Recording - December 2016 - 64

BenKi
Equipment: Apple MacBook Air with M-Audio
Oxygen 25 MIDI controller running Ableton
Live 9. MXL V67 condenser mic. KRK Rokit 5
monitor speakers, beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro
headphones. Epiphone Les Paul Traditional
guitar, Peavey Vypyr VIP1 amp, Takamine 12string guitar, Ibanez SDGR bass guitar, Pearl
drum set.

Music: "Falling All Over Again" is a male vocal rock song. Jean-Patrice
Leroux played drums, Steeve Poirier played bass, the rhythm guitar and
vocals were courtesy of Paskál Labonté. Pascal Des Marais played the
lead guitar and handled the recording end of things.
Recording: An excellent submission from across the Atlantic, one that
came ever so close to making our Spotlight feature... halted only by a few
balance and artifact issues.
All of the performances here are topnotch, ditto for the majority of the
recording. Pascal has done an excellent job keeping his heavily-distorted
guitars articulate here; they still have plenty of girth but never get muddy
through our monitors. The bass guitar is also very nicely played and
recorded. We are privy to all of the movement that Steeve's performance
provides, without the masking that often accompanies this type of heavy
rock. Paskál's vocal chops are on full display here, although unfortunately
we do hear a slight bit of compression-based sibilance as well.
Now for the rub. While the drums were expertly played and recorded,
we felt that the overall level of the drums, along with the tight snare drum
sound and lack of ambience, placed them at odds with the other sound
sources. Through all four pairs of our monitors (yep, you heard right) the
upfront positioning of the drums in the mix puts them in a space usually
reserved for the lead vocal, driving the remaining sounds into the background.
Suggestions: As we said at the start, this is a stellar recording made by
a tight creative unit, something we hear far too little of these days! As for
the trouble spots, they are simply quick fixes in our mind.
We would encourage Pascal to revisit his mix and back off the vocal
compression a wee bit. His powerful vocals undoubtedly needed some
taming, but not to the point of smear. As for the drums, in our perfect
world the snare would have a deeper and more robust tone, and the
entire kit would be placed back into the stereo field and given some fair
amount of reverb to "seat" it with the electric guitars.

Music: "Answer For You" is a male vocal
light rock tune. BenKi was the wearer of all the
hats on the project.
Recording: In his production notes BenKi tells
us that he is new to the world of recording and
that he would appreciate any help we could
provide. Well, good sir, you have come to the
right place! Let us delve in and see what is
what, shall we?
After repeated listening, our overall impression is that BenKi's mix is suffering from both
balance and panning (or lack thereof) issues.
Through our monitors, both the lead and harmony vocals were considerably out in front of the
other sound sources, resulting in a "top-heavy"
feel that we found distracting. We also felt that
the high-end frequency bump on BenKi's MXL
V67 mic was not quite meshing with his voice.
As for the sound field concerns, everything
here seems to be presented "straight up the
gut" as a football coach might say, resulting in
(for starters) some masking between the electric
guitar and the bass. On the plus side, the
vocals were superbly blended with each other
in that Everly Bros. fashion, and the fact that
BenKi actually played/recorded everything
here sans programming or plug-ins gets big
props from us!
Suggestions: Once again we congratulate
BenKi for his ambitious undertaking. It's hard
enough to wear any one of these various hats,
much less all of them!
As for the fix-me-ups, while there is certainly
nothing wrong with mixing in "mono", it just
takes a rather different approach to be successful. We suggest instead that BenKi experiment
with the possibilities of the stereo field, beginning with moving his rhythm guitars out to the
left and right of center, leaving the middle of
his mix for the bass guitar, kick/snare drums,
lead vocal, and lead guitar. Once that is
accomplished, we would love to hear the vocal
volume reduced, allowing for a better blend
with the instrument bed.
Lastly, regarding the mic/voice marriage,
while the MXL V67 is highly regarded as an
affordable quality unit, condenser mics are not
always the perfect fit for every voice. Artists as
varied as Stevie Wonder, Wilco, and Fleetwood
Mac have all had great success using dynamic
microphones in the studio. There have been
many fine articles through the years on this very
topic in Recording, and they would be a great
resource for BenKi in his future projects.

Summary: Très bien, merci!

Summary: A fine start!

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Union of The Slaves
Equipment: Intel Core 2 Duo PC with 4 GB RAM running Steinberg
Cubase Studio 4 with Waves plug-ins and Ampeg SVX for bass. Allen &
Heath GL3 mixer. Mics: Audix drum mics, Shure SM57 for guitar amp
(Randall RM100 head with Marshall cabinet). RØDE NTK and Focusrite
Trackmaster channel strip for vocal recordings. Behringer B2031A
nearfield monitors.

Contact: Union Of The Slaves, unionoftheslaves@hotmail.fr
64

RECORDING DECEMBER 2016

Contact: BenKi, tybeeisla@gmail.com

http://www.recordingmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2016