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FOR MUSICIANS ONLYHurricane Sessions - Day ThreeSunday, November 16, 2008 -- As far as the band was concerned, Sunday was unscheduled to give me a chance to do rough mixes from Saturday's rhythm tracks. There were two side projects to take care of, though, personal things for Carl and Tim, not really part of my original plan. Carl wanted a recording of his dad, Don Hayden; Tim wanted one of his mom, Betty Jones. All I knew was that Don was going to do "old songs" and Betty was going to do some hymns. This page is mostly for their benefit because, like their children, the old folks were rehearsed and ready to go, didn't need to listen back between songs, never required a second take and both left without even asking if I could play it back for them.
So Carl was the rhythm section. This job came with the degree of difficulty that it appeared that Carl was playing some of these for the first time. When we got to "Drunken Sailor," Carl tried to make it harder than it was, giving me a rare opportunity to teach him how to play something. This was a very informal session, with far too many people in the room, plus two dogs and Carl and Cara's two-year-old daughter, Shayne. But this was Grandpa and it was all right. This was for family purposes more than anything. No one was expecting this to get nominated for a Grammy. The bar was low. Don's backstory involves the Navy, nuclear subs during the 1940s, and using his guitar and repertoire of sea chanties and drinking songs to earn free rounds at some exclusive golf courses in Scotland. I think he's still playing the same guitar, which has some seriously worn areas on the fretboard.
Tech Notes: Used the same basic procedure as the Friday sessions. A few of the songs have too much low-end on the vocals, resulting in boomy p's and b's. I compensated for it to some degree with an EQ plug-in to roll off below 300 Hz. "Drunken Sailor" and "You are my Sunshine" have more than normal compression because Don wanted more vocals and everyone sang behind him, but not a lot made it into the mic. I took some shortcuts to get sample versions up, so I'll go back to the original takes and repeat the process in a more thorough manner later and take care of things like Don's one mistake, most of the noise, and the popping p's. Nov. 28 -- Back to Don's Tracks -- Details on the process and the finished versions. |
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A couple of hours later, Tim shows up with his mom, Betty Jones. They want to do some hymns. Tim got his mom into singing just a couple of years ago. Like everyone else, Betty nailed all of her parts, one after the other.
Tim had vocal parts on three of these songs. When they were recording, he was singing his part wa-a-a-a-y too far away from the mic, and on the back side of its pattern. I knew they wouldn't come out right, but we would ultimately have him re-sing his parts for Betty's songs on Monday evening. On at least one of the songs, the residual track from the first take added an interesting dual-voice thing that would have been a little better it I had thought to pan them even a little. We've also got a little of Carl talking in the background on the vocal overdubs, which is going to cost him a demerit. That's why these are the rough mixes. Comments Nov. 22 -- Overall, these tracks are the cleanest of the lot so far. But before I do that clean-up work and get picky, some of these hymns could stand a little keyboard action to give them more of a church feel. So I'm going to see what I can do with them. Later that same day -- Put a couple of tracks on "O Holy Night". I still hear trumpets and angel voices, but I'm resisting the urge to overdo. Nov. 23 -- Necessary keyboard tracks added. Would have gone a little faster if I knew how to play any of the songs. Next, I go hunt down all the spurious noise and eliminate it. After that, I listen to the song over and over, doing minor tweaks until I don't hear anything else that needs to change. Nov. 24 -- Finished tracks are now posted on the main music page. Except for a 2 dB boost at 3k on one song, there was absolutely no EQ applied to the vocals. The low-end boost on the acoustic was varied slightly from song to song. Most of the "compression" and leveling of vocals and the acoustic guitar was done manually. The goal of the keyboards was simply to change the texture of the songs so they didn't all sound the same. A limiter was used on the final mix of two of the songs, also for texture variance more than anything else. |
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We
were back to the same acoustic set-up from Friday. The AKG vocal
mic and Carl's acoustic guitar, taken direct. Don also brought
his own guitar, a nylon-string (I'll check on the brand) that
was picked up by the vocal mic. He didn't want to mic it because,
"I'll just kind of be thump on it once in a while."
Don
says he's going to start with "Clementine," and I'm
thinking. Okay, he did say old songs, but c'mon...
When he opens his mouth and starts singing, I'm blown away. He's
in his 70s, has an amazing bass voice that added great character
to every song he sang. It was a really interesting session and
I've got some interesting production ideas for this batch.
The
crowd from earlier had cleared out and, except for one place
where a dog barks in the background, there are only a couple
of spots where I have to remove a wayward noise. Betty didn't
have Don's problem with p's and b's, but she used oxygen and
every once in a while that "pwshissst" sound pops in.
We can fix that by sampling one of them, copy it to another track,
invert the wave and use it to cancel out the sound every time
it appears, without effecting the other tones around it. This
also works for guitar amp hum and the general background from
the condenser mics.