My Eastman E-22SS/V-SB
As I set out to record the more acoustic singer-songwriter album Resonance, I took a good long time developing the songs. I wanted to create simple arrangements that would include some musical ear candy but also allow me to replicate the songs live and in person. I wanted to be able to play the song fully with just one guitar and have limited embellishments on the album version. For the most part, that worked out with very little orchestration on the tracks. I will talk about each one of them in an upcoming post.
I spent a long time deliberating whether I should try to record guitar and voice in one take. Throughout my recording of other albums, it was always apparent to me that one take throughout the whole track is better than copied and pasted bits and pieces, even when those bits and pieces are played perfectly. There's a certain continuity about a seamless take that sounds better, even when the subtle mistakes are left in. There is a variety, intonation, and a certain feel that you can't replicate with perfect identical parts. I have done that a lot on my electric tracks where I would write copying and pasting, and then I would learn all the parts and play through in one long take. It's not even that you can hear the edits, it's more about the continuity of the parts. The feel is just different, almost like when you listen to programmed drums and they are quantized too perfectly. The little imperfections are what makes it sound real whether it's dynamics, timing, etc.…
So, let's talk about some of the challenges when tracking acoustic guitars for songs that may or may not have drums or percussion. When you're in the writing phase, it's impossible to paste verses and choruses because they don't line up unless you use a metronome. For me, I have never had any success using a click track. If I set a click track to 80 beats per minute and a drum track to 80 beats per minute, I can play perfectly to the drum track but never to the click. So, I had to find a way around using a click track. One thing I would do was use the UJAM Groovemate One plug-in and lay down a track with simple tambourine or shaker. For me this always works better than a simple click. It would allow me to cut and paste things while in the writing process. It also obviously good for maintaining tempo even if I later moved the percussion track. So that's what I did for most of the writing and tracking. A simple tambourine or shaker track kept me in line and allowed me to make edits if i absolutely had to do so.
Working at home in a less than ideal acoustic space, I spent a few sessions trying to record live guitar and vocals while achieving isolation. This didn't work out so well even when trying to use two microphones. The bleed between the small condenser mic that I was using on the guitar and the large condenser mic or ribbon-like used for voice was almost impossible to avoid. And I know that while I'm not an engineer, I tried everything recommended and could not get the oscillation I wanted.
So, I did things like running a mic for my voice and a direct line into my quad cortex for the guitar piezo pickup. Then I re-recorded the vocals to get a clean track without guitar which, although quiet, was still present on the original take. Then I re-recorded a few acoustic tracks with a small Lewitt condenser mic. From there, I went back and listened for parts or inflections that I liked and structured the track. There were several times when I tried to use the one takes, and it caused lots of problems with ghost sounds in the background, either a small guitar part picked up in the vocal mic or leftover vocals picked up in the guitar mic.
Many of you reading this might wonder what my mic set up is, and why did I keep it so simple. I tried my Ashton Origin and I tried my Golden Age R1 Active Mk II Ribbon mics, but I wasn't as happy with them as I was with the Lewitt LCT140 Air matched pair I own. There was something in the directness and purity of the tone that I like. I tried XY, ORTF, and a spaced pair set up. However, I really found that the trio of guitars that I used: My Eastman E22SS/V-SB, Blue Ridge BG-140, and the Bourgeois Touchstone Country Boy OM, all sounded best with a single small condenser pointed at or about the 14th fret and body joint. The Blue Ridge is probably the best recording out of the three, it just sounds great and matches nicely with my voice in a simple setting. The Lewitt also allowed my to keep it simple and to roll of some low end and add a little "air" right in mic for the most part. After listening to hours and hours of my guitars recorded, it just made now sense to add in stereo mic. If I used two guitars on the track, it always sounded better to me to have two mono guitars, each recorded with a single LCT140, panned hard left and right.
After I tracked all the songs that would find their way onto the album, I was still torn about one take versus constructed tracks. I tried for a good week to do them perfectly in one take, and while these were quite good, they were not quite up to the level that I wanted production-wise. So after trying one takes on the two microphones or setting up with my Zoom H4 recorder, I decided to keep working on perfecting the multitrack versions. Even though it wasn't exactly how I wanted it, the continuity of single takes for the whole track and the clean recording of vocals and guitar allowed me to get most of the way to my original vision.
More next time...
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