Recording - May 2014 - 12

Miking The Magic:

The Sound of Two Pines

By Sven-Erik Seaholm

This was not our first rodeo. Americana
artist Peter Bolland and I have spent a great
deal of time together in the studio over the
years. I produced and recorded two albums for
his former band The Coyote Problem, and he's
often in the studio as a session guitarist. From
time to time, he will come in with his acoustic
guitar and demo 15-20 songs in a single twohour session. Over the last seven years he's
done this four times.
One day, Peter called me to say he was
ready to make a solo album. He described the
musical parameters and working method he
wished to pursue. Most notably Peter wanted to
do all of the singing and playing himself, except
for bass and drums. He wanted to cut the
acoustic guitar and lead vocals first, which he
referred to as "building a sturdy frame to hang
everything on".

Multi-miking for a unified "Frame"
Over the years I have been experimenting with an endless variety of mic
setups with regard to all instruments, but particularly the acoustic guitar.
That tinkering evolved into discovering a mic setup that is not only beautifully unique and unorthodox, but probably completely wrong, as well.
When I think of all of the songwriters who have played a song for me at my
kitchen table, I picture them sitting down with their guitar, relaxed and completely immersed in the song they're performing; not craning their neck towards
the mic or maintaining any particular posture. I wanted to be able to allow an
artist to sing and play in this near-fetal position of comfort and still get the best
performance and recording possible.
It was with this in mind that I placed an MXL Genesis tube microphone-a
side-address mic-in a nearly horizontal position, facing up towards where the
vocalist's mouth would be if they were singing slightly bent over their guitar. This
mic location not only allows for intimate close-miking, but its upward orientation
also frees the vocalist from having to sing squarely into it. The Genesis has a
cardioid pattern, which helps to reject the sound of the guitar in this position,
as well as a built-in windscreen, which helps facilitate this tight placement. Since
the mic's shock mount wasn't really intended for less than vertical orientation, I

Due to all of the musical history Peter and I
have shared together, this project differs from
most others I've worked on. Our personal and
professional relationship has brought us to a
point where are of one mind, essentially. We
watch each others' backs, end each others' sentences, and what very little we disagree on is
quickly solved and moved on from. All of this is
to say that his album Two Pines turned out to be
the record we both had hoped to make.
Here is how we captured it all, with explanations of the mics and techniques we used. See if
you can use as inspiration some of the things we
did, some of the rules we broke, some of the
happy accidents we came to celebrate.

placed a small piece of thick foam rubber where the weight of the mic caused
it to make contact with the shockmount.
I placed an MXL R77L ribbon mic, also side-address, in front of Peter's Taylor
510 Dreadnought acoustic guitar at the upper bout. This mic was turned 90
degrees to the right, but facing the guitar's soundboard, about a foot away. The
'L' stands for Lundahl, an iron-wound output transformer that imparts a deep,
warm and rich quality that is still quite detailed and open. The mic's figure-8
pattern brings the sound of the room into the sonic picture as well.
The top of the R77 almost touches the mic placed next to it, a Shure KSM27 sideaddress cardioid condenser, with no low rolloff engaged. This a very bright mic,
with very forward and aggressive upper mids. This mic is set up 45 degrees off axis,
looking across the sound hole (not at it), at an angle. This picks up the guitarist's lefthand action and just enough 'bleed' from the other miked areas to help to keep the
imaging focused and unified, once the guitar mics are subsequently panned into
stereo. See pages 17 and 19 for pictures of this mic array from different angles.

RECORDING May 2014

Recording - May 2014

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