After getting to spend one week of the warm summer in LA wearing shorts, I packed up and headed to Iceland to produce a record for a fantastic band called Soundspell . The band is very cool and very young. The oldest guy in the band is 18, but the music is mature way beyond their years.

I am actually producing this album together with my pal Albert Asvaldsson who is one of the guitarists in the the band Canora that I produced in Iceland last year and also, he and our very own Dirty Ragamuffin assisted Dot and I when we recorded Terry Bozzio last year.

We are recording at Ryk Studio, where Albert is the chief engineer. Since we are sharing duties we might have a little extra time and decided we are going to keep a studio forums journal about making the album. I sure hope it is not nearly as exciting as the mixerman diaries!!!!

There is a month to go until the days are there longest but its is still 24 hour daylight. This photo was taken from the balcony of where I am staying at midnight.

We spent today getting sounds and getting every one settled. we have a little over 3 weeks to make the record. The band has a really organic vibe and they really play off each other well. We are going to try and record most of the album live including vocals. Piano is a really important part of the band, but to make things are little easier we are recording the Piano parts live with a Fender Rhodes, and probably keep some and overdub acoustic pianos later. Even if we get everything live, we will still probably layer in some extra ambience and color.

We started with vocal mic shoot outs. We tried a Shure SM57, AKG 414, and a DPA/B&K; 4011. The 57 just clobbered the other mics. it was not even close. Then we shot out pre amps with a Tube Tech and a Pacifica (I brought one over last trip and they bought it for the studio!). They both sounded good, but the pacifica was a little more exciting and forward.

We are starting out pretty straight forward with everything so far. Bass is a Radial JDI and Sansamp Bass Driver. 57 on the guitar amp, DI Rhodes. The drums are mostly 414s for over heads, Beta 52 on the kick and a 57 on the snare, and the DPA 4011 on the room. We have a few other mics up just in case. We will tweak as needed as we go.

Mic shoot outs.



http://www.venetowest.com/soundspell/voxtest.jpg

have fun Ronan!!!!!!!!!

pan

I have this sudden and overwhelming urge to go to Iceland. That pic off the balcony is gorgeous! I'll keep watching for updates...this stuff is always so much fun.

Pretty cool gig, Ronan. Looking forward to hearing some stuff.

I see they run a TLA console. I never hear much about them. I have an old 2ch TLA pre/DI I like. Very coloured, with a bit of sag, but it's great on some stuff.

edit: I listened to the canora myspace stuff. Cool band!

quote:

ostly 414s for over heads, Beta 52 on the kick and a 57 on the snare, and the DPA 4011 on the room. We have a few other mics up just in case. We will tweak as

yeah let us know about that tube console ! Great band from what Ive listened to on their myspace!

Back to Iceland, you lucky dog Ronan!


Albert's a great fellow, please give him my best-

We are a couple days into recording and its going really well. Albert and I make a good team. He did a lot of work with the band before I arrived so they are in great shape, so now that I am here it is mostly throwing creative ideas around. We are changing out plan a little bit. We were thinking of recording all the tracks first with Fender Rhodes and then going in and replacing lots of the Rhodes tracks with acoustic piano. There are a few songs where we really want to record most of the final stuff live, so the tracks where there are no drums (almost half the album) we are going to record piano tracks live. We can really do that with the more pop songs because drums and piano are in the same room.

We have a few nice toys to play with (Thanks Jakob for the extra Distressors). I think the console is pretty cool. I have not mixed a record on it in a year, but so far the tracks we are cutting with it seem to sound really good and I almost never EQ when I am recording. I have played with the EQ this time to test a few things, and I think I am going to dig it.



We have about one more day of recording the track with drums and then we are going to break everything down and set up for the mellower tracks with live piano. These kids are young but really good players with a lot of great ideas, so it makes things pretty easy. Everyone in the band switches off to keys from time to time.

Sounds like a blast Ronan. Looking forward to hearing the output of this session.

we have finished basics for all the songs with big drums and have switch over to the mellow songs with live acoustic piano. Of course since its a classic instrument that is supposed to get a nice clean condenser into a super clean pre, we are using a SM57 into a drawmer 1960 for the pre and a bit of compression, then slammed into a Distressor.

As you can see in the pic we are also using a pair of 414s (into tubetech pres). We started with an XY pair outside the piano (my classical recordist roots, shining through) but the sound was not as cool as the sound Albert got on the demos. So we went back to the micing he used on the demo with a few modifications. The big change was switching them 414s to omni from Carioid which really opened up the piano sound. Of course with mics this close we are guaranteed some phase problems, so we pushed the mics around until they sounded really cool in stereo but also collapsed well to mono in case stereo piano did not suite any of the mixes. The two 414s panned hard left and right with the compressed 57 up the middle is a really great big sound, and I think we can get away with it since most of the other elements (guitar, bass, synths, organs..) are mono



Having a really good time making the record, and its pretty easy for me. We are working pretty short days, the band is playing really well and Albert has better pro tools chops than me so he is running Pro Tools. I get to kick back on the couch and relax.

Iceland is cool, but a insanely expensive place and with the US dollar in the dump its really bad. The band ordered two pizzas from Domino's yesterday and it cost about $85USD

One of the popular restaurant chains here is called American Style. The best part of it is that it is not "american style" at all. They put bell peppers and cucumbers on the hamburgers, and the fries are served with some kind of strange orange cocktail sauce. It all tastes fine, but American it ain't. The worst part of the place is that with the US dollar being so bad and this being Iceland, the cheapest burger combo, which would cost about $4 in the states costs about $16 at American style. This is one of the cheaper places to grab a burger in town.



So back to the music. Things are still going really well. We have one song with accordion, and I had a whacky idea to just try recording it with our current piano set up, by having him play standing in front of the keyboard. It actually worked fairly well. The spaced omni's and super compressed SM57 seem to give the accordion (which Icelanders call a Harmonica) a nice natural ambience.



I have to keep reminding myself that these guys are teenagers. They play better in the studio than a lot of bands twice their age. I attribute a lot of that to the pre-pro work Albert did with the band before I arrived. Plus, Its always a good sign when the drummer in the band is a good piano player.

The next few days should be fun. All we have left to do is keyboards (rhodes and analog synths) and other colors and get the final vocals. every one in the band plays keys on the record. In a few more days we will start mixing. Albert is a much faster pro tools editor than I am, so he has been doing most of the "driving" during the tracking. I am probably a bit faster at mixing, so I will probably do most of the driving during the mix. It has been going remarkably well with Albert and I working together. I am always very nervous about "power sharing" Not that I am ego maniac, its just that most times things run smoother with only one guy in charge, but so far its going really well and I expect it to stay that way.

I have to ask...what do they call a harmonica in Iceland?

quote:

Originally posted by dirtyragamuffin:
I have to ask...what do they call a harmonica in Iceland?

munnharpa!

i wish i was in iceland. I really like "Her Favorite Colour." Is that the demo or the one you recorded?

quote:

Originally posted by Discolightning:
i wish i was in iceland. I really like "Her Favorite Colour." Is that the demo or the one you recorded?

All of the myspace stuff is demos. It will be several weeks before out stuff is done.

I liked the piano mic'g pic. It turns out it's almost identical to a config I use on a beautiful C3 I record quite often.

Only real difference I see from mine, is for one, I don't use a 57 - but will have to try that sometime, thanks - and I have my mics higher. I use a rather crude alignment technique, where I take a standard 8.5x11 pad of paper, stand it on end on the strings and align my mic caps to the top. I also aim the low reg mic at the hinge..This also gives me a quik visual ref for the next time I have to mic the piano.

Anyways, just thought I'd throw out a thanks for the pic. I recently posted some grand piano clips I've done over at GS and got a couple of pm's asking me about my mic setup and chain. I hope you don't mind, but I used that pic as an eg of my mic config, cuz it's so close

One thing I was pleasantly surprised by in the pic, is that you seem to like to pull the mics back further from the hammers than a lot of cats. I do too, so it was encouraging to see this pic and let me know I'm on track, as I haven't mic'd many piano's.

i can't imagine how they're going to sound when you're done.

what kind of changes are you making?

quote:

Originally posted by Bazz:
One thing I was pleasantly surprised by in the pic, is that you seem to like to pull the mics back further from the hammers than a lot of cats. I do too, so it was encouraging to see this pic and let me know I'm on track, as I haven't mic'd many piano's.

I am usually further back that back, but this was a set up that Albert had used with some good sounds, so we just tweaked a bit. No problem using the pic over on GS.

quote:

Originally posted by Discolightning:
i can't imagine how they're going to sound when you're done.

what kind of changes are you making?

Trying not to change it that much, actually part of our job is to filter ideas, so that studio fun does not get in the way of the great tunes. The band has so many cool ideas, that we need to sort of sort them out.

We are just doing some tweaks on the song forms, getting the sound great (we hope), adding a little bit of extra color and texture to the tunes and just trying to get the best performances.

This session is full of surprises, like the SM57 being the hands down winner in the vocal shoot out. But a little more funny.. We were doing some guitar parts and we could not get the right sound for one part with his American Tele. We tried a few different guitars and the one that sounded best was a Steve Vai model Ibanez 7 string (multi color complete with Steve Vai autrograph!!!) Hearing the music and watching him play that guitar keeps making us laugh.

Goofing around after dinner I threw some clips into imovie and did a crappy 90 second clip. If you are board and like watching grainy footage of distressors, check it out.

http://www.venetowest.com/soundspell/soundspell3.mov