How I Spent My (musical) Weekend
Friday night was the late-night, barely-controlled chaos that was a Caustic show. I mention that merely because I was rocking the theremin and some keys for that gig. I also mention that because it meant I didn’t get home to sleep until well after 2am.
Ordinarily, a Friday night gig would just mean “sleep late on Saturday.” This however was not an option, because bright and chipper on Saturday morning I had a carnatic classical trio coming by to record. It was an unusual configuration, too – saxophone, mridangang, violin, and the omnipresent electronic tampura/sruthi box. (I offered to delve into my surprisingly vast library of tampura samples, but they opted to pass.
Over the course of two days, we recorded well over two hours of music. They played as an ensemble, which meant I had to be diligent with my microphone choices and positioning. Also, because there were six inputs and my ULN2 only has, well, 2, I had to do some fancy routing and device aggregation in order to get everything set up and sounding good. These guys had to play as an ensemble, so I couldn’t simply isolate and multitrack them as I do with my own stuff.
These guys came in from parts distant – the sax player was from north Chicago, the violinist from west Chicago, and the mridangam player was from Washington DC. I was referred to them as someone who could record carnatic music for a reasonable price and not screw it up, I guess, but I had to keep asking in slight disbelief “uh, you guys know that this is just a room in my basement, right?” I can see people coming from, say, Milwaukee to record in my basement, but Chicago? DC? They apparently were fully aware of this and wanted to go ahead anyway. It could be my remarkably affordable prices.
What follows is a technical description of what went down, merely because I lack the appropriate music theory to describe what happened musically.
I slaved my old trusty MOTU 828 to the ULN2’s clock, which significantly improved the performance of that box. I also attached by dbx tube pre to the ULN’s SPDIF and clock-sync’ed that too.
The mrid got a pair of 57’s, run into the 828. 57’s are always reliable of percussion instruments. They were perhaps a little dark and dense on the treble head of the drum, but they still got me a reasonably decent fidelity on the attack/decay range. And because they have such a forward pattern with good side rejection, I didn’t get much crosstalk between the two mics, or from the other instruments.
The sax got the Oktava. Sumanth had specifically requested a rather dark sound on his sax, so the combo of the Oktava and the dbx tube pre was a natural fit. It was pretty warm and punchy by the time it was all recorded. The mic was a little gainy, so I did get some “room sound” off the mridangang too, but that was to be expected. If I’d had a good ribbon mic, that probably also would’ve worked really well.
The violin was the toughy – seeing as it’s a much quieter instrument than a saxophone or a drum, and full of all sorts of crazy harmonics, I had to be pretty careful where I put the mics. I used the pair of Pulsar II SDC’s that I keep around for just such things. Since I happen to have a violin, I did some experiments with configuration, and skipped doing my initial x/y stereo placement in favor of an almost guitar-like arrangement – one mic pointing at the f-holes, and the other aimed towards the neck. The biggest challenge was keeping the mics far enough from the violinist so he could actually play, but close enough that they would get good signal and not pick up every stray noise in the room. I ended up with a bit of a compromise – I got strong signal but still got some spillover from the sax. There’s only so much I can do about that, short of throwing up some gobos – but then the instrumentalists wouldn’t be able to see and hear each other, which defeats the purpose. I ran the mics into the ULN so I could up the gain pretty high without too much noise.
Some of these pieces ran upwards of 20 minutes, one coming in close to an hour, which meant to fix things there was a lot of punch-in/punch out and clever crossfading between takes. They specifically requested a spacious sound, so I’m judiciously adjusting the panning and reverb settings to get it nice and concert-hall-y without being swamped by deep ‘verb. I’ve still got some more engineering to do on this yet, but it’s sounding pretty good so far. These guys were pretty serious players, so that helped an awful lot.
I also learned once again that curious kittens often hamper the recording process by headbutting microphones or deciding to get chummy with the percussionist in the middle of a take.
