a stereo pair just above the drummer’s head using the principle that the best person to mix drums, is the drummer his/herself and I’ve heard his recordings and they are pristine and have immense space and definition. But for more rocky sounds and in a closer live environment, I just felt I wanted a stronger direct signal from the two defining sounds in the kit and it would have been pretty daft not to. That said, the whole kit sounds great and the stereo pair have picked up all the cymbal, tom and hi-hat work beautifully, and given a pretty useable i’s sound, but there’s no arguing with the classic 57 snare sound and good solid click and thump from the kick.

The rest of the band were predominantly 57’d apart from the bass who uses an Ashdown head that has a great DI on it, so I did my usual mic & DI with the appropriate time compensation etc. Keyboards were DI’d and that was about it. All straight into the 24i/o, no dynamics in, just straight signal about 6-10dB below 0. Vocals, we did leave off, just because we wanted clarity, but the lead singer bass player kept everyone in place just as well as if he was mic’d up so we were ok.

Spill was a bit of an issue on a couple of cabs, but as we knew we weren’t going to be dng much/any cutting and pasting or even comping, we just decided to live with it. We knew the vocals would be clean so everything would add to the canvas, and a bit of smart cab placement to simulate how we were going to eventually pan the band in the mix meant that the spill should sound pretty natural (a strategy I’m delighted to say worked perfectly, and is well worth a try, needs a bit of planning ahead, but worth it).

We managed to put 2-3 takes of 6 songs down in just over 2 hours, complete with a couple of false starts and abandonments. As someone who charges by the hour, this was disastrous obviously but it was such a joy as an experience that you just forget that. They are a great bunch of players to work with and one of their partners was staggeringly wonderful at providing constant munchables and drinky things.

Getting the material back to the mothership is always a nervous moment, we didn’t get chance to do any but the scantest of checks to make sure we’d got everything, but I’m delighted to say that DP reliability is so good that so long as signal paths were ok, we should have been in good shape. And happily it was, in fact, the end result has been a real vindication of the decision to record the band altogether. We’ve just put vocals on ithe last few days and the whole ensemble just sound so lively and vibrant without being too ‘garagey’. The mission to capture the band as I hear them live has gone pretty well and has given the boys a really nice shaping demo.

So, next time you’re scheduling a band to come in over 6-8 weeks to fit round various jobs, holidays, dates etc, just see if there’s an afternoon when they’re all available and have a go at the one take wonder. You might be pleasantly surprised!