studioporn

christ, it's been like forever since i last posted anything. i'm going to fix that right now.

one of the main reasons i've been quiet is because for the past several weeks i've been spending most of my time working with christa to get her cd finished before she moves to LA in june. the remaining studio construction is currently on the back burner until i get this project done, save for the occasional critical room treatment and the like.

we've been recording a lot of vocals and acoustic guitar in the studio, and today i recorded the first drum kit in the room. here are some thoughts about my experience thus far....

i'm *very* happy with the great river preamp i bought. this thing works soooo well. i've been using it as my go-to pre the past several weeks (well, aside from my console, it's my only pre down there right now). in the rough mixes i've been doing, i've been finding its sound very easy to work with. i'm so glad i sold my avalon and got this instead.

i've also been quite happy with the RNC compressor i got. the supernice mode is especially sweet, especially for vox. my only gripes about this unit are the lack of input metering and noisy gain. the input meter thing isn't a big deal, i've just gotten used to all of my compressors having one and didn't realize until working with this unit that i tend to refer to them very frequently. the noisy gain is the only complaint i have about the sound--it imparts a low-level hum to signals passing through it when boosting any more than a few dB. not a huge deal though, and given the otherwise great/transparent sound from this unit and its cheaper-than-your-mom-on-a-saturday-night price, i'm more than willing to overlook this minor flaw.

room acoustics.

all of my "nothing shall be parallel" OCD has payed off. i've been very happy with the way the walls interact with one another acoustically. however, i gradually came to realize the the parallel floor/ceiling (the only thing i couldn't make non-parallel) was causing lots of problems. doing some reference listening outside of the room made it clear that all of the acoustic guitar tracks we laid down and the first few vocal tracks had some serious room resonance problems. after a bunch of trial and error i discovered that the only way to fix these problems was to do a buttload of absorption on the ceiling.

so for the immediate future, i have 4 pieces of 2' x 4' rigid insulation crudely hanging from the ceiling. looks like ass, but my god did it make a freakin' huge difference in the sound. ultimately i'm going to make (or have made) 4 6' x 3' metal frames so i can have some bigger absorption surfaces and wrap the insulation in cloth so everything looks nice.

most of all, i've been happy with the vocal sounds i've been getting. my AT 4060 tube mic + great river + RNC is a really sweet combination. my biggest fear when recording vocalists (well, anyone for that matter) is that when they give a really good performance, the room/gear/whatever won't do them justice. well, when christa's singing is great, the recording of it is absolutely amazing. i couldn't ask for anything better. i've only recorded a couple of acoustic guitar tracks since treating the ceiling, so i can't really speak to the sound there much yet except to say i haven't been disappointed with what recordings i have done.

i'm pretty excited about the way drums sound in the room. i'm getting a really nice, bright, live sound. i've never had such a live room for recording drums before, and after listening back to the first recordings we did this morning i had one of those "holy shit, this is what i've been missing" moments. i set up a room mic around 30" in front of the kit, and man does it pick up an awesome ambiance. the only downside (if you can call it that) is that the intentional lack of foam crap all over the walls makes the room rather bright. this has been great for letting those highs and room detail really come through, but it also shines a spotlight on things that are already bright. this evening i was listening more critically to the drums we laid down this morning, and i quickly came to realize that tracey's cymbals are all coming through way too bright. tomorrow i'm going to see if we can swap her cymbals out for some of my zildjians, which are less bright/more rounded and record really well. lots of drummers tend to prefer really thin/bright crashes, which are great for punching through in live shows, but i find them way too harsh for recording purposes. on the other hand, a lot of the "dark" crashes i've heard are a bit too dark for use as a core cymbal. the last time i went on a cymbal-purchasing spree i sought out ones that found a happy medium between the two.

i resumed christa's project with the assumption that since it's been a year since i did any serious recording, i'd probably be a bit rusty and would have to spend a good bit of time retraining my ear and all that. i couldn't have been further from the truth. my absence from hands-on music work seems to have opened the doors to allow me to absorb a huge amount of knowledge, observations, and ideas from listening to music on the radio and stuff like that. furthermore, all of my room planning, room building, and room analysis has had a huge effect on helping me refine my ear, particularly with regards to frequency identification. when mixing, my eq decisions are so much more rapid, intuitive, and rational now than they were previously. i also credit the room's frequency response here--when you set up a listening area such that you hear things clearly and accurately, it has an amazing domino effect.

i've also found myself coming out of hiberation as a much more anal producer. in particular, i've been giving much more attention than i have in the past to song structure and vocal performances. unfortunately for christa, her project has not escaped this increased attention.one of the reasons it's taking so long to get everything recorded is because i keep going, "try it again, you were a bit pitchy.....try it again, and this time round out your vowels more...try and de-emphasize that dipthong....we need to add another measure here....we need to remove a measure here....there really needs to be a prechorus here...can you rewrite this line?" on the one hand i feel like a complete and total asshole about being so picky with someone else's music, but on the other hand, i firmly believe that the songs are much more solid as a result, and her vocals, which were good to begin with, are totally awesome now.

same thing happened today when working with tracey on drums. i was incredibly picky with everything, be it rhythm, dynamics, snare choice, snare tuning, or whatever else i bitched about. for one of the songs, i dictated a rhythm to her that involves linear drumming. i wasn't thinking too deeply about the rhythm when i ratteld it off, so i didn't really take its linear nature into account. such beats can be really tricky for drummers to coordinate and pull off. but man, when it worked it sounded sweeeet.

i upgraded to cubase 4 this week. it rocks. i'm really pleased that they seem to have taken a great deal of customer feedback into account when developing this product. nearly all of the gripes i had (and many others had) with SX3 were fixed in 4. ability to reorder inserts = awesome. instrument tracks = awesome. there are many other new features i'm really excited about but haven't had a chance to try out yet.

well, that's about it for right now. i'll probably continue to be largely/totally incommunicado for the next 2-3 weeks while we hustle to get everything else laid down. but i'll do my best to provide updates on progress, both with this project in particular and with the studio as a whole.