Making "That's Right!"
Page 2 of 5
How did you mic the horn players?
I had a couple of things that I did. I basically set them up in a triangle, where you have two facing each other and one facing at 90 degrees, and then I put some Auralex between the two mics facing each other, basically just to dampen down the trumpet. But I was very very pleased with the results. Basically, it just took a little bit of time to make some very fine adjustments in the relative positions of the microphones, the relative angles of their diaphragms, doing little things like adjusting the height of the microphone on the trumpet.
How high was it?
The height of the microphone on the trumpet was about four inches above the bell and then pointing back down towards it.
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Where did he point the trumpet?
He basically played straight up. The mic wasn’t pointed straight at the throat of the bell, it was pointed at a slight angle and it helped clear up some of the phase problems. Also, the booth I recorded them in is an incredibly dead booth. That’s what that booth was designed for. The only reflective surface in there really is the glass. It’s pretty dead in there.
Were they facing the glass?Two of them were facing each other and one of them was facing the glass. The trumpet was not facing the glass. He was one of the side people.
Did you have problems with reflections or bleed from the trumpet?
The trumpet was the one that caused the most problems, definitely. The trumpet was so loud, I could keep everything out of the trumpet mic, that was no problem. But the trumpet getting into everything else was a challenge.
What kinds of mics did you use for the horns?
I used on the trumpet a [Sennheiser] 421, a great trumpet mic. On the baritone sax, I used a Blue Baby Bottle.
That’s interesting.
Yeah, I was very pleased with it. I hadn’t planned on it, I kind of grabbed it and said let’s see what this thing will do, and was thrilled. It’s probably the best bari mic I’ve ever used. It’s a nice mic, it’s amazing considering how little it costs what it’ll do.
It’s under $1,000, right?
Yeah, the Baby Bottle is. It’s cardiod only, but it seems to work really well with acoustic guitar and brass. And for the tenor, it was a Neumann, the next one up from the TLM-103, that the producer brought with him. We have M149s here, but he had this so we used the 149s over the drums.
Is that particular mic part of his sound?
No, I think it was more just, hey, I brought this thing, want to try it out? And it did a fine job.
Did you have the drums in a separate room?
No, the drums were in the main room. Also in that room were the bass player, playing direct, the guitar player, who was patched into his amps in another room, the lead vocalist was in a booth off of that room, the horns were in a different booth off that main room, and the keyboardist was also in that room with the drums. And we used an upright piano that we had kind of tucked around the corner and had built gobos around and then miked it various places from the back and the front. And he was kind of barricaded back there with the piano and the Hammond.
Was it hard to get a good sound out of him with the drums in the room?
Not necessarily. It took a little bit of work. But I think that was mostly to do with the piano that we got for that session. I mean I could not have made it work with any kind of a grand. It had to be an upright to get the isolation that I needed. It was a fine piano, but you could actually hear it age on the recording! The tone changed subtly from the first takes to the end of the second half day. He was really bangin’ that thing.
But it worked out well. I was able to do a reasonably good job of isolation, because we have a live end and a dead end of the room. He was at the dead end and the drums were at the live end, and was kind of around a corner from the drums.
How tall are the ceilings in the main room?
In the dead end, they are about 12 feet. At the live end, they’re eight feet. It’s a sloping ceiling.
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