Zac Schmidt

Peter Adams - Violin/Keys/Melodica

2008-10-21T20:23:00.008-04:00

Violin -
At the advice of Tom Haines (prof. of the Multitrack class) we miked the violin with a stereo pair of Neumann 184s about 5 ft. above the violin. This mic placement gives a great directional sound from the violin and a great stereo image. The 5 ft. distance gives a small, but effective amount of room reflections especially on releases.

Keys -

The keys were a MicroKorg Synth. We took 1/4" cables from the stereo outputs and routed them through direct boxes. No picture for this one... It was getting late, my mind was other places.

Melodica -
The melodica is a woodwind instrument with piano keys. Each key is connected to a reed which vibrates as you blow into the instrument. The melodica is a pretty flat sounding instrument with the sound holes opposite of the keys.

We miked it with an AKG 414 ULS aimed directly at the sound holes.

Peter Adams - Acoustic Guitar

2008-10-21T20:11:00.008-04:00

Acoustic Guitar -
For the acoustic guitar tracks we used 2 Neumann 184s in an X-Y stereo pair. The stereo pair is set up vertically instead of horizontally and aimed at the 12th fret of the guitar. This is commonly referred to as the Nashville method. I suggested we try miking at the bottom of the fretboard, but the sound ended up having too much "woof" to be useful. At the 12th fret the sound from the guitar consists of clean highs with a subtle low end.

We double tracked the guitar to catch subtle differences in performances. Panning these left and right creates a more interesting stereo image than one performance. Peter knocked out each song in one take making our job very easy.

Peter Adams Sessions - Drums

2008-10-21T19:13:00.015-04:00

Currently I am the Teaching Assistant for E-Media's Multitrack Recording class @ CCM. The class learns about multitrack music recording through various readings, and hands on experiences. This week we are tracking 3 songs in our studio with local musician Peter Adams.

We started with the drums. I have been experimenting with drum miking a lot lately and this is by far some of the best drum sounds I've ever put to tape (it helps that the kit itself was easily the best sounding kit I've ever recorded.)

Let's start with the Kick Drum-
We miked the Kick Drum with an AKG D112, our studio's go-to kick drum mic. The D112 is a large-diaphragm dynamic microphone that is engineered to favor low frequencies.

We placed the mic in the port on the front head of the kick drum (we couldn't fit it inside because the mic was bigger than the port). The front of the mic was aimed across the kick drum at the intersection of the head and shell. This gives a nice punch as well as the shell tone of the drum.

Next, the Snare Drum -
We miked the snare drum with an AKG 414 ULS (Transformerless). We used the 414's cardioid polar pattern to pick up the snare, pointing more toward the front of the rim to get a crisp snap out of the drum. Rule of thumb - for snap aim at the rim, for tone aim at the middle of the head.

Also, we used a -20dB pad on the microphone because the snare drum is a high-velocity instrument. BE CAREFUL though, this mic is a condenser and fairly sensitive. Make sure the drummer has control over his sticks, otherwise goodbye microphone!

Toms -
On the toms we used Shure SM57s, the standard drum mics. Snap and tone rules apply to toms, and are even more important.

As obvious as it may seem, the point of miking toms is to make them sound like they're from the same kit (harder than you may think). The Highest rack tom had a lot of tone, so we muted it with some tape and pointed the mic toward the rim.

In order to match the tone from the small tom we aimed the other tom mics more toward the center of the drum.

Overheads -
For our overhead mics we used Neumann 184s in a split stereo set up. Essentially, one mic over each side of the kit.

The most important thing to consider in this mic setup is phasing. The easiest way to avoid phasing is to adhere to the 3 to 1 Rule. This rule states that if two microphones are picking up the same sound source the microphones must be 3x further apart than they are from the sound source. For example - if 2 mics are picking up the crash cymbal and the closest mic is 12 inches away, the second mic must be at least 36 inches away from the first mic. It sounds more confusing than it really is. For more info on Phasing, and comb-filtering check out Crown Audio's Mic Tips.

Room Mic -
For the Room mics we used a Sennheiser MKH418S shotgun mic. You may be wondering, how is a shotgun mic a room mic? Well, the secret is that the MKH418S is a Mid-Side microphone, which means it has two diaphragms. The one at the tip of the microphone is a Super Cardiod, and the second is a Figure of 8 in the middle of the microphone shaft.

The Super Cardiod is essentially a second snare mic, but the figure of 8 gives a great big room sound (only in a good drum room though.) The trick to achieving a stereo sound from the Figure of 8 capsule is to route the signal to two channels (stereo pair), pan hard left and right and flip the phase of one of the channels.

I read about this technique somewhere 3 or so years ago and this is my second attempt. It's fair to say this is my favorite drum room sound... at least for this particular room.

Not only did the drum kit sound great, but the drummer was solid as well. He really knew his way around the kit, but stayed in the pocket until the time was right.

So there you have it. Drum Miking!

Summer Wrap-Up

2008-09-19T13:00:00.002-04:00

In 4 days classes start back up so I've been trying to crank out some of the Summer projects that took me way too long to finish.

Manute Bol's full length - Positiv-ly Sick is mixed, mastered and sent. The Bol is currrently working on Layout and packaging, expect a mid-fall release. I'd get your hands on this!

My big project - Line Level will be kicking off production on October 3rd. You can check out our Pilot Preview on Facebook.

Also, over the next few weeks my good friend Mitch and I will be recording some original material in my bedroom studio. I'll be posting about that as it happens.

Mixing

2008-06-25T02:06:00.002-04:00

After taking a healthy 2.5 month break to do school and the radio drama I finally finished mixing Manute Bol's Full-Length album. They are tearing it apart as we speak and after I make the changes they give me it's on to mastering!

Also this week is my first week at Wyoming Center for the Arts where I am engineering recording sessions for all of their rock n' roll camps. The first day was rough, but now that I'm used to the lab and the kids it's going really well!

Speed Freaks!

2008-03-28T18:35:00.004-04:00

After 3 days of touch ups and mixing the first Manute Bol e.p. - "Speed Freaks!" is finished. You can listen to/download the tracks here (explicit lyrics). This is a precursor to the full length - "Positiv-ly Sick!" which will be released later. I will be tightening up the mix and really getting deep with the full length so it will sound much better than Speed Freaks! but I am still pleased with the E.P. It has been a week to the hour since we started the whole process. We have 13 songs recorded, 12 of which will be released, and a mixed e.p. Not too bad for 168 hours.

Manute Bol Sessions Day 4

2008-03-25T01:33:00.005-04:00

The gang vocals could not sound better. Nine of us crammed into a bedroom shouting at the top of our lungs, heads pounding and bodies sweating... I haven't had so much fun in a long time. I'm so glad the band asked me to be part of the gang vocals. I did end up using the Octava mic with the omni capsule, and we all made a circle around it. We tracked each part twice and I split it hard left and right for now. Threw in some fairly heavy compression and a nice reverb and the rough mix sounds pretty good. At the end of it all we had a "CD Party" where we all cheered and yelled whatever came to our heads. If you have never heard a CD party grab a Catch-22 album, it's worth the listen. There are a couple gang vocals that sound especially good, but you'll have to wait for the CD to hear them!

Gang Vocals

2008-03-24T18:10:00.002-04:00

I got the internet working at the PDF house! Hooray! I have some down time before Zach gets out of class and comes back to touch up vocals. The studio was a mess with cables so I cleaned all of those up and am setting up mics for tonight and tomorrow. After we touch up Zach's lead vocals we are going to record gang vocals (or after school program vocals as Geoff calls them, gangs are too negative). I've never recorded gang vocals so I googled some mic techniques and found a cool message board on http://homerecording.com.

I think I'm going to try using an Octava mic with an omni capsule and a -10dB pad. The Octava mics are pretty awesome because they have 3 removable capsules, allowing you to have cardioid, super-cardioid or omni polar patterns. The omni polar patter will allow sounds from all sides of the microphone to be picked up. This way I can have everyone stand around the mic and yell instead of haveing everyone crowded together. Depending on how many vocalists we have I will double or triple tradck the sound so I can distribute it left and right.

This should be a lot of fun...

Manute Bol Day 3

2008-03-24T02:30:00.008-04:00

After catching a few hours of sleep this morning I headed back up to BG to record Vocals. Manute Bol's singer Zach (Now there's three of us... confusing, right?) decided to turn Garrett's hall closet (that we had used for the bass amp) into a vocal booth. We cleared out all of the clothes and threw in a mattress. This gave us a really dry, controlled sound. We used the AT3035 microphone for the vocals because of it's ability to pick up frequencies in the 6KHz range - which gives vocals presence, and used a pop filter so the popping p's and other hard consonants wouldn't be as noticeable.

We started recording Zach's voice started giving out (this IS hardcore punk). We started to panic because there were still 11 songs left. Zach drank some warm milk with honey and his throat recovered. We worked out a pace were Zach would take a break every few takes and his voice lasted through all 12 tracks.

At first Zach's voice wasn't quite right, but after the first take of each song his voice wore into a gravelly warm spot, so we tried as best as we could to nail it on the second or third take. Zach blew right through the vocals, and there are only a few touch ups left to do.

Manute Bol Sessions Day 2

2008-03-23T07:00:00.009-04:00

Why am I posting so early in the morning? Because I just got back to Findlay from Bowling Green after 18 hours of tracking. It was a long and stressful day, but on the bright side we have all of the instrument tracks for all 12 songs done. Really, this is an amazing feat.

We were going to get up and start tracking at 10, which means we stated tracking at 11:30. We took our time at first trying to get bass, guitar and drums laid down, but we had a lot of trouble with a couple of tracks and settled for just getting the drum tracks. We also had some severe latency problems. Latency is a delay that happens because the sound has to travel through the computer and software before it goes out to the headphones and monitors. This makes it almost impossible to track live.

I tried everything I have ever done to stop latency, I switched outputs, changed the I/O buffer, chagned the software buffer settings, but nothing worked. On top of this I had a crackle in channel 1 of my Firepod, which has haunted me, and returned at the most inconvenient times. This time though, it would be that dreaded pre-amp that would save the day. I knew from previous disasters that turning the Firepod off for 2-3 minutes and then turning it back on seemed to fix the crackly preamp, and luckily it fixed the latency problem too. How? I wish I knew, but I was just glad we could get back to tracking without the major headaches we were facing. Only 1 or 2 of the tracks were affected by the latency in the long run, and in very minor ways.

Before dinner we finished up the drum tracks and some of the scratch guitar and bass we recorded with it was good enough for the final version. Next up was second guitar. One wall we ran into was the pick/string noise cutting through the mix. We figured out that it was coming mostly from the AT3035 and that it was impossible to EQ out. To fix the problem we put a mattress in between the amp and the mic, but on it's side so the Geoff and Tyler could still get to the cab to create feedback. This didn't take out all of the string noise, but it made it dissapear into the mix.

Tracking second guitar is one of the hardest things to do. Not only do you have to find a complimentary tone to the first guitar, but the player has to be perfectly in sync with the already recorded guitar. The latter caused this part of tracking to take 6 hours. Luckily at this point my friend Zach Mueller came up and engineered for me, so i could take a break and act just as producer instead of engineer/producer. At some point during all of our complaining about how long it was taking it dawned on us that Tyler had been playing for 6 hours straight! I am suprised he was still standing at the end of it, and when it was all said and done we got some pretty killer guitar tracks.

At this point it was well after 11pm and we all needed a break. So we went and got pizza and milkshakes and lounged for a bit, before heading back to re-record Geoff's guitar. Geoff had most of the tracks down, and did all 12 songs in an hour (exactly, according to his watch). We then went back and did some final touch ups on the guitar overdubs.

Mark had fallen asleep by this time, and we woke him up so he could start overdubbing his bass... at 3am. Mark and I worked pretty closely with his track and I learned how to use the auto punch-in and loop record features in Logic. We finally finished all of the overdubs, and therefore all of the instruments at 5:45am.

Day 2 was brutally long, and at some points terribly frustrating, but the best parts were when someone really nailed a track and the time spent joking around with the guys in the band. They are serious about their music, but are always down for having a good time. Things are going well and I hope they continue to do so. We start tracking vocals at 4:30 pm tomorrow... If I can get up.

Manute Bol Sessions Day 1

2008-03-23T06:38:00.005-04:00

I moved into the PDF around noon on Friday and talked with Geoff about his ideas for the recording. For the rest of the afternoon I slowly put together the control room, which lives in Geoff's bedroom. I had a little trouble remembering how to make my two interfaces work together in Logic, so for the grand total of 5 minutes I had the internet in the PDF I googled it. In order to use the two interfaces together you have to create an Aggregate Device in the Audio/MIDI preferences.

After the Control Room was set up I started setting mics. I put the drums in the bathroom. I know this sounds like a horrible idea, but this is no ordinary bathroom. It is basically a normal sized carpeted bedroom with a toilet, shower and sink. The main reason I chose the room was because it wasn't a square. Drums are really the only Instrument I'm tracking that will have room sound so I picked the room that would create the least problems in reflecting sound.

The bass cabinet is in the hall closet, which is still full of clothes. This seemed like a great idea when I first thought of it, and it has made overdubbing bass a breeze. I am using a direct box to get the main tone for the bass, and an SM57 on the amp to capture the bass sound with speaker compression.

The guitar is in the kitchen. The biggest problem with the kitchen is the fridge's hum... so we unplugged it. Easy enough. The guitar cab is a half stack, so I am using an SM57 on the top right speaker, and my AT3035 for the bottom left speaker. The SM57 gives the guitar sound good body, and the AT3035 gives me the high-end clarity that the SM57 doesn't.

So we finally set up instruments and got sounds from instruments. The Guitar and Bass came easily, but the drums were another story. The main issue was in the toms. The floor tom had a strange buzz or rattle that we couldn't pinpoint. The first buzz was Garrett's (the drummer) dampner ring. We took that off and replaced it with duct tape, but the buzz was still there. We decided it was in the mic and so I used a shock mount for the SM57, and the problem seemed to be fixed. But it wasn't over yet. Now the floor tom had some nasty overtones so we worked for a good while trying to match the top and bottom heads, and then match the rack and floor toms.

One of the hardest things to do when recording drums is to match the tom sounds. The basic idea is to make the toms sound like they came from the same kit, which is harder than it sounds. Garrett's rack tom is really punchy, but his floor tom is really boomy. This is because he tunes his drums very low. The floor tom's size carries this low sound and resonates, but the skinny, shallow rack tom resonates more with higher pitches, so the drum seems dead. The trick to marrying tom sounds is in mic placement. For the rack tom I pointed the mic directly at the middle of the top head of the drum, that way the mic will pick up mostly drum tone. I aimed the floor tom mic more at the rim of the drum which means the mic picks up more attack than tone. This took awhile but after gradually moving and testing we found a sound that all of us loved.

We ended the night by tracking rhythm instruments for three songs. Unfortunately a faulty cable forced us to overdub the bass parts, but as i mentioned earlier, the isolation of the closet made these overdubs transparent and noiseless. It was a very good start, but things didn't come so easily on day two...

T Minus 10 Hours

2008-03-21T02:04:00.005-04:00

Today I packed up all of my gear and drove up to Findlay. I was going to try to go to Cleveland to see Manute Bol play at The Brothel, but I had some things I needed to wrap up in cincinnati and didn't end up leaving until 5pm.

Tomorrow around noon I am moving up to BG and getting all of my gear set up. For those who are interested here is a list of gear I plan on using while recording Manute Bol:

-Computer
-Apple G5 (Dual-Core Processor, 3Gb Ram)
-Logic Pro Studio 8
-Interfaces:
-Presonus Firepod Firewire Interface
-Digidesign MBox 2 Pro Firewire Interface
-Microphones -
-AT 3035 Large Diaphragm Condenser (Vocals, Amp Sounds)
-AT 4049 Condenser Microphones (Drum Overheads)
-Shure SM 57(Drums, Guitar Amps)
-Shure PG Drum Mic Kit (Drums)
-Octava Mics (Room Sounds)

Slam Dunk!

2008-03-19T02:10:00.003-04:00

12am this morning was the official end to winter quarter! To preemptively celebrate, last night Mitch and I drove to Bowling Green to see Manute Bol play at Howard's Club H. I wanted to catch a live set before I start recording them later this week. It was one of the most energetic shows I've seen in awhile, hopefully I can translate that energy in the recording! I will try to have some pictures of the show up soon.

I will be moving up to the PDF on Thursday and then will go with Manute Bol to Cleveland to see their show at the Brothel. Then on Friday the recording begins. We will be tracking all of the instruments live, and then overdubbing vocals and extra instruments. It will be an interesting experience for sure. As of now I don't have a fully functioning studio set-up for the recording... Hopefully that will materialize in the next 24 hours.

Stay Tuned...