The band flew out to Radiostar studios owned by producer Sylvia Massy.
She was the producer on the project, while I was given the task of tracking and overseeing some of the mixing duties. Before touching a piece of gear I sat down with the band to discuss their sound, take notes and formulate an approach to capturing the project. After chatting with the band for five minuets, I knew I wanted to track to tape.
“Now I had to convince Sylva this would not put us over budget!”
Next Sylvia and I sat with the band in studio A listing to their demos for the album. Sylvia picked her favorite songs then we started discussing approaches to tracking drums, guitar and bass we set up the band on the stage in live form to track the band as a band! The guitar amps were setup in a small booth on the side of the stage and the bass was under the stage.
Working with tape
I pulled five reels of GP9 tape and calibrated the Studer for 15IPS, the signal went from the Neve desk to the tape machine to Pro Tools. Pro Tools was in record input mode the whole time with quick punch on, this saved my ass at one point when the band was doing an extended take and we ran out of tape, I just pushed record in Pro Tools and captures that last bit. As we went along Sylvia would indicate her favorite takes and I took notes. Later we dumped all the best takes in and assembled them in Pro Tools.
Drums
We went through several kicks and snares and finally decided on using a custom Thumper kicks for some songs and an old Gretsch for the other songs. During the drum tracking process we also kept a few snares on hand trying them out as we went. For the room mics we used a pair of Mojave MA200 tube mics into a vintage Fairchild 670.
Guitars
Sami the guitar player brought in this very special sounding Peavey amp that defined his sound. I used my Radial splitter to split the guitar signal to a 1951 Danelectro Leader Amp.
Bass
We used a vintage Ampeg head with an older Ampeg cab LOUD!
During the rest of the project we did minimal overdubs and ended up keeping most of the original guitar and bass tracks, this gave us a great band feel.
I won’t talk about tracking the band playing various items they took from the kitchen..
” how do you mic a can opener..?”
