I've spent the past week working on a new album. It's my first solo album, and also my first studio experience as a one-man band.
It will have 16 tracks, ranging from old standards like "Good Morning Little School Girl" and Howlin' Wolf's "Poor Boy Blues" to a house version of Stanley Turrentine's "Sugar." I do Cream's "Crossroad Blues" and "Sunshine of Your Love." There are about five original instrumentals, most of which have not been on YouTube.
I've been amazed by the sound that the engineer, Bryan Ward at the Tone Room here in Oxford, has been able to create. The harp sound is smooth, raw, and massive. I wouldn't have thought that you could put those three words in the same sentence and be speaking about reality, as opposed to fantasy, but somehow Bryan has made that happen--at $35 an hour!
Harmonica players of the world, please take note: the Tone Room in Oxford, Mississippi is one heck of a room.
Bryan insisted that he had nothing to do with it. He said that the guy who taught him had said, "Getting a good sound is simple. You need good players, good mics, and good songs."
Bryan had, he claimed, $40,000 worth of mics aimed at me. I really don't know. All I know is that he had a pair of $200 Sennheisers to close-mic my pair of amps; a $10,000 Neuman from 1941 as one of the room mics (he claimed that Hitler's people had made it), a different $5,000 mic as the other room mic, another ridiculously expensive mic for my vocals, two mics on my foot drum, and a good pencil mic on the tambourine pedal of my drumset.
The guy who recorded the new Satan and Adam album (still shopping for a deal) was, according to our producer, one of the three or four best engineers in Florida. Bryan is better. This may be because he's a former rock star who went straight and now spend times doing "walks" with a men's Christian group called Kairos. He's done a number of walks at Parchman Farm, and has been telling me some quite remarkable stories about what goes on there.
Quite a remarkable week I've had on the home front.
More news to come.
Last Edited by on Jul 23, 2010 7:12 PM
Brendan actually heard a couple of tracks from the Satan and Adam album, not this solo album. I'm proud of them, too, but this solo album is a different deal. I like the BP recommendation, though! :)
The album will be available both through this website and also on iTunes. Bryan is going to show me how that whole legit side of the self-produced-CD business works.
Oh: There's a solo version of "The Entertainer," too. Brendan heard me do a bit of that.
I'm certainly going to have some hard copy CDs printed up. I'm not sure if I'm going to sell them through the website or just sell them at gigs.
Last Edited by on Jul 24, 2010 4:58 AM
Adam, that sounds like the legendary Neuman U-47 which every studios will hound you to death for if you tell them you have one. The right mic, micing technique, room can do wonders, along with a good engineer. I did a recording that had all of that, plus enough vintage gear that would make any gear freak drool all over themselves. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Sounds like a good recording set up. The importance of a good engineer for recording can never be underestimated. A good one can work miracles with even the simplest equipment. ----------
Back in the 90's, I did two different recording sessions with a Boston area band called Two Bones And A Pick. The first time was in 1994 and they wanted me to overdub harp on a tune and since it was an overdub situation rather than live recording (for those of you who are wondering, in recording sessions, when they refer to live recording, it means a session where everyone including the vocals are present on a take and NOT something recorded at a live gig), and so I recorded with my real 4-10 Bassman amp.
The recording engineer did it the way they usually do things and everything sounded dead and so I had to stop him right there and teach him what's known as the ambient micing technique, where you have a mike directly on the amp, one on a boom stand in the middle of the room and another on a boom stand way in back of the room, which is the way things were recorded in the 40's until the late 50's. Now everything sounded bigger, making use of the entire room, and this guy had just graduated from Berklee as a recording engineer and never learned this technique at all, which by today's standards, it is totally caveman ancient, but works.
On another session I did with them in 1998, we recorded live and the studio had tons of vintage gear and just the collection of vintage guitars alone could rival the collection of Duke Robillard's and his was greater than a lot of many music stores had.
I used my Pro Junior for the recording, which was perfect for it and no chance of bleed thru because of it being just a 15w amp and when I was about to set up the Boss DD3 Digital Delay I was using at the time, the engineer stopped me and said "we don't allow ANYTHING digital in this studio, so wait and I"ll be back with something I think you'll be OK with."
Well, I waited about 5 minutes and here he comes with a late 50's all tube Echoplex and with my eyes popping out of my head, "No problem!!!"
They didn't use a reverb tank, but what they did have was a ceiling in which the height could be adjusted and what they'd do is once the recording got done, they'd remove all the gear in the room and readjust the ceiling height and they got true room reverb.
They did two different masters, one in stereo and one in mono. In stereo, it sounded somewhat thin, but in mono, it was gloriously humongous, like an old 45 or 78.
This studio had not only gear like vintage guitars and amps, but also vintage mikes like a real Shure PE-55 and a Neumann U-47, and they knew how to use them with a very modern board and got their stuff together. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
No cover of "Going Round In Circle" on the album ? I heard the original version on the radio recently, it's a great tune. ---------- http://www.buddybrent.be
@ BBQ Bob "The recording engineer did it the way they usually do things and everything sounded dead and so I had to stop him right there and teach him what's known as the ambient micing technique, where you have a mike directly on the amp, one on a boom stand in the middle of the room and another on a boom stand way in back of the room, which is the way things were recorded in the 40's until the late 50's." It may be the way that some things were recorded at that time, but typically not everything. In the early 50's most stuff was single track recording, 2 track by mid/late 50's, stereo by '58, 3-4 track during the early mid 60's with 8 track recorders appearing towards the end of the 60's - consoles might have 6 to 8 channels for most of the 50's...once you get a decent number of musicians in the studio you run out of channels pretty quick, ambient mics for the most part would have been a luxury not many could afford (though if you have the opportunity today, then try it). Close micing was pretty well the norm from the 50's onwards.
Sure there is sometimes a degree of ambience on old recordings, but even in the 50's engineers were aware & largely avoiding significant, uncontrolled "wet" that they would be stuck with. Reverb & delay were usually applied in a relatively controlled manner, rather than simply letting sound bounce off the studio walls. Indeed the reverbs & delays used back then heavily contributed to the character of the recordings, some early 50's dry recordings (from the same studios that released cuts with a treated wet effect) are simply good, unaffected recordings...that could pretty well have been recorded at any time over the last 50yrs.
Overdubbing, multitracking, vocal booths, DIs & chorus effects etc were well in use during the 50's...Labels like Aristocrat/Chess (before they had their own studio) & JOB were using professional, advanced for the day, recording studios.
There is a tendancy nowadays for guys to make a lot of assumptions about how they "did things back in the day"...usually these reflect techniques that were pretty well obsolete by the 50's.
Last Edited by on Jul 27, 2010 5:48 AM
I can't speak about how things were done at some point in the past. I can say that what BBQ Bob says above resonates very well with how things worked in the studio for me. I used a pair of smallish amps, set about 10 feet apart. We close miked them--good Sennheisers, about 3 inches from the grill cloth, but NOT right against it--and we used a pair of room mics about 8 feet apart and about 6 feet off the ground. The room mics delivered a noticeably smoother sound than the close mics, but the sound was TOO smooth at first because the room mics were a little too high, and slightly too much off axis.
Also, my amps were out of phase. This was obvious when we looked at the sine wave version of the recorded tracks. When we reversed the phase of one amp, the sound smoothed and noticeably solidified.
The combination of two close mics and two room mics, plus some bleed-through into the vocal mic, made for a great harp sound.
Here's a brief sample from "Poor Boy Blues." G harp, Marine Band Deluxe, OTS. This is a rough mix.
Sounds great Adam! I wish you all the success with it. There is nothing like making a recording that sounds good to you. The one man band concept seems to be growing! We should gather a bunch of 1 man bands and do a 1 man band festival sometime. Here alone, there is quite a range of the 1 man band spectrum. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
