Recording - May 2012 - 30

bleed from the guitar and the drum mic. Keys also went through an amp. If you’re using a digital keyboard, there’s already an amp simulation in the patch itself, but since we were using a Rhodes, a Hammond organ and a D6 Clavinet, those sound much better through an amp. I actually tried them direct, but the sound I got didn’t have the warmth that the amp offered. How did you deal with miking all those sounds at the same time? Running the bass direct was a necessity. The main thing was getting the amplifiers muffled enough so that the bleed, especially from the drums, was not too much. We did it with foam and blankets around the amps. What about overdubs? The percussion and horn solos were done at a studio in Santa Monica and then Fanny sent me the tracks, but those were done digitally, and the vocals as well. Fanny sang live while we were playing, as a guide, but the finals were done digitally. That’s where the use of plug-ins was handy. My favorite one is the Waves Kramer MPX, which is like an Ampex tape recorder; it’s really warm and it has a good slapback echo. Since you work with real tape and tape machines, how do you rate plugins that emulate tape and tape machines? They do a good job on individual tracks; when you try to apply them to the whole mix, it doesn’t sound the same. In this case it worked fine, where I just needed to warm up a digital track here and there. Once I mixed down to tape again, that really seemed to glue the tracks together. That was really a revelation. I had a digital mix and a mix to tape, and at first I didn’t know which one I was going to send to mastering. But the one to tape definitely outshone the digital one. What kind of mixing decisions did you make to keep the vintage vibe?
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I didn’t want to overproduce it because I wanted it to sound like a live band as much as possible, so there was a lot of consistency in the mixes; guitar was panned right, keys were panned left, and that was consistent throughout the songs. For the most part I used real spring reverbs, like the Fostex and the Orban. In this area, how did plug-ins compare to the real ones? They are great for certain things, although for this style the real spring reverb really fit the sound. The Orban has a little more of that plate character to it, but I stayed away from the digital ones as much as possible, since sometimes they could sound a little “cheesy.” Was this project more expensive because of the cost of tape? The half-inch format is not that expensive, and I re-used the tape; once I filled up the tape and it was dumped into the DAW, I could go over it again. We really needed to make sure we had what we needed. Someone said recently that one of the biggest problems with modern recording is that you don’t have to commit to anything! What about the transfer from tape to Apple Logic? There was no synching. I just set the levels in Logic, played the tape into a Mackie board, and into an Apogee Rosetta 800 A/D–D/A converter. Why Apple Logic? Logic seems to be able to do pretty much anything you need it to do. In a way, it can be a little overwhelming, so you have to narrow it down to the things you need. But any scenario you could run into in a studio, you could deal with using Logic. And then came mastering... Yes; the engineer probably thought that there was some sort of a limitation in our recording because the first time around he over-compensated by making it super-bright and supercompressed. So I had to explain to him how we loved it the way it was and wanted that sound, and he mastered it again to our liking. For more info on Jason, please visit www.enfieldstudios.com.

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Recording - May 2012

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