New York, New York

I am back from a whirlwind adventure in NYC. I met up with Dave E. at the airport and we bounced into Brooklyn to see Anne. From there it was couple of days of record shopping, toy shopping, window shopping and good eats.

Yesterday was a big day for Cedub Studios, yet (as usual) it seemed anti-climatic. Chris’ close friend and Code of the West front-man Terry was in town from Waco. Terry has been away for almost 10 years and is visiting the Bay Area to catch up with friends and to do a Code of the West reunion.

Chris talked to Terry and offered up Abstracks services to help track, mix and master a 5 song demo CD for Terry to give to local clubs. The EP will be just Terry and a guitar. Tracking started yesterday afternoon and when I arrived early that evening only 4 more vocal tracks had to be laid down.

It’s hard to put into words the excitement I felt sitting in the control room, looking through the live room window and seeing our first guest and performer singing into the mic. There is something brilliant in seeing a person in another room, singing, hearing the clear crisp vocals roll through the nearfield monitors, but not hearing it from the room itself. Once again, little moments.

We finished the vocal takes and the mixing began. We where using the Neumann U87a on the vocals and the mic is absolutely fucking great. The clarity and warmth of the voice is pretty out there and we did not have to touch his vocals with any EQ. That, and Terry has an amazingly raw but rich voice that fits the country/blues grit of his guitar.

We slapped on a little plate reverb with some depth, low dampening and a bit of decay. The idea was to smooth and the sound of the vocals, but in a very subtle way. It’s the kind of thing that you don’t even notice the effect unless you compare the wet and the dry versions.

Once Chris fine tuned the reverb we jumped into the guitar. We used the Amek 9098 stereo pre-amp with the MS-Stereo setting. To do this we set the Octiva CM012 facing the guitar set to a cardioid pattern that gets fed into the A input of the pre-amp. We then set the Neumann, at a right angle and under the Octiva, set to a figure-eight polar pattern and feed this into the B input of the pre-amp. The pre-amp’s MS-Stereo mode mixes the two mic inputs to create a stereo signal which has a more realistic stereo sound then a mono-panned stereo input. Mono-panned is what most people hear when someone says stereo in music.

The guitar sounded decent by itself, but compared to the vocals it was muted and sounded very weak in comparison. We fired up the Massenburg MDW2x2 EQ on the Mackie D8B and started to tweak the guitar.

Chris and I have both read a ton of reviews of the Massenburg and they just raved about the surgical precision and clarity of this plug-in. Neither of us really used it much before we closed the original studio, so we didn’t have an opinion either way. Let’s just say after last night I am jumping on the bandwagon and saying this is the most impressive EQ I have ever used. With just a few minutes of tweaking we brought out the mids and highs in the guitar, rounded out the bass and the song just popped out at us. What an amazing difference a little EQ can do.

Once we got the balance right we bounced down a mix using the AES/EBU digital input to a stereo-pair for mastering and then we will burn it to CD to hand off to Terry. Good stuff for the first session…