Posts tagged with “music”
Doby Watson “22” Track Sheet
Here’s the track sheet I made for the Doby Watson “22” session, if anyone is curious.
Artist
Doby Watson
Date
April 8, 2009
Studio
THE PUNCH at Premier Studios
10000 Marshall Dr
Lenexa, KS 66215
Engineer
Sample Rate
44.1kHz
Bit Depth
24bit
Notes
All songs tracked Live in the big ol’ live room.
Tracks
- 6 String Body (ORTF)
AKG C451 → ATI 8MX2 - 6 String Neck (ORTF)
AKG C451 → ATI 8MX2 - Mandolin/Slide Guitar Body
AKG C414EB → ATI 8MX2 - Mandolin/Slide Guitar Neck
Microtech Gefell UM70 → ATI 8MX2 - Tenor Guitar Body
AKG C414EB → ATI 8MX2 - Tenor Guitar Neck
Cascade Fat Head → ATI 8MX2 - Room Overhead Left (From Doby’s Perspective)
AKG “The Tube” → ATI 8MX2 - Room Overhead Right
AKG “The Tube” → ATI 8MX2 - Doby Vox
BLUE Bluebird → Focusrite RED 8 - Austin Vox
EV RE20 → Focusrite RED 8 - Matt Vox
EV PL10 → ATI 8MX2
During Doby Watson’s “22” session. Brought to you by the vibiest studio in the greater Kansas City Metro area, THE PUNCH
Photo credit: Jerad Tomasino
Doby Watson Press
I guess this slipped under my radar, but I just got name-dropped on Orchid Collective and The Pitch for my engineering of Doby Watson’s “22”.
As Richard Gintowt from the Pitch tells it, we
“…went into The Punch studio in Lenexa with engineer Ross Brown at 10 a.m. and were home in time for dinner with an eight-song album in tow. They recorded each song two or three times and picked the one they messed up the least on. ”
For those who care, we started at 1pm and had to postpone dinner until we finished at 8, mainly because we couldn’t nail a certain song in five takes.
But the preceding statement does make us all sound better.
And as long as we’re name-dropping, Jerad Tomasino and Ryan Cork made great assistants.
everyday/everynight tracking
I spent last weekend recording a nine song album for everyday/everynight at home. Everything went fairly well and we were able to track all instruments for every song and three vocal parts for three songs.
We scrounged together enough equipment between Jerad and me to be able to track guitars/keys and drums live. Ryan from The Punch was gracious enough to lend me an Audix drum mic pack, two AKG C451s, and three AKG C460. Two PreSonus Firepods (pre FP10) were daisy-chained together for the interface. Mics got some love from an ART MPA Digital, a couple of the older, noisier Presonus BlueTubes, and an ART Pro VLA. In most cases, this is what was used:
I’ve posted a mic list on RedMinutes for anyone who is interested. The password is mics
We used what we had and got a pretty good sounding result. I was pretty happy with Jerad’s Dragonfly. It was very smooth but still had a nice crispness. Nowhere near as (sometimes) harsh sounding as the MXL 992 on vocals. It fit Jerad’s voice nicely and made a killer guitar amp room mic.
All the tracking was done in Ableton Live 7. I’ve said it before and I’ll stand by it: I think Live is pretty darn quick and easy to track in. It’s not as powerful as a lot of other things and it’s not really tailored toward multitrack recording, but for getting stuff to tape it’s pretty handy.
I did encounter some problems a few times with buffering the samples. On a couple occasions the audio would actually drop out in the middle of tracking. I’m not 100% sure what caused this. It could have just been the speed of the hard drive.
At one point we went back to a song to record the beginning after we had recorded the end with different instrumentation. Somehow I had accidently cleared some audio regions from the session and my Undo history was toast. I had to manually locate the files and drop them back into the project. Part of that final section we had recorded, however, had a punch-in towards the end of the track and I thought I was going to have to adjust the clip length to fit it back in with the original take. That is, until I remembered that Live saves an analysis file2 with each audio file in a project, containing information about clip length, Warp, and placement. All I had to do was drop the file back into the project and bump it over to where the original take ended. The clip bounds were exactly how they were after I edited the two takes together.
File management is also pretty slick with Live, as long as you can get used to the concept of Projects. Basically, the Project contains all the audio and analysis files that the “sets”3 within it access. This makes session-wide file cleanup possible in a few clicks. Finding unused audio files does so across all sets.
Live 8 will apparently include some things that will make it a little friendlier to multi-track recording. We’ll see.
1 Nice balanced sound. Might be a new favorite.
2 They have a .asd extension and are in the Samples folder of your project.
3 .als files
I’m famous!
I have received an advanced copy of Eric Margan’s Midnight Book, an incredible collection of songs that he has been working on for some ridiculous amount of time. A long while ago he asked me to contribute some things to a few of his songs. Only a 15 second mandolin part made it to the final cut, but I’m just thrilled I’m on this thing. Seriously, pick up a copy on the 17th when it’s officially released. I feel like he’ll make it to the big time with this one.
Eric was gracious enough to lend his talents to two tracks on the Human Condition, which I will shamelessly plug now.