EQ Magazine - February 2009 - (Page 28)

THEATER PIECE only have the amps—not any original signal at all—and that gave the piano sound a dirty kind of warmth. How did you track Alex’s vocals? Carey: Most of the vocals were done in a fairly tight space. My studio has a fairly big room with one corner that has quite a dead sound, and we’d normally track the vocals from there. Alex used two mics—a Wunder Audio CM7 and a Sennheiser MD441. We started off doing a lot with the CM7, but we ended up using the MD441 more, because it’s a handheld, and it was just more fun to record that way. We put a makeshift pop screen on it, and routed it through the Shadow Hills with the output transformer set to Iron. On some stuff, I’d get quite mad with echoes and effects—like on “Can’t Stop Feeling”—and have him sing off them. Overdubs and doubling would always be done on the CM7. There are a lot of backup vocals. Were those done together or separately? Carey: Backup vocals were a mixture of things. Paul sounded good on the Electro-Voice RE20, and Nick used a SM7 or a SM58, depending upon the part. On some of the gang vocals where everyone sang at the same time—like on “What She Came For”— we either used the 441, or maybe a Neumann M149, or perhaps the CM7 set to Omni with everyone standing around the mic. What’s your view on using outboard gear during the tracking phase? Carey: If I knew that something was going to need a little top-end boost, I’d add that on the way in, but I’d never do anything super extreme. As far as compression, I find that compressing stuff such as drums or guitars only makes them sound softer, so I try to leave that until the mix. On drums, we’d sometimes use kind of a parallel compression, where you have your direct signal, but also a fairly compressed signal that blended in slightly with the direct tracks. Most of the stuff was compressed at tape transfer, and we’d sometimes put it back into Radar again with additional EQ or compression. I’d compress the bass a little with either a RCA or Shadow Hills Master Compressor, set to a fairly slow attack time, and never more than 3dB of gain reduction. Maybe there’d be one or two places with heavily compressed guitars for effect. I’d rather compress things lots of times very gently, than once really heavily. By the time a track is mixed, it might have gone through three or four compressors. The album is no stranger to phasing effects. What was your technique? Carey: Sometimes, we’d take sections of the basic tracks, and feed the signal back into a guitar amp. Then, we’d take two mics—one fixed about a yard away from the speaker, and we’d manually move the other one slowly from about six feet away, just past the mixed mic, and right up to the speaker. When you mix those two signals together in mono, you get this amazing phasing effect. When the mics come together you get nothing, but there’s a really pronounced swooshing sound as the moving mic approaches the speaker. We also did a pretty weird thing on one or two songs where we used one of those Little Labs IBP analog phasealignment tools to process three different mics—one mic positioned to capture the bass amp and the back of the drum kit, one mic placed near the guitars, and the last one positioned as a room mic. We’d play with the phase relations in the IBP to get more bass or more midrange. It was just sort of this strange filtering effect. What were the most memorable recording techniques you used during the sessions? McCarthy: I think the coolest one was the time I climbed up into the rafters, and dropped a mic and cable down a few yards so that we could swing the mic around a guitar amp. It took several hours to get it right, but we got this really cool Doppler effect as the mic moved around the amp. It appears on the chorus of “What She Came For.” Carey: We used a fair amount of spring reverbs—like on “Send Him Away” to get a kind of King Tubby sound—and our main spring reverb was a toy Slinky. We took one of those, attached a drive speaker to one end, and put two “pickup” speakers on the other. Then, we fed the Slinky signal to a Fender amp, and miked the amp’s speaker. That technique was pretty amazing. 28 EQ FEBRUARY 2009 www.eqmag.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

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.