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I'm having a session coming up shortly where the plan is to record vocals and acoustic guitar, some tambourine and background vocals "live" it's a sort of 60's retro songs so any retro tips would be welcome!

One set up i would like to try is to use a figure of 8 along the guitar, use an old white Sennheiser 421 for close vocals and ad a Neumann Fet sm2 as a room/distant mic, add some paralell compression to the vocals (add some mids to the paralell, motown style!) some Lexicon plate and a toch of compression and stick it straight to a Cdr burner.(Or should i use the old 1/4"?)

We are using a damped tracking room and have a seperate room for monitoring with Genelec 1031 and Yamahas along with my beloved 4usd computer speakers.

How would you do it? I've had my share of problems with these kind of recordings. Would be interesting to get some other's view of the senario!

Keep em in the red ! /Toby

toby@cascatoma.com
http://www.cascatoma.com

Comments

Richard Monroe Mon, 10/13/2003 - 18:59

Being an old hippy, I'm too stoned to see your mic cabinet in my crystal ball. I would put a Shure SM82 line level broadcast mic on the guitar. If you don't have that, us a C414, any type will do, close mic'd around the 12th fret. Make the old guy sit down to play. You have to decide on the basis of the talent how close "close" mic'ing is. The Sennheiser's not bad for vocals, but it's not too forgiving. I'd put up Shure SM7, and backing vox on old AKG dynamics. For style points, D320B would be perfect. If you're rich, RCA ribbons will do just fine. Put your best clean omni in the middle of the room for ambience, and move it around until the feeling is right. For that tambourine, best small diaphragms you got. Earthworks is perfect, and if that's too expensive, Behringer ECM8000's perform shockingly well in that role.-Richie

anonymous Tue, 10/14/2003 - 00:28

Thanks a lot for the reply. A lot of useful info for us who not where around when it all happened!
Especially about tambourines, o boy do they have transients that can kill a digital recording and make them sound like a bag of rusty nails instead of the tineling we were after. Omni room mic is something i should use more but i guess i'm forgiven for coming from the generation of cardiods and multitrack seperation!
All the best / Toby

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