EQ Magazine - February 2009 - (Page 18)

Cut to the Quick kit’s kick drum, and blended it with a U47 FET positioned outside the front head,” says Dobyns. “It sounded just great. It had this incredible attack, and then this really long and sustained low end.” On the other side of the glass wall, bassist Dougie Payne’s Ampeg SVT was close-miked with a Sennheiser MD421, lead guitarist Andy Dunlop’s Orange amp was close-miked with U47 FETs, and Healy’s Vox AC30 was miked with a Royer R-121. “The amps weren’t particularly boxed in—they were just separated from each other,” says Dobyns. “We weren’t going for complete isolation. In fact, the open sound of two guitar amps and a bass amp playing in the same room added a nice texture to everything.” Although he took home a Best Engineering Grammy for Suzanne Vega’s Beauty & Crime—and has a résumé thick with sessions for artists such as Patti Smith, Antony and the Johnsons, Sia, and Battles—for Ode, Dobyns drew from the reserve of hip-hop techniques he picked up early on as an assistant at P. Diddy’s Daddy’s House. “The demo for the song, ‘Get Up’ had this hypnotic groove that could have been psychedelic folk or hip-hop, and I definitely steered it toward hiphop,” says Dobyns. “We used the Ludwig kit for ‘Get Up,’ and I made sure the kick and snare were really slamming. The API console at RAK can really take a beating, so I ran the signal levels very hot to tape, and this was one of the few songs where I also added a bit of compression—via a dbx 160 VU—to tape. In hip-hop productions, acoustic guitars are often heavily compressed and get treated like a synth sound, so we layered a whole bunch of acoustic tracks on ‘Get Up’ to emulate that effect. I also overdubbed this breathy thing, which I lifted from watching Puffy do ad libs over songs. It’s this breathy ‘huh’ sound that I dropped into a verse and a pre-chorus to add a nice accent to the rhythm section.” For “Long Way Down,” Dobyns threw a bunch of plastic knives and forks on top of a piano’s strings. “It’s this crazy piano solo that sounds like a horn section,” he says, “but it’s actually an extremely distorted piano recorded with all that plastic cutlery in there.” A more conventional approach was taken on the piano part for “Chinese Blues,” played by touring keyboardist Claes Bjorklund on a nine-foot Steinway, but it paid big dividends. Dobyns set up a matched pair of Neumann U87s about three feet from the open top of the piano—which was placed in the same room as the guitar amps. The signal leakage from the blasting amps into the piano mics expanded the sound so much that a planned string session for the song was cancelled. The moody “Broken Mirror” swells with atmospheric room tones. “I knew this was a really dark song, so I planned to use room mics that could impart darker timbres to the overall sound. I also wanted to bring out this haunting snare tone, because Neil had released the snares from the head, so the snare sounded like a tom. I put a Chandler TG1 limiter on the Coles ribbon mic that I used to capture the room sound, and that gave the cymbals this great decay and a really nice presence—which also allowed the snare to be more hypnotic. I included more room sound on Andy’s guitar, as well.” A double-tracked, 40-piece choir— one of the final parts recorded at RAK—is the centerpiece of the title track, which begins with Healy’s Telecaster-and-AC30-driven guitar riff. “We had the Crouch End Choir come in and do this massive part, like something out of The Omen,’” says Healy. “It’s totally over the top.” The song “Friends” boasts a particularly wacky recording technique, as it utilizes two complete double-tracked performances. “The demo of ‘Friends’ was so good that we had a hard time getting as good a performance in the studio,” says Healy. “We settled on editing a couple of the best takes together. But when we listened back, both takes sounded so good that it was hard to pick one as the final take. Just to be daft, I suggested that Emery put one take on the left speaker, and the other take on the right. We listened back to that, and it didn’t flam. Emery put the only overdubbed part—the vocal—up the middle, and made one of Andy’s guitars slightly louder to become the lead part, and we went with the two-performance, stereo mix. When you’re in the studio and that kind of magic happens—well, that’s what it’s all about.” 18 EQ FEBRUARY 2009 www.eqmag.com http://www.asc-studio-acoustics.com http://www.eqmag.com

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

EQ Magazine - February 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Dave Cooley Low vs. Diamond Hank Williams III Travis Franz Ferdinand Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Apple Logic Pro 8 Cakewalk Sonar Near-Field Monitor Roundup Gadgets &�Goodies Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - February 2009

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