EQ Magazine - September 2008 - (Page 17)

tracks back to tape in order to manually manipulate tape speeds. “Devendra wanted a slow-motion sound for ‘Samba Vexillographica,’” Georgeson says. “Something akin to a tape machine being shut down. We tried to achieve that sound with tape emulators, but it didn’t really work. So we took a marker, marked a spot on the tape, grabbed the reel, and slowed it down with our hands. It took a bunch of passes to get it down right, because if you grab the tape too quickly the reel will stop spinning, but it produced the exact effect Devendra wanted.” According to Georgeson, tracking Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon to tape gave the album a kind of steadiness despite the disparate musical influences being conjured by Banhart. “Putting everything to the same brand of tape, on the same machine, makes for a very consistent sound—it’s almost pre-mastered in a sense,” Georgeson says. “From track to track, you have an enriched low end and a sort of glow on top. It took a lot of time to record—six months— and it was because we were very careful to keep everything uniform. But, texturally, the album makes sense, even though it’s all over the place musically.” HORRIFYING SPILLS Greg Weeks, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and founder of the Philadelphia-based band The Valerie Project, recently led his group through the recording of an alternate soundtrack to the cult 1970 Czech horror-fantasy film, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders [Drag City]. “I’ve always been a fan of merging folk with psych and prog,” Weeks says. “The album was quite a challenge,” says recording/mixing engineer Brian McTear, who runs Philadelphia’s Miner Street Recordings studio with partner Amy Morrissey. “We captured the whole of the performances live in the studio with as many as seven musicians at any one time, stretched out across a span of only 15 feet. The amount of signal bleed from instrument to instrument was tremendous. A cello mic was acting like a room mic for the drums, and a six-foot concert harp was only eight feet away from the drums and it was picking up all the cymbals.” To combat this potential mixkilling malady, McTear was forced to develop a few unorthodox miking strategies. “For the harp, I used an old Revox M3500, wrapped in foam as a shockmount, and stuffed inside the sound hole of the harp so that it functioned like a pickup,” the engineer says. “I also used a Shure KSM32 on the outside of the harp’s soundboard, but that was almost a foot away, and it was picking up the most bleed. I needed it to round out the harp sound, but, in reality, it wasn’t much more than a room mic for all of the other instruments. Thankfully, using the M3500 like I did allowed me one signal for the instrument that was totally malleable in the mix.” In order to avoid what was sure to be an enormous amount of bleed from Weeks’ searing, fuzzed-out guitar, the guitarist’s rig was isolated in Miner Street’s isolation booth. “Greg’s sound is, in part, due to the ear-bleeding volume he plays at,” McTear says. “There is no way any other instrument could be in the same room with him.” “My objective is to get a guitar tone that is as thick, nuanced, and filled with as many weird overtones as possible, while keeping a certain clarity,” says Weeks. To that end, the guitarist matches up a Fender Deluxe Reverb with a Leslie 145 speaker. “I’ll use a Leslie cabinet without the effect. The Leslies have a really weird midrange-y sound even when not engaging the horn.” McTear used two Shure SM57s on the Leslie, and a Coles 4038 ribbon on the Fender Deluxe Reverb. “The 57s were at either end of the Leslie— 180 degrees—pointing directly at the horns through the cabinet vent holes,” McTear remembers. “The Coles would have been about 30 inches from the speaker, pointed at the center of the cabinet.” But even placing Weeks’ amps in the isolation booth didn’t keep his signal clear of bleed. “The Deluxe and the Leslie were sitting between a pair of very old upright pianos. The muting on the pianos is over 100 years old, so there’s always a little piano reverb finding its way into the track.” In spite of all the steps taken to drive out the demons of signal bleed during the recording of The Valerie Project, there is still a significant amount of spillage on each track. But that’s okay, according to Weeks and McTear. “Particularly with the mics placed next to Greg’s metalaphone and recorder, the bleed from the other instruments added a glue to the band’s melancholic music,” McTear says. “Those mics functioned as default room mics, and, even in the sections where those instruments weren’t being played, if I muted those tracks it became immediately clear that they should be ‘on.’ I figured that out about two seconds into the mix. A little bleed works in favor of bands like this. It’s part of the sound.” THE BEAR’S TALE For Brooklyn-based experimental indie-folk collective Grizzly Bear, everything from 1930s Big Band music and bluegrass swirls together with folksy guitars, ghostly quasichoral arrangements, and horn and woodwind swells to create the unique sound of their most recent effort, Yellow House [Warp]. According to multi-instrumentalist/producer Chris Taylor, the band’s primary objective is to evoke a powerful, psychedelic image in the minds of listeners. “When recording, I think about how to convert visuals into sound and vice versa,” says Taylor. “If we wanted an antiquated sound for a track, we’d pick antiquated instruments—like an old Steinway piano. And if we want to set a perspective for our audience, we place mics where we think their ears should be. For example, with the Steinway we wanted to reproduce the perspective of a person with their head in the instrument, so we opened the lid and placed a Neumann U87 inside the piano, facing diagonally across the sounding board toward the low www.eqmag.com SEPTEMBER 2008 EQ 17 http://www.eqmag.com

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

EQ Magazine - September 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Freak Folk Todd Rundgren Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Sony Acid 6 Ableton Live 7 Portable Recorder Showdown Gadgets and Goodies Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - September 2008

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