EQ Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 30)

GUITAR TRAX PIECING TOGETHER AN ACOUSTIC PUNK CD by Michael Molenda I was supposed to be producing a simple little punky, folky singer/songwriter solo project with a few dashes of Ireland and Scotland thrown into the mix. But, because I wanted to incorporate enough additional textures to take listeners on a bit of a journey—rather than hearing just strummed Dobro and solo voice for 11 songs—Bag O’ Tricks [Vagrant Records] by Ol’ Cheeky Bastards (a.k.a. Dave Dalton of Screaming Bloody Marys fame) became somewhat of an air-traffic control challenge of managing different file formats and recording approaches. The basics were tracked on Pro Tools HD at Tiki Town Studios in Mill Valley, California, by house engineer Tom Luekens. I wanted “pure” performances of Dalton banging away on his Dobro and singing simultaneously to capture his energy and casual “busker” style. No click tracks. No lead-vocal overdubs. No punch-ins. Just a man and his guitar documented in real time. “When recording acoustic guitar and vocal together, I usually find it’s best to use two mics with figure-8 patterns,” says Luekens, who opted to track at a resolution of 96kHz (the project’s low track count wouldn’t stress out the CPU, and the higher resolution would better represent the nuances of Dalton’s performance). “I choose a Neumann U87 for Dave’s vocal, as it complemented his gravelly timbre, and I picked an AKG C-12B for the Dobro. I angled the null point of the vocal mic toward the guitar, and I angled the null point of the guitar mic toward the voice. This minimized the leakage. There was some of the pick strumming sound in the vocal mic, but not much of the body of the guitar, and the voice was almost undetectable in the guitar mic.” Dalton’s Dobro also had a pickup, the output of which Luekens routed to a Radial JDI direct box, with the intention of reamping the signal later. But the McDSP’s Chrome Tone plug-in he used for the rough mixes sounded so good on the DI track that no reamping was done at the final mix. Dalton busking in Tiki Town’s living room. Luekens importing bits of madness in the control room. “Dave played the Dobro for a few of the songs, and then he switched to a Gretsch Electromatic,” explains Luekens. “I kept the same setup, but the acoustic sound of the Gretsch wasn’t quite as good as the Dobro. However, the DI track more than made up for it, as the pickups on the Gretsch sound great.” During the basics sessions—which proceeded with Dalton comfortably recording in the studio’s living room with his box lunch, lyrics, guitars, and wife and baby photos scattered around— Luekens launched a few standard operational practices he developed to make sessions move faster and easier. “When I start a new track, I begin the audio recording a minimum of ten seconds into the sessions file,” he says. “I do this because I can’t count the number of times I’ve started recording a song at the beginning of the session file, and then someone wants to put on a part that leads into the song. Starting the song with some open front space saves me from having to move all of the audio and markers downstream later. “I also organize my hard drive so that each artist has a folder at the root level of the drive. Inside the artist’s folder is a session template containing tracks for everything I’ll be recording during the initial tracking. If the group has drums, bass, two guitars, keys, and a scratch vocal, I put those tracks in the template with inputs and outputs, basic headphone sends, effects sends, and fader levels pre-set. Once the first song is recorded, I go back to my template, and import any fine-tuning changes I made during the tracking of the first song. This saves a lot of time opening a new session and configuring it from scratch each time. Also included in the template are blank mono and stereo audio tracks, with the headphone sends activated. That way, if I need new audio tracks, I simply duplicate as many copies of these tracks as I need, and rename them appropriately.” Studio overdubs consisted of background vocals (tracked in groups of two or four circled around a late ’40s Telefunken U47), grand piano and organ (performed by Keyboard Associate Editor Michael Gallant), and a few electric-guitar parts. For rhythm sweetening, EBow lines, and a solo or two, I plugged a PRS SE Paul Allender Signature guitar into a Vox Berkeley (modded with a presence circuit) or an Orange Tiny Terror—both miked with a single Royer R-121 ribbon. “The Royer R-121 is one of my usual choices for electric guitars, as it can take high-volume sources, it has a nice presence boost between 2kHz and 4kHz, and also a slight dip between 10kHz and 18kHz that takes some harshness out of closemiked amps,” says Luekens. “When placed directly in front of the speaker cone [of either amp], the mic was still a bit spiky, so I moved it up above the plane of the center of the speaker, and I angled it down at not quite 45 degrees. I ran the R-121 through either a Studer D-19 mic preamp, or an old Ampex MX-35 tube mixer. The 30 EQ MAY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - May 2008

EQ Magazine - May 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Jamie Lidell, What the New Model of Record Deal Means to You, Part II, Andrew W.K. Tool Box Aerosmith Fast Tracks Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet DigiDesign Pro Tools LE 7.4 Cakewalk Sonar 7 Line 6 UX8 Studio Projects CS5 Art Tubefire 8 Jazzmutant Dexter MCDSP Emerald Pack Overloud Breverb KRK Exposé E8B Mackie MR5 Blue Sky Exo Monitor System Big Fish Audio Around the World in 80 Raves East West Fab Four Virtual Instrument Sony Matt Fink- Starvu Session Keys Room With A VU

EQ Magazine - May 2008

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