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Snow Songs
'UFOs'
Recording Yolanda Bejarano is always fun, she's a super singer, and getting great takes is always easy. For this set of songs, she'd invited Mark from the Sweet Bleeders to come by and add some flavor tracks. He plays guitar in innovative ways, and has a great collection of effect pedals.
Rather than have Yolanda record her songs, then have Mark overdub, we decided to just set everyone up, and see how it went. This was a little risky, since Mark wasn't completely familiar with the material. He proved to be a fast learner, though, and a very intuitive player.
With Yolanda's awesome performances, things went smoothly. I set up Yolanda in the same way I'd recorded her in the past, with her playing in the area between her dining room and living room. This area has nice acoustics, and is close enough to the dining room where I was set up to make communication easy. Headphones weren't really necessary, but Yolanda likes to hear herself, so we set up a monitor mix.
I used two GT44 mics on the guitar, in pretty close. One was just off the sound board, the other above the neck looking at the joint of the neck and body. Since she sings and plays simultaneously, I wanted to get a little separation. I set up a Studio Projects B1 for the vocals, running through the GT Brick, to give it a little warmth. The B1 is a good mic, with very clear high end. Sometimes it's a little sibilant, so I had Yolanda sing off axis a bit. We ended up using a pop screen, just to avoid losing a good take to an errant puff of breath. I also set up an Oktava MK219 up high, about 10 feet away, as a room mic.
I had Mark set up in the living room, and put an SM57 up close on his amp, with another MK219 about 8 feet back, in case I wanted a little roominess. We did each song a couple of times, with Mark working out his bits, then went ahead and tracked.
In a couple of hours, we had solid takes of the songs Yolanda hoped to finish. We got together a few days later to mix. We did a few vocal rides to even out some of the louder passages, and touched up a couple of Mark's parts, to help things flow. A little reverb was added, along with some compression on the vocals. All in all, a very fun, easy session that came out great.
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