I’m gonna try to actually do a blog maybe. I’m not gonna put a periodic expectation on myself because that will fail. But every so often I’m gonna pick a record that I worked on and write a little bit about making it. No juicy stories or anything the artist wouldn’t want written but instead insights into the process and some technical stuff that recoding needs might like. Anyway here goes.
I’m starting with this one because the recording process was so simple and the results are so amazing.
The backstory of this record if you are not familiar with it, is that it is a re-recording of the full band self titled Watchhouse record but just Andrew and Emily. Hence the title “Duos.” When I recorded “Such Jubilee” (the band was called Mandolin Orange then.) I thought it was very important to record as much of it as possible with Andrew and Emily in a room together with no isolation and with them as close to each as they would be if they were playing together in their living room. I was inspired by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings who I think are excellent at making records like this. It totally worked. I’m assuming that is why they came to me for this duos album.
I mentioned the simplicity of this recording and here is what I mean. The album cover shows it all. Two people and two mics. However, these aren’t ordinary mics or ordinary people. We used 2 RCA 44’s in a Blumlien pattern. Really its an X/Y pattern, but they are ribbon mics and so their inherent bidirectional nature make it a Blumlein(this is the recording nerd part). The RCA 44 is arguably the best ribbon mic ever made. Basically each mic pointed at a player but the combination captures the room as well from the back sides of the mics. I find this technique to simultaneously be natural and super real. While this is a cool technique, it’s capturing 2 voices and 2 instruments all at once so it relies heavily on the musician’s ability to respond to what the mic is doing and adjust their position to it in order to create focus on either the voice or the instrument depending on what is needed in the song. Andrew and Emily did this masterfully. Look at the record cover again. Now close your eyes and imagine you are sitting on the floor between them. That is what this record sounds like. It isn’t over worked, we mixed the whole album in a day, there are 1 or 2 overdubs (harmonica I think), the only reverb is the room and a little bit of the EMT 140 plate reverb we have in the church at Echo Mountain, and we really only did a few takes of each song to get the ones that are on the record.
To me, it is one of the more gratifying ways to make a record. It is a real moment in time that is trapped forever(hopefully) so that all of you can experience what I got to experience over and over again.
So my note on this one is that if you have huge talent in the room, make sure that you don’t over complicate the process. Engineering is an art not a competition and sometimes too many brush strokes hides the beauty.