Recording - May 2014 - 22

Now I do any edits as needed, stretches, fades, autotunes, then use
VocALign so they come in and exit together. I hard-pan them so you hear
four from the left and four from the right, for a really big sound. Then a little bit of reverb, slap delay if you want to, although typically with something smooth like aahs and oohs, just reverb will do the trick just fine.
mixing down. After all, it's all about the artist and
what is it they want in the end.
I only take a little bit of low end off when I do my
levels here through the Universal Audio, the 6176
Vintage Channel Strip, a tube preamp. We also
have the Avalon 737, but right now the combination
of Avantone and UA is my favorite.

Background vocals
Do you do much with backing vocals, for people
who come in to do that?
Oh yeah, one of the funnest experiences I had doing
vocals was actually with Jeff Timmons, the founder and
one of the members of [Grammy-nominated pop group]
98 Degrees. I remember doing his album and he would
have probably up to 96 vocals on certain parts of the
song, stacked and layered...

...of his own?
...all of his own, doing different harmonies and
different things, that was really quite amazing. Then
there was another band right after that, they had
about 12 vocal tracks, and I remember them saying
"Yeah, when you get the song, don't be suprised,
there are a lot of vocal tracks on it", and I asked
how many, and they said "About twelve", so I said
"That's nothing, going from 96 down to twelve...".
That was a wonderful experience I had with Jeff
doing all that...
Do you get people to come in here and stand
here (at the mic) and sing like they do on stage?
Yeah, I had a group in the other night and we
had about four members standing all around the
microphone at once and do a chant. Typically,
though, if we're doing harmonies we do it separate
so it's nice and clean, so I can do things like use
VocALign [www.synchroarts.com] on all their
takes, because I usually like to get at least four layers of any particular key or harmony. Eight is my
favorite, but depending on the artist, if they get
exhausted or whatever, we can settle on four or
even two.
22

RECORDING May 2014

Drums in a dead room
We talked about a dead room earlier-that's really what I go for, I go
for really direct miking, especially for drums, because if they want real dry
up-front drums, I can give that to them. If they want a room with a little
reverb or anything accented later, I can give it to them also.
Do you track with distant room mics that you can blend in later-or not?
No, not unless it's requested. For years I did overhead mics for drums, but
now I mike every element of those drums individually. I just had a group in here
called Fused By Defiance (www.fusedbydefiance.com), I miked up their China,
their Ride, the three Crashes, all individually, each of their three toms, their kick,
snare above and below, and their hi-hat, which gave me a total of 12 mics.
What genre?
Heavy rock-they have a really good label now [laughs-it's the
Wrights' own label www.wrightrecords.com, affiliated with Sony], and a
great following, too, they came in as Number One in the Tap House Battle
of the Bands for the Warped Tour.

Here's another new act, Raff Caballero [Nathan plays back the track "Stop
This Train", which readers can hear on Spotify] where I miked the drums as
follows: For the toms we used Sennheiser MD421, for the overheads we used
Audix ADX51 or AKG C414, Shure KSM 109 for hi-hat, Audix D6 for the
kick, Shure SM57 for snare top and bottom, Oktava MK-012-01 for the Ride
and AKG C414 for the China and Audix ADX51 for the Crash cymbals.
In this track I hear a pronounced click on the kick-did you eq that in?
Let me look that up [scrolls through Pro Tools screens]. I used not just the
Audix D6 on the kick, but I added a sample-and I eq'd the sample, I
added 4.8 dB at around 100 Hz and 5.7 dB around 200 Hz. Here they
are [plays back miked kick, raw sample, eq'd sample, then final combination]. The click you heard is a part of the kick sample.
Lots of people bring tracks that sound okay, or they bring in their own
kick drum that only cost maybe five hundred bucks, so they can't expect
too much. I have samples that are not only better but also more modern in
the way they sound, in my library of samples of DWs, Ludwigs, Pearls-
five-thousand-dollar kick drums, and miked as good as it gets.

Building the mix
Do you normally proceed with the mix, or does it happen that somebody comes here to do some tracking, then takes the tracks and goes
somewhere else to mix?

http://www.fusedbydefiance.com http://www.wrightrecords.com http://www.synchroarts.com

Recording - May 2014

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