May 2018

We are a bit late with this one as it is quite hard to find the time to get these out. Hopefully we can get back into a monthly routine with these updates.

Last month saw our good pal and fantastic engineer Mark Perry track an EP for The Cutaways and a compilation song for Deafcult. Fletcher Matthews was in documenting some songs for Sweater Curse andSemester, Dan Sugars finished an LP for local band Mayhem for Mary and Gareth Hargreaves was in working with WildHeart.

Drawing Blood came in to track their LP which had actually been in the works for 10 years! Gil Cerrone was also up from Melbourne to finish their demonstration come EP, one of the songs from this session will be used in a split 7″ with Brisbane band Hraun. The Hraun gang will be in this week to lay down their track.

Rock dogs Clever also tracked their LP. Its a vicious, crude and primal thing and its process was documented below if you are interested.

In other news we begin recapping our Amek console this week as all capacitors have arrived. This will be a process that will be drawn out over the next month or so as we can pull channels out to work on in between sessions. We also have a new/old vase cabinet, a leslie and a 6 driver beast made by Dylan at Blacktone that will be here in a few days. Info on this will make the next newsletter!

Clever LP #2

Clever drum set:

Underground house kit, 76’ Ludwig stainless steel w/ a 10 lug Ludwig stainless steel marching tom converted to rack.
Snare drum: Jeff Ocheltree 6 x 14 phantom steel
This was a slightly abnormal microphone setup due to the idiosyncratic nature of the playing. It was also taken into consideration the nature of the songs and how the other instrumental tones were sitting with the drums. A conventional approach was not required.
70% of the sound is picked up thru the stereo blumlein mic. This was positioned so that the very minor null point that exists was in line with the diffracting element of the guitar spill (a door in this case). There was heaps of bass bleed but this was sympathetic to the overall sound of the recording.

Inside the bass drum is a beyerdynamic m380, this captures the pistonic effect of the batter side whilst also picking up the resonation of the front head because it is a fig 8. The proximity boost of this microphone is insane and there is nothing else that matches it when inside a bass drum.

The snare drum had a 201 on the top and a 57 on the bottom, one of the very few valid uses for a 57.

The mounted tom has AT 4041’s, having a matched pair allows you to take advantage of the differoid effect. In this case the top microphone was phase flipped rather than the bottom.

The floor tom has a CAD equitec on a cardiod setting with a 20dB pad on it. The bottom of the floor tom has an atm450.

There was some light and detailed ride playing so an M160 was put up over the bell.

The original speaker box that was brought to this session was found to be faulty. In this case the engl replacement sounded great. This is a particularly strange sounding V4, although they often do all sound a bit distinctive from each other. We spent a fair amount of time positioning the ribbon, but the m88 was where it usually likes to live on this cab. There is an ambient microphone a few metres back.

Amazing workhorse of an amplifier, the house acoustic 220. There is an re20 covering more of the mid and an m380 slightly closer and delayed. The closeness is for proximity boost in the low end.

The Cutaways Tracking Session