#e945

South by SouthWest is, quite frankly, always a bit of a brain fry. I don't mind, simply because I have never been there not working. I can't imagine just attending as the amount of decisions to be made when no one is paying you to be anywhere are just too much. Lucky us, we were working. We were on the job for one of our sponsors, Sennheiser, who were sending us artists from the Paste Magazine showcase at SXSW. Our team split up; with Ariff and Zack off to cover the remainder of the Ambassadors' performances and Taylor and myself (Lonely Paul) tasked with running the sessions on the bus. We discovered our rhythm in these sessions as well. My position, while continuously addressed as engineer in the planning phase, really amounts to producer. Taylor, on hand to film the sessions, had spent the previous year working with everyone who came through the sessions and is no slouch in the recording world himself. So, rather than having a guy around to film the session and wait a lot while we made things happen for the session, Taylor was able to double as engineer. I am quite happy with our discovery. We have to move pretty quickly in there and the second set of hands left me to sort routing, make choices about preamps and microphones and then leave the fine tuning positioning to happen once I am out of the tracking room and manning the desk and DAW. Conveniently placed in the live room; Taylor was then right on hand to roll camera when I pressed the red button. The MobileStudio Recording Team was born of necessity and led to efficiency. This is what happens when your team of creatives are all multi-disciplinary in their abilities: you save time and money and get things done. The first artist Sennheiser sent over was the lovely and charming Kelly McGrath. Kelly is a recent transplant from Los Angeles to Nashville who performs as a country artist. However, I feel like her work really transcends a genre that has become hard to discern from MOR or adult alternative or whatever other thing they are calling things for the sake of promoting them at the counter of Starbucks or whatever. Kelly is more classic in her interpretations of the genre, recalling artists like Patsy Cline, some have even referenced Janis Joplin in her case, but I was never a Janis man so it didn't automatically occur to me. Regardless of what you call what she does, it really is quite lovely to watch her perform and she has an instant charisma that makes her material endearing and heart wrenching all at once. I don't really know what happened or how it started, but I remember this: we all really hit it off. Maybe it was shared humor. Maybe it was just that SXSW thing where you're all far from home, whether for the past few months or just the week, but you don't have your usual support network and you are open to bonding. Whatever it was, within a few minutes of talking to Kelly, we had determined that we were going to catch her material in the raw, the way she performs it live. We had already set her session up estimating for the fact that she was bringing an acoustic and that we thought we would shoot for comfort. We opened up the space in the live room and set up a two mic session for the acoustic, with the Sennheiser e914 pointing down the neck and the MK4 at the mouth of the body. I then ran our Neumann TLM103 as a vocal mic. I ran the e914 through the ADL 600 and ran the Neumann and the MK4 both through the True P2 Analog Preamp. Taylor had sat and played guitars and done a basic level check for me, so when Kelly got there, we were ready to go. We took advantage of the simplified set up and just sat down with Kelly and shot the breeze. We filled her full of water, hummus, and pita chips and then just talked about everything from life and love to what brought all of us to SXSW this year. As for the specifics of the conversation, well, that's between us. More importantly, we all really bonded in the start of the session, making a very comfortable place for Kelly to give us an intimate and beautiful performance. I've said things about the importance of vibes in my session, and this was a completely organic and unplanned way of doing exactly what I try to focus on in the studio. I wonder if there will ever be an artist I work with where the session goes quite this way and I don't recommend trying to force such a thing. We were just very lucky to all end up in one room together and gel like we did. So, if you are reading about our sessions and taking notes; sincerity is important and comfort is everything. Keeping snacks on hand for your talent and making sure they have everything they need to not feel like something outside of the studio space is pulling them away is key to all of this vibe setting business. Eventually we solved all matters concerning life, the universe and everything else. With all that behind us, we still had two hours to track. So we parked our lovely little performer in the studio, grabbed her a bottle of water and fine tuned our level and mic positions to fit her now that we had her in position. Once I heard her voice coming in through the mics, I wired in a light reverb on an aux send and sort of formed the sound of the track by blending my three sources within it. I was pretty much instantly happy, having created a mix that, combined with Kelly's performance style, really would finish itself. For the record, all I used on the tracks were the stock standard Pro Tools Channel Strip plugin and the good old D-verb plugin. A little compression dropped behind the D-verb which I set to a short decay and we were in business. We ended up tracking three songs with Kelly: "Fool For You," "Lighting Strikes," and "Say Goodbye." I honestly couldn't have been happier and Kelly herself seemed pleased with the results. More importantly, by the time the session was done, she had faith in us to the point that I don't think she was even particularly concerned with hearing the playback. We ended up just going back into chatting mode and I eventually stepped aside and let Taylor take care of interviewing her. I couldn't have been happier with the results and I was completely confident to hand off to Taylor to let him wrap things up. As for the adventures we had after the session, I'll let Taylor tell you about that too. -Lonely Paul

Getting to know the artists when they come on the UniqueSquared Mobile Studio is not only a treat for the team, but it's also a great way for everyone to get comfortable with the recording experience. Studios are always a bit intimidating so finding that right bit of comfort before the red light starts blinking is always a plus. Lonely Paul and I found out a lot about Kelly McGrath and it's safe to say we became fast friends on the day of our session.

Sennheiser e945 Supercardioid Dynamic Stage Vocal Mic Review | Full Compass Description:

Sennheiser Microphones Sennheiser e945 Supercardioid Dynamic Stage Vocal Mic Review | Full Compass Description:

sennheiser microphones Video Rating: 5 / 5

Sennheiser SKM 100-835 G3 Wireless Transmitter CH A

sennheiser microphones – click on the image below for more information.

Sturdy metal housing

42 MHz bandwidth: 1680 tunable…

Review: Sennheiser Evolution 900 Series Microphones

Sennheiser’s evolution 900 series microphones are not new. In fact, they’ve been around since 2003, but if you haven’t checked them out you owe it to yourself to give them a listen. Many vocalists feel that the natural, clear sound and unique sensitivity of the e935 and e945 vocal microphones are a welcome upgrade from other popular stage microphones. For micing instruments, Sennheiser has built a reputation for quality and reliability with mics like their MD 421. In that tradition, they built the evolution series e609. Designed to be both road-worthy and studio-friendly, the evolution microphones are built for the professional musician and audio professionals. Like most professional microphones, they come with a clip and a bag to protect them, but they also come with an impressive 10-year warranty to protect the buyer. Let’s have a closer look at these mics.