Archive for the ‘My Sessions’ Category
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Last week I was recording a song here at Epic Sounds that was just acoustic guitar and vocals. It felt a bit empty in parts and we had plenty of time to experiment so that’s what we did.
The perfect $1 shaker
First we looked for a shaker sound, not having a real “store bought’ shaker wasn’t an issue because my kitchen has a cupboard full of spices and other things to shake. My favorite shaker turned out to be sesame seeds in a plastic jar. I believe it came from the dollar store. Depending on what the song needs, try peppercorns, rice, sugar in plastic or glass jars.
I recorded the sesame seed shaker with an XY spaced stereo pair of AT 3035s with a pop filter in front (highly recommended). For processing I used BX solo with the width at 300%, a bit of EQ to take off the lows and very top end, then sent into some reverb. It was a great sound, but it didn’t make the final mix.
Cardboard percussion
Another thing we tried was a cardboard box hit with drum sticks. It was cool but needed a lot of processing to make it fit with the acoustic guitars and shaker so again it was scrapped to give us more time to focus on vocals. You should definitely try it, it costs nothing but a bit of your time.
Guitar case kick
And finally a sound that did make the final mix. We wanted a sort of deep drum sort of sound, but without a kick drum around or digging into the sample library we found the perfect thing. The acoustic guitar case! We laid out a thick blanket on the floor, turned the empty case upside down and tapped the top until we found the ideal spot (there is a ton of tonal variations on a guitar case believe it or not) and marked the spot to hit. To fake a soft mallet I wrapped the end of a drumstick with a guitar cleaning cloth and secured it with a twist tie. Recorded it in mono, did the typical kick drum EQ stuff and had a cool sound that worked really well for the final climax of the song.
Just do it
So the point I’m trying to make…try anything! Your favorite shaker of all time might already be in the spice rack, mine was. If not go down to the dollar store and try things out, guaranteed you’ll find something you can use.
Have a listen to what we accomplished in that afternoon.
Killer Green - Fly:
Download
Posted in DIY, Gear, My Sessions | 4 Comments »
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
I’ve posted a song for people to mix over at the Home Recording Forum <- referral link
This is the link to the thread with the files and mixes: Mix This # 2
It’s in the members only section so you must sign up to participate or get the files.
The first Mix This session is here
These songs are from my Jay Scar sessions, the album Burst is available on iTunes, EMusic, Napster etc.
Posted in My Sessions, music | No Comments »
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
This past Thursday I helped record some upright piano for Allie Hughes at Revolution Audio. The piano is in the basement below the studio live room. I ran cables down through the floor for mics and headphones. The mics used were an AKG C3000 on the left side, and a C414B XLII on the right side, each are about a foot away which reduced the proximity effect as well as the mechanical noises. It’s a great old piano. I would have liked to have a ribbon overhead but I wasn’t running the session. Anyway here’s some pics.
Posted in My Sessions | 5 Comments »
Monday, February 18th, 2008
I’m in shock, I didn’t think we would get all 9 songs recorded today, but Jordan pulled it off. We just got a huge chunk of the album done, we now just have a few more tiny extra overdubs to do and then on to the mixing.
Click picture above to see a couple pictures from the session
Jordan used his Pearl kit, and he rented the biggest snare he could find, a Vinnie Paul model, because he only owns piccolo snares. Awesome snare. We did everything with a single pair of Vic Firth TW11 tala wands. Normal drumsticks are just way too loud and since it’s an acoustic album these worked out perfect. We used Evans E-Rings on the low and floor toms and moon gels on the high tom for dampening.
Mics:
Overheads – SE3 stereo pair
Room – M-Audio Sputnik tube
Kick – Shure PG52
Snare – AKG D5 [top], Audio Technica AT2021 [bottom]
High tom – AKG D22 (moved to low tom when needed)
Floor tom – Audio Technica AT2020
Everything went through Soundcraft Spirit M4 preamps and into an M-Audio Projectmix I/O. Recorded in Pro Tools of course.
If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got 6 hours of drums across 20 playlists to organize.
Posted in My Sessions | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 16th, 2007
This weekend we resumed recording vocals, but this time we improved the quality of the signal chain by recording at Revolution Audio. We got to try out the M-Audio Project Mix I/O and the M-Audio Sputnik tube microphone. To describe them briefly, they are awesome.
The Sputnik has a natural way of compressing vocals that we really liked. Its very warm and close sounding with very low noise. It sounds really nice and its really not that expensive, a huge step in quality above my Audio-Technica 2020 which is quite harsh and dirty in comparison. I highly recommend this mic, and this is my favorite mic of the moment.
The Project Mix I/O was pretty cool, its very much like a 002 or 003, but its got 8 preamps instead of 4. It only has 4 outputs instead of 8 though, but thats a good trade off. The only problems we had was this device is very picky about which firewire port you use. Otherwise we got clicks and pops in the recording, didn’t happen on playback, and only when there was a significant level coming in. It was annoying but now I know about it and its easy to take care of. The faders and transport controls were a welcome change from using the mouse all the time. One thing I don’t like about the machine is the headphone and master volume controls are endless rotary encoders rather than potentiometers. That probably makes it a cleaner signal path, but there is no visual guide to how high or low the level is. You can’t quickly turn the levels down if it is way too loud, but they did seem to have a fine resolution, so I’m still undecided on that I guess.
Oh yeah, Protools M-Powered works just like LE, so if you are looking to get into protools M-powered has my stamp of approval now.
Posted in Gear, My Sessions, Pro Tools, Review | No Comments »
