well this morning i begin emoting with my voice. guitars are put on pause. our friend gary who is a tone and note guru leaves us and we are again left on our own. i couldn’t be happier with where the guitars are at this point. so i will sing. i’m feeling my soul swell and it is as good a time as any to let some of this out. so i will sing. we will first do a blind test to decide upon a mic. for illuminate the winner was a blue kiwi. now we have access to many fine vocal mics including some of the typical u87 types as well as some of the very famous vintage variety such as the akg c12 but every voice is different and when put up against this healthy dose of competitors last time the kiwi did the job. this go however it may have met it’s match. shane has now procured the blue bottle. this is the largest mic in the barn for sure. it’s huge. it has interchangeable capsules that are quite typical in size but the body of the thing is over a foot long. the test will be conducted as follows…i will be in the blue room singing. there will be a kiwi set up. there will be the bottle set up. shane will set up the signal path and i will sing first into the kiwi, then into the bottle. both will be recorded. shane will not know which one is which. it’s like when they would do the pepsi challenge. they would cover the can so you couldn’t choose with bias. same thing. you see the bottle is more expensive and so impressive to behold that you would simply expect it to capture my vocal in a more pleasing manner. but we need impartiality here. so the blind test. i will let you know soon who has won and what the signal path is. i also need to give the low down on all the guitars but i will need to sort through all of the parts and see which ones are winners. don’t want to mislead you and give you the goods on guitars that don’t make it on the record. now i will go sing.
so the bottle won. with the b – 0 capsule. i just finished up four passes of “o god where are you now? (in pickeral lake? pigeon? marquette? mackinaw?)” and we will comp from those. that simply means we listen a phrase at a time between the four takes and pick the best of what we have there. then once we have a comped vocal we will listen down and if there are issues still present we will then resing some parts. that one went fast and the moment was thick. i know they won’t all be this way. some of them fight you. so i am enjoying these seconds before moving on to the next tune. i’m not sure which i’ll go for…
the signal path is as follows…
i’m singing into a blue bottle with the b-0 capsule
the power supply on it is padded to -6 db
into a telefunken v76 mic pre 34 db of gain on the mic pre
into a urei la3a in compressor mode gains at about 40 percent peak reduction 45 percent
into another urei la3a in limit mode both gain and peak reduction at about 45 percent
into dbx902 for a little dessing
and then an amek 9098 eq with high pass at 60htz to take out the rumble and about 1.5 db at 21 k
so i have moved on to “wholly yours”. i’m still referring to it as wholy yours but it has caused problems around the barn here with file transfers and such so i have already lost the battle. we will spell it properly from now on rather than try to be so clever as to use deft word play as we want everyone working on the proper version of the song…
so i got through “wholly yours” and “here is our king” and started “foreverandever etc…” and the voice just wasn’t happening. done for the day. so we got through 3 songs today which ain’t too shabby and were quite enjoyable. you never know which way it’s going to go but today it was painless and fun. we’ll see what tomorrow holds. we’ll sing another in the morning. we just had bwack cut some ammo for a couple of songs. just gave him a click and told him to play a straight beat. then we had him do a pass of just fills. ammo man. ammo.
what the!??? hogan has lost his mind!!!!! he walked in ready for the hoe-down and saw the keytar sitting on the table and he lost his freaking mind!!!!!