RECORDING MUSIC

There is a very good site that shows microphone positions for many instruments, and other information:

http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/shop/news_story/a/news_id/e/58

Private Island Trax

I will shortly be putting up details about a (classical) recording session at Hollywood's Private Island Trax that I saw. The studio is an excellent and friendly studio on Sunset Boulevard between Highland and Vine.

Here is a recording at the studio of an orchestration I wrote for a Beethoven song from his incidental music to Goethe's "Egmont"

RECORDING MUSIC: NICK DRAKE

This discussion is primarily about recording rock and jazz music: guitars, piano, singing.

Nick Drake

It is good to start with the most basic and simple type of music: guitar and vocals. One of the premier guitar/singers is Nick Drake. Drake recorded three brilliant and lyrical albums, culminating in "Pink Moon" in 1974. The sound of his records was both very rich (his first two albums) and very simple ("Pink Moon").

The producer was Joe Boyd and the engineer was John Wood. They both recently gave a great interview to the excellent and concise "EQ" magazine [Calif]. I summarise their points below.

Album one: "Five Leaves Left"

Drake's first album was "Five Leaves Left". It was live: singing, guitar AND orchestra. The recorder was a FOUR TRACK.

The brilliant track "The River Man" was recorded as follows:
Reverb: they allocated instruments to tracks depending on which instruments they wanted to reverb.
Seating: twelve string players (with a conductor) were sitting in a semi-circle and Drake sat in the middle.
Overdubs: none.
Baffles to separate musicians: none.

A unique characteristic of the studio (in Chelsea, London) was that there were three different ceiling heights, depending on where the performer was placed. The best place was in the middle of the room, so they put the drum kit there (see the second album, below) and the orchestra when used.

Boyd's input: there was no need to suggest anything for Drake himself as he was "always perfect". So they turned OFF his mics for their monitors in the studio booth and listened only to the other musicians. Were they playing properly?

So how did they "get the Nick Drake sound"? They didn't: they just put a mic in front of him (said the engineer Wood).

The microphones: Wood said studios are just working environments. Equipment doesn't interest him as such. It's the musician who is important.
The typical chain "of command" was a Neumann U67 for vocals and a Neumann KM56 (a small condensor mic) for the guitar. As it was all live, both mics had to also flatter the other instrument too.
Mic placement for Drake: close to the singer's mouth, and the guitar's soundhole. In other words, they didn't want much room sound: the other musicians were to be kept separate to some extent.
Compression: only the vocals were compressed. So the U67 went into a Fairchild 660 limiter. Wood said that they would record with the limiter on as they wanted to get as close as they could to the final album sound before the mixing.
Mixing: they used very little EQ!

Wood: "You should be able to pretty much be able to put the entire performance to tape and be done with it".

Boyd on mixing: a melody is at the forefront because of texture, not volume. So he wants to make the melody line "clear and alluring" without being too loud or unbalanced. He took this idea from old fashioned solo piano playing. He says you can do this by panning vocals to a particular place, or by boosting or cutting frequencies.

Album two: "Bryter Later"

Nick Drake's second album introduced a new factor in the recording: drums. The first album had only had a small amount of percussion.

You now had guitar, bass, drums, and also horns in addition to the strings.

The guys had three attempts at mixing this album. (One attempt was in New York because of the particular studio's echo plate). The third attempt was at the Chelsea (London) studio, after they changed the monitors!

Wood says, in mixing, you need two things, perspective and depth. For example, on the song "The Chime of A City Clock", he used selectively different amounts of reverb on each instrument, (including high compared to low strings). They used two echo plates on the song.

"Poor Boy": this was an interesting record, as a jazz pianist who Wood had been mixing in the morning was still around in the studio. Wood suggested he play on the track, which he did. The intended instrumentation was to have been guitar, bass and drums. First take!

Wood says it is an example of the best sound he ever got out of a piano. Drake overdubbed an acoustic-electric (A Guild with a pickup). That is on the left side of the stereo spectrum. The right side has Drake's normal acoustic guitar. There was a lot of playing with the faders to hear eveything the way they wanted to hear it.

Reverb on the backing singers was "a mixture of (echo) plates and tape retard".