One Mic Recording Session
During a recent studio session I captured a take of Your Dead by Norma Tanega, performed by myself and friends utilising what instruments we had together : acoustic guitar, bass guitar, keyboard and vocals. As we had recently in class took part in a podcast recording workshop, I decided to take the limitation of only one mic for multiple sound sources, which we faced with the podcast, and apply the same limitation to where I would usually utilise multiple input recording, in an ensemble recording context. Similarly to the podcast session I had a shortlist of mic choices to work with, a dynamic sm58, an AKG P120, or an SP B1.
Ideally I’d have had the sm58 on the bass amplifier to utilise it’s classic low-end tone response, with the AKG on the acoustic and the SP for vocals, with the keyboard bleeding into the two condensers for a sonic position more suited to it primarily being backing in the composition. However, as with the limitation of using only one mic, I opted for the SP B1 as this has the largest diaphragm of the two condensers, and generally in this context of recording a room a condenser is essential as it’s polar pattern pickup and high frequency response is important for a balanced sound. This is especially the case for the SP as it’s presence is boosted slightly more than the AKG, which would be beneficial for the high acoustic transients as well as allowing the vocals to cut through properly, and it provides an adequate bass roll-off to minimise unwanted rumble from the recording.
Mic placement was a challenge due to the size and shape of the room, which being basically rectangular the microphone was placed in the middle of one of the longer walls fixed on a mic stand, the sonic field of the room in relation to the mic (directly infront being 0’) consisted of : the dry bass signal (before amp) sat at the left (-80’) / the vocals infront (0’) but positioned further away than usual for proper balance against the backing (~50cm) / then also at 0’ (and 50cm below) the mic sat the amp for the keyboard which gave it a decent backing placement due to it’s signal mostly consisting of reflections off the back wall when being picked up by the mic / the right side then was the acoustic guitar (at +45’), being a fairly standard positioning when it comes to panning guitar in a mix I figured it’d therefore lead to a fairly natural capture / with then finally at +80’ the bass amp, which required being further down and out of the way than the rest of the sound sources as bass is a power signal that could easily overpower the mix in such a setup.
This microphone then was connected to a BOSS VE-20 vocals focused recording processor, which added a small bit of reverb to enhance the signal from the relatively dry clean tone, as well as splitting the signal into stereo from mono. The VE-20 also provided the phantom power and pre-gain for the microphone, with the latter being fairly higher than usual to properly pickup the whole room. This signal then fed to the stereo inputs on the interface where it was then converted into a digital signal and sent to the recording session on the DAW software.
When it came to the monitoring, the mics output could be listened to from either the vocal processor or the DAW output itself, I chose the later as it of course would be the final recording point which is the most crucial to monitoring the signal. When monitoring I’d noticed that the high-frequency response had picked up a lot of sounds that typically may cause an issue, however because of the song-choice I had figured that when It came to the post production I’d not dampen the high-end and remove these taps and clicks to keep it similar style to the fairly similar sound on the original, where such details had been left in also.
On the recording process itself, I armed the two tracks from the mic’s signal, hit record and left it rolling. We got a few takes, the playing coming together better with each take, the final recording from the day which I picked out as the best and most consistent / concise was around 3:30 in length, and the instrumentation there-in was tight in places but kept a loose feel which we did figure again suited the style, the song is certainly one we’ll be rehearsing again due to it’s complex almost polyrhythmic relationships between each of the instruments rhythms themselves.
At the mixing stage, I added another duplicate of the left mono signal to the already existing two tracks for a triple-tracked mix. This additional track I focused on the bass with an EQ plugin, and was to tightened with another compressor to the one which would get the whole mix, as it would help solidify it in the mix. The left and right tracks then were put into their respective positioning with the directional mixer plugin (over pan-pots cause F logic pro’s none degree based pan-pot settings), which split the left signal at 300Hz (with the highs direction being -90’ and lows being 0’), and positioned the full right signal at 90’. The left side split was crucial to keep the mix balanced, as the low-end phased out against the third bass-focused track otherwise.
These two both then took roll-off at 80Hz to reduce sub rumble, and the right-side received some short timed reverb to enhance the spacial field, which although may sound initially to be unbalanced was then spread properly across the mix’s sonic field in the final output processing. The output processing then consisted of first a tape delay with no-delay time, a trick I use to help saturate a mix and boost it to a fuller sound, with said spread settings to balance out the highs subtly at either side, with feedback at 33% and wet output at 13%, the effect again is subtle but certainly helped balancing out the final mix. This then passed through a compressor, final touch EQ and an adaptive limiter, all of which were used to just slightly tweak and finalise the recording.
Being relatively satisfied with the final outcome, here below is the link for your listening.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o8M_N1pJt3bSR8JHVRlTfUvLrMgzDONg/view?usp=sharing
