Catching Ghosts Pt. 2: Gear is Like Porn for Nerds

*I'm going to jump right into the technical aspects of making the Bud Heavy album, so if you want a little background before I dive in click here.

I must admit, that I am a bit obsessed with making records in precarious places.  A little floor creak never ruined a record and frankly, it makes it more fun for me to listen to on the back end while I'm mixing.  And lordy did some yips, squeals, telephone dial tones, and ghosts get caught on tape (of course not literal tape).

The Room
The Brownville Antiquarium has had many lives, but its current incarnation is that of a bookstore and art gallery.  Apart from the main room, there are a number smaller rooms (classrooms) filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling with books of every nature.  The main room is packed full of books, and I mean packed.  There's no space left on any bookshelf, and there are long wooden tables filled with even more literature.  It felt like every time I pulled a book off the shelf, a new book had annexed the space, leaving me feeling like an asshole with nowhere to return the book in my hands.

Credit:  Spencer Morrisey

The main room was originally the school gym, provided some nice wood floors for us to work with.  The second floor had been removed and now only a walkway about the perimeter still exists from that.  Normally, a room like this would provide almost unmanageable echo/reverb qualities.

But wait!  The books!

The books seemed to "soak up" a lot of that extra ambience.  Which is nice, because despite common trend, every song does not need to sounds like it's been bathed in a friggin' spring reverb tank.  The inlets of books and shelving also provided ghetto isolation booths if we needed it.

The Gear

Credit:  Maxwell Morrissey

At this point, some of the gear may elude me, but this is what we brought with us:

Mac Pro (SSD, lotsa Ram, Logic Pro 9 because Logic X blows)

RME Fireface 800 (Converters and "junk" preamps.  When you've got Neve, you use the Neve!)

Neze 1290 (x4 Neve 1073 preamp clones; thanks Ben!)

Ampex MX10 (x4 Channels of sweet RCA tube goodness, unfortunately it sums down to x2 outs, so we just used two of the 4 channels to prevent stuff from running over each other; thanks Mark!)

Yamaha HS8 pair (Monitors)

Mics:  AKG 414s, 451s, 112;  Audio Technica 4033, 4040;  Neumann TLM 103s; Cascade Fathead Ribbon;  Shure SM7b's;  EV RE20; various other dynamics and whatnots.  (Thanks Mark, Ben, Brad, and Chris!)

Recording Live aka What The Heck Is He Thinking

As I stated in the previous post, the goal was for this to be a very live feeling record.  On previous projects, I've isolated instruments and recorded in the standard scratch/overdub format.  Some have turned out great, some not so much.  However, Bud Heavy is a live band, so I wanted to capture what you would hear at a Bud Heavy show, but through headphones.  I'll write about a few difficulties we ran into doing it this way, but here was these basic signal path.  

*My engineer friend Mark did a lot of the legwork on this part, so please don't assume I deserve credit for everything.

Upright Bass:  RE20 > Ampex

Photo Credit:  Maxwell Morrissey

Placement:  I moved my head around to find the place where the bass sounded big, but not overly thumpy.  An upright can produce a heckuva lotta air, so I wanted to make sure I captured the full sound of the instrument, not just the BOOM!  Ultimately, I settled on about 6 - 8" from the bass, a couple inches about the bridge pointed between the strings and the F-hole.  That gave the musician a little bit of room to relax and not feel like he was glued to the mic.  Mark chose the Ampex (I think) for a nice warm tube sound, and we had the option of tube grit if we wanted it.

The upright was the only instrument we made use of our ghetto "iso booth" for.  We didn't want that low end to bleed all over the other stuff too much.

Guitar:  TLM103 > Ampex

Photo Credit:  Mark Hansen

Placement:  This took the most fiddling.  For the most part, the general placement was a couple inches away from the 12th fret pointing towards the sound hole.  It seemed like if we turned too much one way, we'd get lots of banjo bleed, and turning the other way would get bass bleed.  So we found a good balance and crossed our fingers.

*shrugs shoulders*  

I had a couple guitars with nice contrast to choose from:  my trusty Gibson Southern Jumbo and an old Gibson J45.  My SJ is one cannon of a guitar, while this particular J45 had a much softer sound.  With a bit of gain stage tweaking, I could easily swap guitars out for faster/slower songs.  I also used a crazy sounding Cigar Box guitar made by our Mandolin player, and a Nashville strung guitar was brought along, but never used.  Mark ran me through the Ampex again, for the same reasons as bass.  

Banjo:  AT4033 > 1073

Vocals:  SM7B > 1073

Placement:  Since the Banjo player was one of the lead vocalists, we tried our best to reduce the amount of bleed from the respective mics into the other.  As most people know, the SM7 has great rejection, so most of the time was spent with the banjo placement.  A banjo can produce quite a bit of power, and we had to be aware of the metallic sounds produced by the ring.  We found a spot where the sound of the banjo was full, but not boxy sounding a few inches back from the bottom left of the drum head.  

Mandolin:  AKG 451 > 1073

Vocals:  SM7B > 1073

Placement:  Most of the ideas from the banjo rang true for the Mando.  Again, the SM7B did a great job of isolation, although not as well as it did with the Banjo.  I wasn't involved with this placement as much, but in general the 451 was placed a few inches away from where the neck connects to the body facing back towards the F-hole.  Most likely to prevent the musician from swatting the mic with his hand while he played?

Fiddle:  Fathead II > 1073

Placement:  We tried a couple of different mics on the fiddle.  First the 451, but ultimately decided on the ribbon mic.  The ribbon mic resulted in a much warmer, sweeter sound.  Although a great mic, the 451 was too bright for our taste.  We put the Fathead up over the Fiddle player's left shoulder facing down and away from the Mando/Banjo.  As I listen back to the songs while I mix, the final fiddle sound has been my favorite overall.  

Room Mic #1:  414 > 1073

The 414 was flipped to Omni, and was about chest level in the center of the room, maybe 6-8' from the musicians.  

Room Mic #2:  TLM103 > 1073

This was put up in the air maybe 12', facing down towards the musicians about 15' away from them.

Wild Card:  451 > 1073

We stuck this puppy up near the ceiling and it had a pretty interesting result.  Lots of ambience!

Overall Impressions/Learning Points

I was very happy with all of the sounds we got.  While mixing, I have lots of options to choose from.  Room Mic #1 provides me with a type of "glue" while putting things together, and creates dimension in my mix.  My favorite sounds have been the fiddle mostly, and bass on a couple of the songs.  Not to say that the other instruments we done poorly, but those two were the ones that I notice made me start tapping my foot as I'm mixing.  

Recording live did not scare me from ever doing it again.  In fact, I'm pretty pumped to do more.  A few things I'd probably do differently next time:

1.  Use mics or outboard EQ that have a HPF on them.  Saves time doing this later on.
2.  A pair of outboard compressors.  I'm actually avoiding compression as much as possible in mixing, however, it would have been nice on the front end for vocals.

2.  Isolate "control room" better.  Mark had to get his gain stages set as best he could, while still being in the room with us.  What a champ!

3.  More time.  Our vocalists got pretty tired, and I don't blame them!  We also ran out of time for harmony vocals.  I don't feel like anything is lacking by any means.  There can always be more!

4.  This is a personal critique, but I wish I would have rehearsed more, primarily my harmony vocals.  I got too caught up in preparing the audio components for the recording that I didn't practice at home as much as I would have liked.  Oh well.  

5.  More whiskey....actually no, there was too much.

Whew!  Can't believe I typed all of that!

- Stonewall

Catching Ghosts Pt. 1: Recording that Old Time Music

I should begin with a brief apology for being on hiatus for so long.  Despite the endless supply of cluelessness which guitar culture provides me to make heinous/sarcastic posts, they take up quite a bit of time to write.  And time is something very few people have as they get older.  So to those of you asking, I will do my best to keep you entertained.

On to business.  I've had the great opportunity and pleasure of joining a very talented Old Time/String Band group known as Bud Heavy and the High Lifes.  While attempting to stay true to the ways of Old Time music, many members - myself included - have also come from strong punk rock backgrounds.  Thus the music reflects an interesting blend of traditional appointments and new energy.  Having played electric music for the majority of my existence, I must admit that I felt rather naked at the first rehearsal with them, being armed only with my trusty acoustic.

My lovely mistress.  A Gibson Southern Jumbo - True Vintage
 a gift from my mother.

After many shows, bottles of bourbon, bouts of nudity, and the like, it was natural for us to want to take our songs and amalgamate them onto a record.  For those of you naive to the world of record making witchcraft, there different avenues to track the album.  The most obvious is to spend some time at a legitimate business, and have an engineer - a person who makes it their business to actually know what they're doing- capture your magic.  After much deliberation, we decided that is not what we wanted to do.

I am a firm believer that an album, like a song, should tell a story.  There is something to be said about hiding away in an audiophile's man cave filled with glowing tubes and magnetic tape, only to emerge with a finely polished record.  It simply wasn't the story that we wanted this album to tell.  Most of the songs are older than atom bombs and automobiles (even a couple of US states).  It seemed fitting to do two things:  to track the songs in the same fashion as traditional Old Time music and to do so in a historic location.  So we put our feelers out to a handful of historic organizations, and received many enthusiastic replies.

In the end, Brownville Nebraska provided us with a deal much too swell to pass up.  Brownville is located in Southeastern Nebraska, and with enough Bourbon you could practically urinate across the border into Missouri.  The Brownville of old made much of its success operating steamboats down the mighty Mo' river, but also dipped its toes in clay mining and the business of the rail.  According to the the locals, Brownville is a legendary arts community.  The town used to provide local artists, musicans, and tradesman with grants and housing to sustain them while they honed their craft.  Modern-day Brownville proudly displays the original signs of old shoppes, while young local entrepreneurs move into the old shells like hermit crabs, and carry on businesses of their own.  The people are incredibly friendly and infinitely generous.  Brownville was the perfect setting for our story.

Brownvillite - (?) - Thomas Rudloff welcomed our project with open arms, and offered up his old Antiquarium Bookstore and Bill Farmer Gallery as a haven for our recording endeavor.  According to Thomas, the building was constructed in 1934, and has lived and been reincarnated in the forms of a grade school, gymnasium, artist residence, and presently a bookstore/art gallery.  The building is two stories high, but is one vast open room with wood floors and is illuminated by massive arched windows flanking the North and South of the building.
(Photos courtesy of Maxwell Morrissey and Spencer Morrissey)

Gotta include the artsy emotional photo.

After investigating the place thoroughly, we scheduled a date and began preparations for a long weekend in Brownville.  I will go more into detail on how we attacked the recording itself in Catching Ghosts Pt. 2, but the magnitude of the project requires multiple posts - sorry.  There will be much more gear and nerdery in the following post, and quite possibly a ghost story.

-  Stonewall