#microphone preamplifiers

Hey!

So we've just launched our ASP880 and we're super excited about it! I'll take you through the recording of our latest product video with Swift 89.

Production Background

When talking with my colleague & drummer Andy Allen about how to demonstrate the new ASP880 unit in a "project studio" environment - we eventually decided after watching loads of product vids to do a Travis Barker style drum video over one of my hiphop-style beats that we found lurking on my "sketches & roughs" hard drive.

The track at that point was pretty much an embryo - a sketch with some programmed drums, some horn samples and a few synths. Replacing the programmed drums with something altogether more real sounding and unique would be just the ticket.

As a hiphop fan - I often find myself spending a lot of time listening to The Roots, and in particular am a huge fan of ?uestlove's drum sounds. Always unique, often kinda lofi - they are such a signature.

The plan was to head to Chris Munday @ CJM Productions and his really interesting "wooden hut" studios to craft an odd, slightly lofi but punchy and oldschool drum recording with as few a mics as possible, armed with some inspiration from ?uestlove and an engineer I respect hugely, Russell Elevado.

Swift 89 Makes The Song

We sent the rough beat to friend, iD22 user and rapper Swift 89 for some lyrical contribution and he really turned the "rough" idea into a song with bags of hook and energy. He pinged me back an MP3 with all stacked vocal parts on it, straight from pen to mic within 3 hours and I can't thank him enough for really making a difference. We loved what he did with it and set a date to re-record his vocals later on after drum tracking (now that we had a better arrangement for a sub 2-minute video).

Meanwhile - Tracking Drums

We arrived at CJM Productions and Andy setup his large Animal drum kit with some Fiberskyn heads on kick (resonant) & snare (batter) - thick and old sounding with no hole in the front head - we left it that way along with some pretty unorthadox drum tunings (reference our inspriation from ?uestlove) and I looked at mics and rigging the ASP880 and iD22 into the CJM patchbays!

Microphone Selection

In terms of microphone selection, we typically try to use "only" commonly available types and steer clear of costly esoteric solutions so that we can show that great results are indeed possible without having major budgets. It's always fun to use C12s, U47 FETs etc on drums but it's also not "typical" for most users!

Here's what we went for:

Kick Drum - Sontronics DM-1B

Snare Drum - Audix i5

High Tom - Sontronics DM-1T

Floor Tom - Sontronics DM-1T

Overheads - Sontronics Orpheus

Punch Mic - Shure SM7B

The majority of the sound comes from 4 microphones - the kick drum body and meat from the DM1B, the snare and kick punch from the SM7B buried in the middle of the kit and the space and positioning of the rest of the kit from the Orpheus pair. The close snare mic provided a little bit of presence on the snare but isn't largely featured in the mix and the tomtom mics were only used in a few exaggerated tomtom overdubs for added THUNDER!

Microphone Placement

To keep in with the "retro" theme we decided to use a popular microphone technique based loosely on the 'Glyn Johns' technique as you can see in the photo above.

In this config the two Orpheus overheads and Sontronics DM1B are the same distance from the centre point of the kick & snare (always a compromise) and the phase on the SM7B punch mic was tweaked with some subtle mic movement to play nicely with the 3 mic technique (as you can see below).

Variable Impedance

When we got to line checking, I took Chris through the variable impedance controls on the ASP880 (he is now an ASP880 user too ;-)), settling in on a combination that worked really well for the track. A MEATY and punchy kick drum sound creeped out of that DM1B using the HI Z setting, whereas I found the snare and toms sounded more "glued" and sat back in the overheads using the MED Z setting.

Read our other blog to find out what variable impedance can do for you and what it sounds like!

http://blog.audient.com/post//asp880-using-variable-impedance-what-to-listen-for

I was particularly pleased with the sound of the hi-hats - which were coming from the snare side Orpheus and i5 mostly. Spill was definitely our friend here!

All seven microphones were fed straight into the ASP880 and once we had tweaked the positioning a little bit (reverse polarity on the snare mic) we obtained a sound we were happy with and set off.

Andy worked out the pats as he went and did a great job - drummer for hire anyone? (now he has a healed foot post football accident)...

Check out the sound of the unprocessed (and quirky!) drums here:

ASP880 - Drums Unprocessed:

Drums - In The Mix:

I used quite a bit of Lexicon-style plate reverb in the mix - but I really like how it moved the entire kit to the back - even though they are still the most upfront thing in the mix. I suppose I was aiming for depth and a way to make the CJM drum room sound bigger.

Most of the drums have some EQ - mostly to sort out some of the room colouration and a bit of odd tuning issues! From there I have a few parallel kick/snare chains and an overall compressed drum parallel.

ASP880 - Drums Processed:

Vocal Tracking:

We returned at a later date and tracked Swift 89's vocals using an SM7B and ASP880 (set to HI Z). When line checking we found the SM7B needed a bit of help to get the full body of Swift 89's vocal. So using the new insert points on the ASP880, we inserted a dodgy old 1176LN FET compressor with a broken meter (going by ear went with more than SOME compression!).

Comping as we went, Swift delivered some pretty aggressive takes that had good impact. The mic and pre combination had some chesty colouration but we liked the performance of the takes so stuck with that over switching out the mic for something else and going again. To be honest most of that is the 1176 line amp...

Check out the unprocessed vocals here - in this situation I found the ASP880 brutally honest and I should have worked harder on the vocal tone. One thing is true, what you give the ASP880, it gives back in a pretty open and unforgiving way! If you work with it, it'll make you a better engineer, no hiding behind smeary transformer colouration here unless you insert it.

ASP880 - Vocals Unprocessed (1176 insert):

Vocals - In The Mix

In the end, I used a CRAZY amount of parallel fuzz distortion to give the vocals a messy over the top energy. In many places I automate this on and off to emphasize delivery of certain phrases. An unhealthy amount of tape delay and some lexicon-style reverb and again I was liking the overall delivery, remembering the initial influences of the Travis Barker remixes and The Roots.

The nice thing about tracking with our mic preamps - is that they are pretty natural even though there is a hint of 2nd and 3rd harmonic in them. To this end, you can go nuts with processing and the tracks take it pretty well. The vocal still has a natural topend, even with the parallel fuzz. I promise that on our next video we'll do something open & natural that I don't abuse in the mix!

Check out the processed vocals here...

ASP880 - Vocals Processed:

Until next time...

Here's the finished video.

ASP880 - Swift 89 - Keep It Moving

Tom @ Audient

Recording Flight Brigade on Location

Back in July I headed to a church located in a small village in Hampshire, to record Folk/Rock collective Flight Brigade. We recorded a few tracks with them when they kindly agreed to help us out at the ASP4816 launch party back at the beginning of the year, so to repay the favour I helped them out with filming a video for the great new tune - Creature.

You can check out their original ASP4816 session video here!

Planning the Session

With most music videos the band play along to their pre-recorded track, but in this case Flight Brigade had not had a chance to get into the studio to record it. So we decided to kill two birds with one stone, shoot the video and record the track at the same time. I thought I would talk you through the setup and problems that had to be overcome to get a decent recording onto disk.  To complicate matters slightly further, Flight Brigade aren't your average rock band. They have a wide range of acoustic and amplified instruments, from delicate violin melodies to distorted guitar lines. Normally to avoid issues with a relatively quiet instrument being drowned out by spill for a louder instrument, we would simply overdub one on top of the other. In this case that was not going to happen, we simply did not have the time, to record each instrument individually, and part of the idea was to get a good 'live' recording of the band playing together, which will have a distinctly different feel from the tracks that will be appearing on their debut album. So, the challenge was to get a great sound with all the musicians playing in the same room at the same time - oh, and we didn't have isolation booths available for amps, and the drums would not look good with partitions separating them off from the rest of the band.

The Setup

To minimise spill it was important to get the loudest instruments as far away from quietest instruments, and then carefully pick and position microphones to make the most of their polar patterns. We chose to position the band in a circle, all facing inwards, providing great line of sight, which normally helps get the best performance out of the band. We then tried to tackle the acoustics of the room, when it is a completely open space the room is very lively, with about a 2.5 second reverb tail - not ideal for this sort of music. To do this we made use of the chairs and tables available in the hall. Stacking the chairs up around the back of the drums, and then standing tables up on their ends, with blankets and quilts draped over them. This really helped break up the reflections in the room, getting it to a manageable reverb tail given that everything would be close mic'ed.

Mic selection was next up - we would have loved to put a condenser vocal mic up, but this just was not appropriate for the room, and with the band playing all together, the spill would simply be unmanageable. So we went for the Sontronic's STC80, which is a great cardioid dynamic, designed for live sound - it suits Ollie's (the lead singer) voice nicely, and reduced the spill issues to a very workable level. The violin would be another hot spot when it comes to spill, but the band have been using a DPA 4099V in live settings for the last couple of years with great results. The 4099 is a miniature shotgun condenser mic, making it very directional, coupled with the clip-on mount which allows the mic to get very close to the 'f' hole. This mic sounds great, very natural and picks up the detail of the violin, unlike most pickups. Other highlights include the Sontronic's DM1-B - a condenser kick mic which has both weight and presence, meaning that very little EQ is needed later on - and of course a pair of AKG C414-ULS as drum overheads, positioned quite low to reduce the room sound.

Complete Mic List:

Vox 1-3: Sontronic's STC-80

Violin: DPA4099V

Accordion: DI from pickup

Glock: Shure Beta-58

Lead Gtr: Rode NT1-A

Rhythm Gtr: Sennhieser MD421

Bass: LA Audio Di2

Keys: 2 x LA Audio Di2

Drum OHs: 2 x AKG C414

Toms: 3 x Sontronic's DM-1T

Snare: Rode NT2-A

Kick: Sontronic's DM1-B

Now we get onto mic pre's, we were running 17 channels of audio split over 3 Audient ASP008s. While the band were having their lunch, Seth Baines and I made a little video to go over what makes the unit so good for location recording. I've used the units on numerous sessions of various genres, classical, jazz, acoustic pop, and I don't hesitate to use them on anything. I talk about it in the video, but I'll say it again - in this sort of situation the variable high pass filters are just what's needed - each instrument has a different frequency range, and having the flexibility to roll off the low frequencies just before it starts to effect the instrument tonally really helped to clean up those channels which were picking up too much of the bass frequencies that were filling the room. The digital outputs really help too, in a situation like this I like to be certain I will have a copy of the best take, so I play it safe running a backup hard-disk recorder alongside Logic. I did this digitally using the two ADAT outputs which - at sample rates up to 48kHz - both output all 8 channels. Above 48kHz SMUX kicks in and the outputs are split 1-4 on the top ADAT output and 5-8 on the bottom output. In a situation where I needed to use higher sample rates, I could have made use of the AES outputs, which output simultaneously with ADAT at all sample rates. On top of that, the analogue outputs can feed another device at the same time - so you could have a 4 way split out of an ASP008 if needed. I hope you enjoy the results of the sessions, and thanks to Seth and the Flight Brigade guys for all their help! Audient distributes Sontronics Microphones in the UK.

Watch the Flight Brigade "Creatures" music video here!

Cheers!