Recording Session: The Dailies
 

So, the recording session that I talked about back on this thread has wrapped up, and I thought I'd post some pics. I'll upload more when I get the chance, but for now, here are a few to whet your appetite:

The control room, listening to playback on one of the songs:

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Chris, on the far left, is the engineer. He's done work for John Mayer, My Chemical Romance, Tool, a pretty wide range of artists.

This is a pic of me at one of the keyboards. On top is an old ARP, on the bottom is a fender rhodes. We were running an old synth string sound out of the ARP, into a guitar overdrive stomp box, and back into the rhodes speaker with the tremelo on, then mic'ing the speaker.

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The keyboard room at this place is unbelievable. I'll try to post a big pic of the whole room, but basically, it had a 1929 Steinway (perfectly reconditioned), Hammond B3 organ with leslie speaker, 2 different fender Rhodes', 2 different Whurlitzers, an ARP, all in great shape. I didn't have to bring in much of my stuff, just an old Jupiter 8, my Nord Electro, an old Moog, and my computer to run the bleeps and blorps stuff. Pretty much keyboard paradise.

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This represents about 1/3 of the guitars that the guitarist, Corey Witt, brought to play on the session. Several customs, several rares, even one strat with a pin-up girl decalled on the front, to play just one single Led Zepplin-esque overdrive line on the chorus of one song. Gearlust is a beautiful thing.

Hey, that's kind of how I used to tape songs off the radio when I was a kid. You'd tell everyone in the room to be quiet, but your little sister always ended up making noise that ruined it.

Gearlust *is* a beautiful thing...so how come I can't see which old ARP it is, and you didn't even *try* to take a shot of the Moog. Sniff. Mope. Whine.

Further staring at the pic leads me to believe that the ARP in question, despite being covered by sheet music, is in fact an ARP String Ensemble. I missed getting one of those for free on Freecycle a few years ago by about five minutes. Damnit.

Mellotron?

Nah...a 'Tron is a big honking thing. The instrument in question is sitting on top of a Rhodes.

Nevermind it was a brain fart. I was thinking of the emu synths that emulate some of the vintage gear - including the mellotron.

the ARP was an OMNI-2

I had no idea we had such gear nerds in the house, or I would have certainly been more detailed. I'll know better next time.

Here's the drum setup. The room was intentionally left large, not baffled off, and the result was just a massive drum sound. The kick was mic'ed up using a reverse NS-10 speaker, and a pair of AKG C12s caught the overheads. We put a little bullet harmonica mic underneath the snare, which we fed into a princeton reverb guitar amp in a separate closet, which was then mic'ed with a sure 57. It's a little proccess, ear-candy sort of overdriven snare sound that mixes in beautifully underneath the direct top-snare mic'ing.

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This is Chris Steffen tweaking the outboard gear rack. I'm not ever going to begin to list the stuff that was in the racks - I'll just say that what he's tweaking is a Fairchild 760 stereo compressor, which is about a $30,000 compressor, and one of 6 that the studio owns.

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Damn...who bankrolled this place?

It's one of the old school big "A" rooms in LA - labels book it out for months at a time to make big budget records. It's currently owned by a guy named Rob Strickland, who was a studio keyboardist back in the day (thus the amazing keyboard room). He bought it from Dave Jerden, who has produced a ton of heavy records. Dave built it out to be his personal production space, but got tired of the hassle of maintaining it.

I assume Rob went and put together a business plan, got a monster bank loan, and bought the place, moved in some better gear, and runs it like any other business now.

Studios in LA are generally not a hobby.

Mellotrons actually had magnetic tape strips and heads, one per key, with a single voice (usually chorused violins/violas/chellos, but others were available) recorded on it. Pressing the asociated key caused a felt pad to hold the tape strip (weighted at both ends) to be pressed to a long cylindrical capstan and made the tape move against the head. For long sustains there was some wacky mechanical arrangement to get the capstan to let go and the tape reversed direction until it was played out, and the capstan engaged again.

I actually saw on in person once, it was amazing....and a mechanical nightmare if it ever went bad, I'm sure.

String synths came a little later...and boy were they welcome. Although you couldn't easily get that Genesis effect where you interrupted power to the capstan and bent all the pitches at once....:-)

Yep. Way too many moving parts. I read a magazine article once where the keyboardist from the Moody Blues described traveling with one. It was a nightmare.

I saw the Moodies in concert a number of times in my youth, so I do have an idea as to the size of the things. I thought perhaps this was an emulator and they were going for a mellotron-like sound.

I have had the dubious pleasure of actually carrying a Model 400 (single manual) 'Tron down a flight of stairs once. I cannot recommend it, either as a physical stressor, or as a psychological one (can you imagine the grief you would feel if you dropped the damn thing?).

Cool instruments. Wholly impractical as a touring device, but cool nonetheless. I am constantly pissed that I have yet to manage to find a suitable emulation of the classic Tony Banks/Genesis strings on any of my software or hardware gear.