Recording - August 2017 - 19

Did you mix them in stereo, or did
you just decide which mics worked
on each track?

I used them in stereo, left and right sides
of the cone. On a few of the first tracks,
there were only two mics, panned left and
right. They had different attack characteristics and different EQ. They were mono,
but very different in sound. When I went
to four mics, I put two on each side.

As Chris was singing and playing guitar at the same time. How did you
deal with that?

I'll start with vocals. There were two
vocal mics: a really nice long-body U
47 that Dave has, and a Coles 4038.
They're as close together as they can
possibly be without the Coles sticking to
the 47. [The 4038 is a ribbon mic with
very strong magnets, and yes, other mics
will stick to it if they get too close.-Ed.]
He doesn't get up close; he stays about
a foot away, and listens to himself in the
phones, gets into the zone, and adjusts
himself to what sounds best.
These two mics went into Neve 1073
preamps; the 47 went into a Fairchild

compressor and the Coles went into a
Chandler RS124, which is fantastic. No
EQ or anything, and that went to two
tracks in Pro Tools. I would then ride
those two faders up and down as needed when we're mixing. There are always
two mics on his vocal.
Then, when he played acoustic guitar... if you were sitting, there would be
an RCA 77 at your right hand and a Gefell 582 at your left hand, both angled at
90º into the guitar. The 582 is pointed at
where the neck meets the body, and the
77 is pointed right at the soundhole. The
two mics are exactly the same distance
apart as each of them is from the 47 on
vocals; it's a triangle in the same plane.
It's hard to describe but it seems to work
really well, the phase coherence is really
good and it feels like one sound.
On those mics, Dave has some Universal Audio 610s [preamps], and then
I went through an Empirical Labs Fatso,
then to Pro Tools. That's kind of my normal thing.

Morgane sang on a U 67. Dave mostly
played acoustic guitar, I brought my [Neumann] KM 56 for that. And then I think we
had an AEA R88 out in the room as an
ambience mic, to catch the room-vocals,
guitar, bass... the room's really big, 40 x
70 x 30 feet, so that mic's catching air.

Did Chris' wife also sing on a U 47?
What other mics were there?

I love Sylvia! And yes, always.
Absolutely!

Going back to the drums: Did you
compress the drums on the way in?

I compressed the kick and the snare
through a pair of Univeral Audio 1176s,
but that was it. And then I would combine
the drum tracks on the way into Pro Tools
so it was one kick drum, one snare drum,
two tracks of toms, left and right, and
overhead left and right.

I recently interviewed Sylvia
Massy-she said that even when
she's got seven toms on a heavy
metal drummer with multiple mics,
she always buses them to stereo on
the way in and they always sound
better in the mix than trying to
recombine them later.
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