The url has changed on the page. It's now http://jonathanleepickens.bandcamp.com Oops.
Lots of recording talk follows for Mike. Ignore if you're not interested. The basic tracks were recorded live using 57s and 58s into the Presonus Firestudio in Reaper at 24/44.1. Vocal harmonies were done with an OktavaMod 219. Some were done with the Presonus, some with the Apogee Duet. Extra instruments were done with OktavaMod 012s. Eventually some extra instruments were done with a KM84 through the Apogee. I brought everything into Logic Express dry from Reaper once I had it all edited and levels evened out. We thought the plugins sounded better in Logic Express. Mixed it down to 2 track getting the best sound I could at 24/44.1, then ran it through Logic's mastering channel preset making adjustments until I felt like it was balanced. I think I used a little eq and the compressor. Then applied Voxengo's Elephant limiter to get it louder. Then played mixes in a bunch of different systems to hear how it translated and compared it to commercial CDs on the same systems and went back and made adjustments. That was a long process. On the lead vocals, I did a lot of automated fader moves as well as compression to try to even out the vocals--bring up the softer parts. Didn't compress the mandolin but did the guitar to keep its level constant. It took a lot of eq to try to get some presence in the vocals/instruments because of the 57s/58s. I did put my Heil PR20 on the mandolin and that track didn't get much eq. The overdub tracks didn't need hardly any eq. I started with the Logic compressor presets for vocal/acoustic guitar and then adjusted settings till it sounded good to me. I tried not to get carried away with eq, compression, reverb, etc.--tried to use as few plugins as I could and not use extreme settings on any of them. What did I learn? 1. 57s & 58s have some huge bumps in their frequency response, especially with the proximity effect. 2. It takes me a really long time to finish a project like this. I'd get it to a certain stage and live with it awhile and try to figure out what it needed. I eventually got someone from tapeop to do a mix for me and then I tried to reverse engineer his mix and make mine sound like his. I learned a lot from that experience. I ended up getting some Axiom M2 speakers and an Adcom GFA535 amp for monitoring. That made a huge difference in being able to hear what was going on in the mixing stage. 3. I enjoy the recording/mixing process. 4. By the time it was close to done, I couldn't tell if it was sounding better or worse. I needed other folks to listen to it and tell me what they were hearing. I need to get better/faster at making decisions and getting things done. 5. I like Logic Express better than Reaper for a lot of things. On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Romkey <[email protected]> wrote: > > Nice-sounding project. If you feel inclined to talk about microphones, > compression, mastering and so forth, please share. Sounds as if you > sort of served as musician-engineer-producer on this. What was your > approach and what did you learn? > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Taterbugmando" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/taterbugmando?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
