#asp008

Hi Jb. Tell us a little bit about yourself, who are you and what do you do?

I'm John Bart van der wal, I'm from the north of Holland, I play/played guitar and bass in bands like Aborted, Herder, Leaves Eyes, Atrocity and DrDoom, and wrote music for a bunch of others.

Next to that I record/produce/mix and master, albums for both a lot of dutch and international bands. And whenever I have time, I work as a Front of House (FOH) and Monitor Engineer for a selection of bands as well. I recently did a DragonForce/Huntress/Kissin Dynamite tour some time ago as FOH, and at the moment I'm working for a dutch band called Kensington.

You play bass for death metal band 'Aborted' who are currently signed to Century Media. How did you get into music?

I started playing bass when I was 15 or so, got kicked out of both the bands I was in at the time, so that started out well! Then got a grindcore band called DrDoom which did fairly well within that scene I guess. From there I got a call from Sven from Aborted who needed a bassplayer mid tour in 2008/9. I jumped on that, played some awesome shows, and from there on I got more calls for other bands as well, which kinda brings me to where I am today.

You are into your production, how did this occur? Do you think it was natural progression from being a musician and wanting to record your own music? Or has it always been something you were interested in?

As kids we recorded our own farts on a tapedeck, and listening to what I record now it hasn't changed much actually haha, so that just gradually took a more profitable turn for the best, I can make my living of it anyway.

I didn't like what most other people in my area did recording wise, so I started of doing it myself (except for the Aborted record I co-wrote). Slowly but surely I took an education in music production and the first year I had spent more hours on school than most teachers. After, I got a bunch of job offers and spent way to little time there haha.

You are set to tackle the production duties on the upcoming 'Aborted' record . How are you feeling about taking the helm?

We're not sure yet if were doing this, but we already did the drums for System Divide's (Aborted members) full length album a few weeks ago, and with the vocal recordings from sven (aborted), for Dirk Verbeuren (Soilwork, ex aborted) his grindcore project and this went perfect. 
We're still unsure what to do since you can also be a bit biased if you write songs and record them as well.

Any tips on metal production?

Even though I don't like triggering myself, and don't do it when I can help it, I'd recommend recording triggers as it's a helpful tool when triggering, and gating and the obvious recording of D.I's in case you want/need to re-amp.

Also recording drums and guitars first, then fit in bass later, sound wise this works out way better for me then going for the usual drums>bass>guitar>vox.
 
It's not common to record roommics on drums for metal stuff, but I found it glues a kit together way better in the mix (for fast stuff a m/s or blumlein at knee hight works well). Also cymbals tend to get a more nice, natural decay/tone, and it helps toms. 
A far away left right with ribbons or omni's (I like the cheap meassurement mics for this) usually only works for slow stoner stuff, and is useless for fast, blasting stuff. Even then it's cool to use it on the rare slow stuff to kinda break the (usually) monotone sound of metal records.
 A ribbon on top of a Shure SM7 can be good to add some more life to vocals.


I try to do as much as I can to atleast give some life to the full on compressed and limited wave form that is your typicall metal track. Which also means alot of automation whenever I can, mostly on overheads, guitars and some vocals. Most people don't believe in automation in metal, but I try to get some in whenever it fits.

What's your stance on triggered drums in metal music? Necessary?

Some music only works with triggers, I wouldn't like to play without triggers live when playing with Aborted (with whom we only trigger kick, live and studio). 
Ken Bedene of Aborted is a insanely good drummer, but still there is no way 16ths on 250/260 bpm, on a single bass drum and miked up will give a sound direct enough even after EQ, that will make for a solid basis for FOH or monitors. 
For some parts of the metal genre it's just part of the sound, just as I can't or wouldnt want to play stoner rock without a Les Paul, fuzz and SUNN amp.

That being said, it IS being overused though. I get too many bands and drummers asking for a fix in the mix and asking why I can't make their tom rolls sound tighter with over triggering and in the process making it sound like a drumcomputer (or a bag of popcorn in the microwave). Making you wonder why they didn't ask you to program it to begin with...

You are also in 'stoner rock' band Herder. Quite a stark contrast from playing death metal. Do you find it easy to switch between the two mind frames?

Oh totally, when playing way too intense riffs on bass at 250 bpm and really getting that as tight as you can while still giving a good show, it's great to go back to the other discipline. It's great to just lay down a simple riff with a ton of groove with Herder and it's more based on tone.
 Playing for both bands enhances my playing, its great.
The most fun switch is the gear one though, we're all intense 70's guitar gear nerds in Herder with a ton of Soundcity, SUNN and old Ampeg/Marshall amps and full stacking that and hitting the first chord is great. 
Playing more current gear with Aborted means it also breaks down way less then the old stuff though.

Recording is way different as well, no triggers and little room mic with Aborted versus sometimes only room mics on drums with Herder.

What gear is currently exciting you?

The Microtubes B3K bass overdrive/distortion from a great Finnish company called Darkglass Electronics (that i just got an endorsement from).

Alex webster from cannibal corpse recommended me this pedal, and it goes from a bit of grit, to full on, oiltanker dragged over concrete by mammoths during a snowstorm in Alaska bass sounds!! The harmonics it adds to the sound in both type of settings is awesome.
 Both in the studio and live with Aborted last weekend in Russia and some fests we played, it worked really well! Also the Heill Mics we use with Kensington live, the Pr30 and Pr40 are nuts too, buying some soon!

You own an Audient ASP008 8- channel microphone preamplifier, what made you buy the 008?

Back when I was still in "AE school", I had to use a various preamp's for drums and I felt they were missing all kinds of depth and tone.
 So I rented a ASP008 and A/Bd it with the previous pre's on all drum kettles, and the differences were far from funny. Toms alone went from flat sounding and unEQable afterwards, to a totally shapeable, way punchier and more realistic representation of the tom sound.

How are you finding it? What's your favourite use for it?

I can blindly run most drums through it, and my favourite is still having it on toms actually, but also the DI in on the first 2 channels are perfect.
 Most DI signals for re-amping afterwards go through the ASP008. The new Bent Sea vocals were SM7b with the Audient ASP008.

Thanks JB!

Thanks for reading.

Andy @ Audient

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got into audio engineering?

I was studying in London doing a performance degree as a drummer. I went to education fairly late on and wasn't really sure what I wanted the outcome to be. As part of my studies we covered music technology and got to spend time in the studio, although in more of a session player role. As a result something just sparked my interest, and as my knowledge grew I thought "I'm actually not completely terrible at this" and so decided to consider it seriously as a career path for the future.

When I record, I prefer to get my microphones to do the heavy lifting, rather than relying on masses of outboard processing to get the timbres I'm looking for -- it's more fun spending time in the live room with the musicians (rather than in the control room twiddling knobs), the results always seem to sound better with less effort, and it's usually cheaper into the bargain! In particular, I love using multi-miking to craft tones, which is why I never seem to have enough tracks available when recording bands!

My recent session for Brushes Held Like Hammers was a case in point, because I wanted to run up 20 mics out in the room with the band, but only had 16 inputs on the recorder. However, on this occasion I happened to have access to a pair of ASP008 units, which helped provide a rather elegant solution to this problem. Let me explain...

Too Many Mics, Not Enough Tracks!

The band use the classic rock line-up of two guitars, bass, and drums, and I'd allocated my 16 tracks as follows: kick, snare, hi-hat, ride, two toms, stereo overheads, stereo room mics, bass DI, bass amp, two guitar DIs, and two guitar amps. I had deliberately given the drums plenty of close mics, as well as factoring in instrument DIs, as a safety measure, because it was my first time working with the band and I figured I might need a good deal of mixing flexibility to cater for their eclectic collage of different styles. That did mean, however, that I didn't have spare tracks for multi-miking four instruments I really wanted to: the kick, the snare, and the two guitars.

There are lots of great things you can do with multi-miking. Firstly, you can blend contrasting mic tones to create a 'best of all worlds' combination. Secondly, you can pick up more of the overall character of an instrument by miking different bits of it and then adding those different perspectives together. And, thirdly, you can get creative with comb-filtering effects between the mics. The last of these is one my favourite 'secret weapons' in the studio -- just adjusting the distance between the same two mics only a few inches can change the sound dramatically, and you can also immediately access a second (and often quite different) sound for any given spacing by flipping the polarity of one of the mics.

I initially considered bringing a Mackie mixer along with me to preamplify additional mics for each of these four instruments and submix them to the four available tracks, but I really wasn't that happy about the idea of running through all that extra circuitry, which included each channel's (unbypassable) EQ -- I normally prefer to go straight into the recorder from the mic preamp if I can. In addition, I'd also have lost out on half the creative possibilities of the multi-miking, because of the lack of any polarity inversion switches.

An Elegant Solution: Two ASP008s

I was therefore delighted to be able to lay hands on a couple of Audient ASP008's, one of which I was able to combine with my own SSL X-Desk eight-channel line mixer to create a much more attractive system: a short, uncluttered, high-quality signal path from the mics to the recorder, complete with the necessary submixing from the X-Desk and the ASP008's per-channel polarity-inversion facilities.

However, there was another big reason I was so pleased to get hold of the ASP008 for this session, because of the specific way I'd decided to record the whole band (bar vocals) simultaneously. I wanted to let the band play exactly the way they do in rehearsal, set up close to each other without any headphones or monitors impinging on their sound or slowing down communications. Now I'm a big fan of spill -- I see it as the glue that holds a band recording together -- but in this instance I was nonetheless keen to keep the sound reasonably tight, and one of several tactics I used to achieve this was using directional mics and bringing them in close to their sources. As we all know, the proximity effect tends to make directional mics serious emphasise the lows under such circumstances, and while that's sometimes part of the appeal, it's just as often unwelcome.

Now there are lots of ways to deal with proximity effect. You can use a mic with a natural low-cut in its frequency response, such as a Shure SM57, but that restricts your mic choices somewhat. Alternatively, you might switch in a high-pass filter on the microphone, but this can often be a bit of 'sledgehammer to crack a nut' situation, because the filter always seems either not effective enough, or else it cuts way too much body out of the tone. The typical fixed-frequency filter switches you get on most mixers and preamps also suffer the same inflexibility, but this is an area where the ASP008 really scores for me, because it gives you a switchable and fully variable high-pass filter. If you want it out of circuit, you can bypass it. If you want it to protect a vocal compressor from rumble, it can stay really low. But, more importantly in this scenario, if you want it to counteract just the right about of proximity effect for each mic, you can dial it in to taste.

Enough of the theory, though. How did it all work out in practice?


Multi-miking Kick & Snare

The kick mics I put up were an ADK S7 and a BLUE Kickball, a good all-purpose condenser+dynamic pairing that delivered what I was looking for without too much fuss. I had a bit more leeway with the positioning here because I'd built a little blanket-covered tunnel out from the front of the drum to control spill, so I was able have both mics about a foot away from the drum. The S7 had started out three feet away, and already provided plenty of LF woof there, but I'd moved it inwards twice in search of more focus. The Kickball had started out in the hole of the drum's resonant head, but having heard the weight of the S7, I decided to move it back a bit, as well as reduce its low-frequency emphasis switch to the minimum setting, so that the signal provided a more complementary dose of attack and midrange tone.

Here already, the ASP008's high-pass filter helped me out by tightening up the S7's sub-bass, which felt like it was giving my speaker cones a bit too much of a work-out -- that mic goes way down low, and although I liked the rest of the sound, the subs felt too much for this particular production. A typical fixed high-pass filter would have been no use at all here, though, because it'd have turned over way too high, whereas I was able to set the ASP008's to 20Hz, allowing all the drum's 50-100Hz meat to survive intact while I toned down the extreme lows. Given that the mics were destined to be mixed together onto a single track, I wanted to make sure I had the best polarity combination, so flexed the polarity switches too, although it turned out that their default polarity relationship happened to give the most solid low end in this instance. Combining them with the rest of the drumkit mics, however, necessitated a polarity inversion on both mics to get the best blend.

The snare close mics were quite critical to this recording, because the drummer's rather dominant hi-hat meant I couldn't really draw the snare's character from the overheads as I often like to. So I paired two Shure mics for that: an SM57 and a KSM137, gaffered together on a single stand because space was tight around the kit. These did the trick straight away, once the tuning of the snare itself had been lowered to give it more weight, the close proximity of the mic capsules obviating any need for polarity inversion. Not that I didn't check, though -- the resulting super-thin combination provided ample confirmation that the mics were already well phase-matched.

Sculpting Guitar Tones

With the two drums is was more a case of just blending the mic characters, whereas with the guitar tones the mics had a little more distance between them, collecting different aspects of the cab sound and providing more opportunity for subjective phase-tinkering. I had given each of the guitars a Groove Tubes GT55: a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser mic. I was looking to these mics for body and warmth, placing them towards the edge of a speaker cone in each case to keep the sound fairly soft-edged. As I'd suspected, however, one of them became a little boomy from the close placement, so I switched in the ASP008's high-pass filter on that channel, sweeping it up to around 80Hz, allowing the natural frequency-recessing above the filter's cutoff point to pull the guitar's 100-200Hz zone subtly back into line.

To complement the GT55s I originally put up an Electrovoice RE20 and a Shure SM7 for the two amps respectively, but neither made the final cut, being replaced by a vintage Sennheiser MD421 and a Shure SM57 respectively before I was able to achieve the midrange solidity and cut-though I was hoping for. Again, though, the proximity effect was slightly clouding the SM57's low end, so I punched in another high-pass filter there at 50Hz to rein that in a touch. The polarity buttons got a big work-out here as well while we worked our way through different combinations of mics and mic positions -- some combinations seemed utterly hopeless until I'd flipped one of the signals, while others (including, by chance, both the final setups) turned out better without polarity adjustments.

Yes, But What Did It Sound Like?

Enough of the words, though: what did it actually sound like? In anticipation of this question I asked the band at the end of the session if they'd mind playing the same short section of one of their songs a few times for me, so that I could reroute all the multi-mics to separate tracks for demonstration purposes -- and they kindly agreed! So here are files for all the mics I've mentioned, which show what each of the individual mics sounded like, what the filtered mics would have sounded like without their filtering, and also how each pair of mics mixed together (both with the default polarity I preferred, and also with one of the mic signals inverted):

Kick:

Kick -- Mic 1: ADK S7 with 20Hz high-pass filter (MP3 - WAV)

Kick -- Mic 1: ADK S7 without 20Hz high-pass filter (separate take) (MP3 - WAV)

Kick -- Mic 2: BLUE Kickball (MP3 - WAV) Kick -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix (MP3 - WAV)

Kick -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix, Mic 2 inverted polarity (MP3 - WAV)

Snare:

Snare -- Mic 1: Shure KSM137 (MP3 - WAV)

Snare -- Mic 2: Shure SM57 (MP3 - WAV)

Snare -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix (MP3 - WAV)

Snare -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix, Mic 2 inverted polarity (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 1:

Guitar 1 -- Mic 1: Groove Tubes GT55 (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 1 -- Mic 2: vintage Sennheiser MD421 (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 1 -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 1 -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix, Mic 2 inverted polarity (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 2:

Guitar 2 -- Mic 1: Groove Tubes GT55 with 80Hz high-pass filter (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 2 -- Mic 1: Groove Tubes GT55 without 80Hz high-pass filter (separate take) (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 2 -- Mic 2: Shure SM57 with 50Hz high-pass filter (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 2 -- Mic 2: Shure SM57 without 50Hz high-pass filter (separate take) (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 2 -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix (MP3 - WAV)

Guitar 2 -- Mic 1 + Mic 2 mix, Mic 2 inverted polarity (MP3 - WAV)

(Click here if you'd like to download all the WAV files as a single 70MB ZIP archive.)

Of course, what I haven't yet mentioned is that I also took the opportunity to generate a whole series of examples of the ASP008's input-impedance switching while I was at it, but we'll leave that story for another post...

About The Author: Mike Senior is an award-winning audio engineer who's worked with artists such as The Charlatans, Reef, Therapy, Nigel Kennedy, and Wet Wet Wet. For six years he was Reviews Editor for Sound On Sound, the world's best-selling music recording magazine, and writes regularly for their popular Mix Rescue, Session Notes, and The Mix Review columns. He is also the author of the best-selling Focal Press book 'Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio', a complete mixing method based on the techniques of the world's most famous producers.

All photos taken by: Blake Lewis

Thanks for reading.

Audient

We recently came across this review from Josh Hayward at Astral Plane Recording Studios about our ASP008 Microphone Preamplifier on Gearslutz:

"All 10s? You bet. The ASP008 by Audient is by far one of the best sounding preamps I have heard and I've used quite a lot of stuff out there, however this one is in a league of it's own.

With the Christmas tree in place and the edit suite locked up for a warm and fuzzy holiday season, I've finally managed to get onto the sofa with a mulled wine to bring you this review. Two weeks ago I put to the test the Audient ASP008 preamp against one of its more expensive rivals, the True Systems Precision 8i. Both were being used to track a live big band on location in Central London, being fed directly into a BlackBox Recorder created by a company called JoeCo.

ASP008 Competition Winner

Between September and November we gave you the chance to win an ASP008 Microphone Preamplifier and on November the 5th we announced the winner via 'Project Terra'. The lucky man was 'Brandon Cousins' from New York and here he is with his brand spanking new ASP008!

Congratulations Brandon. Enjoy! Thanks for reading.

Andy @ Audient

At Audient we pride ourselves in giving back to our customers, which is why we decided to give you the chance to win an ASP008 microphone pre-amplifier back in September. As you know we recently announced the winner, however we chose a very unconventional method to unveil this unknowingly lucky fan. That method was ‘Project Terra’.

Here at Audient we love nothing better than receiving positive feedback from happy customers about our products. So when we recently received an email from a 'Drew Erfle' describing a rather intriguing story regarding one of our ASP008 microphone preamplifiers we felt inclined to share it with you. After receiving the email I caught up with Drew to find out what happened:

1) What's your name and where are you from?

My name is Drew Erfle, and I am from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

2) What is your profession?

I am an audio engineer, producer, and composer/arranger. I am also currently taking a bachelor in music, majoring in Digital Audio Arts at the University of Lethbridge.

3) How did you get into audio engineering?

My interest in audio engineering dates back to recording an album two years ago. It was my first time in a major studio, and I became interested in recording and the creative possibilities that existed therein. I'm a fan of Glenn Gould and his thoughts and writing on recording have influenced me immensely. Finally, when I was younger, I was a huge fan of Psychedelic music which often utilized the studio in fascinating and musical ways (in my opinion, of course).

4) You recently told us your studio was involved in a fire. What happened?

Last June, during the night (the estimate is around 1:30 - 2:00am) there was a very serious lightning storm and the most probable theory is that a rogue lighting strike hit a forklift that was outside the building where my studio was housed (I should also mention that we lived in the same building).

Studio One:

The strike caused the forklift's hydraulic tank to explode, and the area beside it, a paint room for wood finishing, caught fire. It was at this point that I was woken by one of the other tenants who was at his business working late (this happens very often). Because of his presence, both me and my father, whom I was living with, were able to make it out safely. It was at this point, before any law enforcement had arrived, that I ran back to the studio (It was located on the complete opposite side of the building, and the fire hadn't spread very far at this point) to try and remove what equipment I could.

Studio Two:

I managed to remove the computer that stored all our protools sessions, one guitar and a bass. I was heading back in to retrieve both our ASP008, and UA Apollo DSP interface when the police arrived, and I was no longer allowed back in. 

After that, I was forced to spend a gruelling night/morning watching the entire building get engulfed in flames (or so it seemed), and I was told that none of our gear would survive the extreme heat, flames, and smoke.

After the fire had been put out, except for a few pockets, we were allowed back in for a few minutes to collect what we could. I was relieved to find that the actual flames had not progressed past the wall of the house, but the gear had still been subject to extreme heat and smoke damage. Upon entering I saw that all my key instruments (a Line 6 keyboard, a Roland digital piano and Hammond A100 plus our friend's 1972 clavinet) were destroyed, except for an old Wurlitzer organ that had been at the very far end of the room, away from the fire. The Mackie universal controller that you can see in my picture was completely destroyed as well, as was my Fender Stratocaster. Truth be told, it wasn't looking good for either the ASP008 or the Apollo.

The shocking damage caused:

We collected them, and brought them them back to my mother's house, where we stored them in the garage. The next day I went out to the garage to test the systems, but I didn't have much hope, after all, you're often told that sensitive and high quality equipment is the most susceptible to damage. After wiping off some of the smoke, I plugged in the ASP008...

You can imagine my surprise when the lights all turned on! I was beginning to get cautiously optimistic. One by one, I plugged in a mic to each channel, and lo and behold every single channel registered as receiving signal! Upon further inspection, I noted that every channel's features (phantom power, line input, polarity reverse and HPFf) were fine - even the buttons hadn't sustained damage!

Since then, I've been using the 008 regularly, and still haven't had any issues with the system, and no difference in the sound of the preamps.

Post fire:

I don't know how you build these preamps, but in my opinion anything that can survive a major fire, still work, and still sound top quality, is some of the best craftsmanship you can get.

Being Used Recently:

If you have any stories regarding your Audient product then please feel free to get in contact with us.

Thank you for reading,