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Snow
Songs Session Notes
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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