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Vanessa Agosto
April 30th, 5 hour observe at Kung Fu Bakery Studio
Watching the studio musicians today was really cool. They (alto sax and flugelhorn players) were more exciting than the drum and bass guys. So... They just got chord charts and some vague (to me) sounding instructions, and off they went. Amazing. The musicians were set up next to each other, facing the control room, with cathedral-looking individual mikes. Pretty simple!
After the studio musicians left, Tim - the owner of Kung Fu Bakery - play the guitar tracks. They'd put 2 mikes on the amps for layering (chorus guitar) (as well as stereo, I'm guessing). His electric guitar sounded like ambient, dreamy car horn keyboards, it was crazy! Then he messed around some more and got a completely different sound: high little ringing bells, with a nice pinging delay. Beautiful and atmospheric.
A few things I noticed: as Tim set up and switched guitars between songs, Steve would play the next song in the background, just to get it in Tim's head. Steve also edited clips between takes and during down time. The ribbon mike recorded at a higher signal level than the 57 mike. Tim did a lot of tuning between takes on the electric guitar, due to all the "bending those puppies". He also mentioned several times how he had to be careful not to tread on the keyboards with his guitar part; it's become really apparent to me how tricky it can be to find a place for everything. When the signal started clipping, Steve moved the mike farther back from the amp. Moving back the mike also "thinned out" the waveform, taking out some of the bass end (hello, proximity effect!). And again, the importance of a good ear: Steve caught the guitars being out of tune. He has such a good ear, it's discouraging... My ears are NOT that good. Tim's guitar pick change also prompted a mike move.
Right before Steve and I took off, Naomi decided to get some vocals recorded. She wanted to start really soft so she'd have something to build to, but it was messing up the preamp settings. They gave her the note to sing it out the whole way and maybe add a little more on the chorus, but to not arc the performance. It made such a difference, not just in letting the preamp do it's job, but also in the performance: filling up the mike translated into better tone and sound she could actually work with (in terms of adding emotion and energy).
May 2nd, 4 hour lesson
We talked about compression! The difference between knees and attack times can be confusing, but! Attack and release of compression are functions of time, whereas hard and soft knees describe the curve of the compression's application over frequencies. Argh. Steve also mentioned early and easy compression versus late and hard, and how he likes top go early and easy FIRST (lower threshold, lower level compression) and then catch remaining peaks with late and hard (higher threshold, higher compression ratio).
And we talked about Sausage Fattener, a plug-in that blew my mind for some reason. Oh, the trickiness - the implications astound me. Apparently, you can get nice, natural sounding compression before any signal manipulation by saturating the preamp, where the transformer will lop off wave tops for you.
And, my ProTools assignment! I have some sound samples that I'm trying to recreate a recorded and printed song's beat with, giving it some emotion, interest, and pacing - as well as rhythmic accuracy. Woo-ey! I'm excited and intimidated.
