EQ Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 18)

IT’S ALRIGHT, MA (I’M ONLY TRACKING) Shaw further tempers Dylan’s vocal sound by running the SM7 through a Millennium HD3D mic pre. Dylan asks Shaw to crank the midrange on his voice, which he does by adding a couple of dB between 2kHz and 3kHz on a Neve 1073 module. Shaw then compensates by adding some additional low end and a little airy EQ around 12kHz, then heavily compressing the signal through an Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor. “I drive it untill the red lights don’t blink anymore,” he says. “You can hear all the bleed from the band into the vocal microphone pumping under the compression and it adds a cool thickness to the sound.” ylan going digital was not nearly as radical or traumatic as his raucous transition from acoustic to electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. His first LP to use Pro Tools as the recording medium was 2006’s Modern Times, though his introduction to digital nonlinear multitracking came while doing several one-off tracks for film soundtracks in between tour dates. Shaw, who is comfortable in either domain, has a knack for doing multitrack edits across one-inch and two-inch tape. “I still love it,” he says. “I used to make money doing stutter edits for dance records in the ’80s.” Moving to Pro Tools may have been D Dylan’s right hand production man: Chris Shaw with his portable rig. SOMEDAY BABY Bob Dylan won the GRAMMY Award for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance in 2006 for the song “Someday Baby,” from the Modern Times LP, which itself garnered a GRAMMY for Best Contemporary Folk/American Album. Chris Shaw was looking for a dense, Muddy Waters-like sound for the track. He placed a Neumann KM 84 microphone on the bottom of a snare drum purposely selected for its “crappy” sound, with a Shure Bullet microphone on the top on a stand over the kick drum, and rounded the center of the kit off with a Shure SM57 on the rack tom. Dylan’s Gibson Every Brothers model acoustic guitar is usually recorded using one B&K 4011 pointed at the 12th fret. The distantsounding slide guitar, played by Larry Campbell, is mixed hard left and owes its spooky allure to the Neumann U87 room microphones. less adventurous but was definitely more productive. “Dylan records get made quickly—a track a day, usually—and I went to Pro Tools as a result of the time pressures more than anything else,” he says. “I never asked Bob about it—I just did it. On one of the first songs on that album I had a multitrack edit done before Bob could walk from the studio into the control room. That convinced him, but he never had any issues with the sound of digital in the first place.” Neither did Shaw, who at 42, straddles the analog and digital epochs. “I never had that nasty aversion to digital that so many other engineers seem to have,” he says. “Digital is fine as long as you record what you want to hear. I use Neve 1073 and Pultec EQP1A EQs, [Universal Audio] LA3 compressors, and dynamic microphones through tube preamps to get the sounds I want before they’re recorded. I mixed that record in Shaw making notes in between takes. the box but it sounds just as it did when we recorded it. The signals were passed through a lot of analog stages and that’s where the warm sound came from.” Nonetheless, Dylan still pursues an old-timey sound and likes to see the accoutrements to do so in place, which calls for some maneuvering by Shaw. “As you never know where the song is going to go, I’ll often set up microphones for both really old-school and for closein miking,” he says. “The drum kit will have one set of a few microphones—a Shure SM57 on top of the snare and a Neumann KM 84 on the bottom, some U87 for overheads, and a Sennheiser 421 inside the kick drum—and another set with mics on every drum, where I’ll add a Neumann FET 47 outside the kick, angle an RCA 44 down in front of the kit to add some low mids to the sound, and add AKG 414s on the toms. As a result I’ll often have 15 to 18 tracks of 18 EQ JANUARY 2009 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - January 2009

EQ Magazine - January 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Bob Dylan The Killers Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Microsoft Windows Vista Apple Mac OS X "Lite" Software Roundup "Lite" Software Gadgets & Goodies Sounds Room With a Vu

EQ Magazine - January 2009

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