Studio Insider #89 May, 2005
Studio Notes
Hello this month to Ken Cartwright, President of the Oregon
Bluegrass Association, who wrote recently in support of my research
about the late California fiddler Virg Evans. Ken tells me that the
OBA has been in existence since 1983, and is now getting chapters
set up statewide. Their web site is small but growing, and if you’re
heading up north this year, check it out ahead of time. Maybe
you’ll be able to catch a bluegrass show on the road.
Work at Highland Studios
I’ll tell you about some recent sessions at Highland Studios.
Norton Buffalo was in, overdubbing harmonica for Chuck McCabe’s
album of original songs and adding tracks to some of my own
material. I recorded Norton with a Neumann U87 mic, set to the
cardioid (unidirectional) pick up pattern, and protected with a wind
screen. For the type of harmonica sound we needed, we kept the
mic-to-instrument distance at about eight inches to a foot --
something like recording a voice. While this technique won’t work
in front of a screaming blues band, it does provide us the best
portrayal of his playing in this more controlled environment. We set
the room up the same as we would for doing vocal overdubs -- the
wall diffusers are rotated to their absorptive position. We ran the
mic into a Summit Audio MPC100A, which is a single unit that
contains both a variable stage tube mic preamp and a compressor.
Keep in mind, though, that although the gear heads like to know
which particular tools we are using, a far greater influence on the
character of the sound we capture is the acoustic signature of the
room in which we are recording.
The source of great sound
The greatest component of the sound, of course, is the player
himself -- and there is no other Norton! I still remember reading a
photography magazine in college when I came across a photo essay
by a photographer who refused to submit the customary listing of
which camera, lens, film, and developer he had used for a spread,
saying instead that he felt that those particular elements were each
insignificant compared to the subject matter and the artistic
development of the photographer. It’s pretty hard to package those
crucial but ephemeral qualities and sell them over the internet at a
discount with free shipping, so they often get left out of the
discussion. Lance Armstrong put it another way: “It’s not about the
bike.”
Also in for overdubs on Chuck McCabe’s album was Bobby
Black, a top-level pedal steel player from an earlier generation in
California country music. Bobby toured the US in the 1950’s
playing in country bands, played with Commander Cody and the
Lost Planet Airmen, and turned down some national tours to settle
down and raise his family in the Bay Area. Bobby held down the
house pedal steel chair for many years at San Jose’s “Cowtown,” and
I used to run into him frequently on country gigs and at country
recording sessions in San Jose. For his session for Chuck, Bobby
brought in a non-pedal steel supported by tripod legs, and we
plugged it into a Summit TPA200A tube preamp and then directly
into a Digidesign model 192 ProTools interface. The sound was
beautiful, due to Bobby’s exquisite slide technique and the new,
warm bronze strings on his instrument.
Mark Graham, another world class harmonica player and song
writer extraordinaire who hails from the Seattle area, was in later in
March for overdubs, as was his guitar player, Orville Johnson.
Check out Marks’s tunes on “The Funniest Songs in the World,” and
Orville’s music on “ Slide & Joy.”
Scottish sessions
Berkeley’s Michael Bentley has been in working on an album
of Scottish music, and he brought in Callie Morrow on Celtic harp,
Susan Worland on fiddle, and finally, John Taylor and his band,
Hamewith, to contribute two of their arrangements. For the
Hamewith session we recorded two fiddles (John Taylor and Pam
Laine) playing live, accompanied by two acoustic guitars playing
finger style. We set up the two fiddlers close to each other, but
positioned their mics (cardioid in each case) so that they would pick
up mostly the appropriate fiddle while rejecting the sound from the
other. We set the room to a fairly dead sound, since we were
recording four musicians at once. The mics we used for the fiddles
were Neumann U89’s, which have a softer sound than others (much
better for those fiddles) and include an extra narrow cardioid pick
up pattern among their five selectable directional patterns.
At the other end of the room, we positioned the two guitar
players, each softly finger picking a beautiful acoustic guitar. We
arranged the players and the mics so that each mic would point at a
guitar while rejecting the sound of the other players. While
separation between instruments was very good, we found when we
combined all the mics into a mix, we had a beautiful sense of
ambiance with the fiddles. Live recording is tricky, but can provide
some wonderful sonic benefits when the setting allows.
Overdubbing the bass
We overdubbed upright bass later. It would have been much
more difficult to include the bass in the live session. When
recording bass, often the best spot for the (cardioid) microphone is
about four to eight inches out from the face of the instrument,
about the same distance down from the neck and body joint, and
about three to four inches to the right of the treble side of the
fingerboard. I usually add a second mic down near the bridge,
pointing at the face (not near the f-holes), and if the bass has a
pick-up, I’ll record that too. (I record all these elements onto
separate channels.) Since those mics are away from the bass’s
body, even though they’re rejecting sound from behind them, they
always have large amounts of bleed from other instruments playing
in the same room. The sound of the bass isn’t very loud, and the
ratio of ambient sound to the bass’s sound is high. Then at mix
time, we frequently have to boost the upper midrange and treble
frequencies of the bass in order to give it the clarity it needs to
speak well through the other instruments. If there is lots of bleed
from other instruments on the bass mic tracks, then boosting highs
and mids will bring up shadow images of those instruments,
muddying their sound and their placement in the stereo panorama.
Therefore, recording the bass as an overdub or in another room
makes the whole thing much easier.
Joe Weed records acoustic music at his Highland Studios in Los
Gatos, California. He has released six albums of his own, produced
many projects for independent labels, and done sound tracks for
film, TV and museums. His latest production, for Appleseed
Recordings, is “Spain in My Heart.” You can reach Joe by calling
(408)353-3353, or by email, at joe@highlandpublishing.com.