Hey folks, been awhile since I last visited. Very busy over the last few months but have a short breather and thought I’d put up a post to share some stuff I’ve been doing lately.
For the last few months I’ve been doing both FOH and recording for a series of jazz shows. Really cool shows, great players in a small church, built around 1918 or so, every Sunday evening. The band is generally a quartet, key’s, bass, drums and sax/flute.
We’ve done 7 shows so far, the last one is this weekend. It’s been a blast!
Here’s a few tracks from some recent shows. Hope you enjoy them and let me know what you think.
BTW…the system I’m using for this is…
Presonus Studiolive 24.4.2 mixer feeding an ADK 7600 laptop via firewire (running Cubase) with the direct outs feeding an Alesis HD24xr as a backup recorder.
Yamaha C4 grand and a few elec keyboards, a pair of AT4033’s on the grand, DI on the elec key’s.
Acoustic bass (usually) with a DI into the board and a Shure SM81 about 1ft away, pointed towards the f hole
Drums get an Audix D6 on kick, i5 on snare top/bottom, Sennheiser e914 on hat and a pair of Octava MC012’s as overheads
Sax has an AT clip on mic but is mostly just an SM57 in front.
Edited/mixed etc ITB with Cubase 4.5 (I have 6 but haven’t had a chance to install it yet).
Welcome back, Karl. You really nailed the sound, or maybe I just think the guys can play. Enjoyed these two tracks. You must have some other room feeds? You listed only close mics.
Nope, no room mics. The shows have been packed…standing room only. We’ve been putting out extra seats and the front row folks are literally 2 ft away from the musicians. Room mics would get so much audience noise that they’d be pretty much un-usable. They’d also pick up the PA/house sound.
Just running the mic’s I listed and adding some ambience at mixdown. A couple of mono delays panned left/right with very short/Haas effect delay times and a few verbs.
The players are REALLY good which always helps. Glad you liked it.
The goldfinger track is absolutely gold, listening to the second one now
edit: yeah, the second is possibly even better
I like those elec keys, what did they use?
Thanks, they really did come out great. As for the key’s, it’s actually a Yamaha controller, running midi into a laptop, using several keyboard patches out of Logic. I’m not sure of the sound library exactly. That feeds out to a cabinet called a “Motion Sound”…
It’s a pretty cool system, kind of a combination Leslie (it has an actual rotary horn in it), with built in mixer. It even has internal mic’s that mic the horns (thats what we tapped and why it provides a really incredible stereo Leslie effect).
Glad you liked the track. I have hours of recordings from the series (did 8 shows, the last one tonight). Average of 6 to 8 tracks in each show, most ran around 8 minutes, longer for medley’s. Some really great stuff!
I think I’m loosing it …
Can you headbang and laugh at the same time to a jazz version of a James Bond song?
I don’t care! I love it!
Sad thing is that I’m so thrilled by a bunch of people playing.
This should be the norm but it’s the exception?!!?
Damn well played and great dynamics and everything else anyway!
I’ll listen to more songs later!
Thanks guys, glad you’re liking it. A lot of work…every Sunday for 8 weeks, between loadin, setup, show, teardown and loadout about 10 hours for each show. And that doesn’t include any editing/mixing of the recorded tracks. A great experience but pretty intense too.
A lot of fun though and great musicians… One of the first shows featured the keyboard player you hear on these tracks and a second piano (a Steinway 7’ grand, brought in for the show in addition to the Yamaha C4 grand) played by the head of the jazz department at the university of Utah. That was great though tough to mix…getting two pianos, playing in very close physical proximity and, musically speaking, “talking” back and forth to each other …sometimes talking at the same time…to make sense in a mix is very tricky (still not sure I’ve quite got it).
Got enough material for 4 or 5 CD’s I think (working on mixes of the Herbie Hancock tribute show as we speak). If youl’d like to hear more, the first CD release is available here…
We’ll be posting more over the next few months. The band had such a good time they’re talking about going back into the same church, recording the Beatles tribute tracks again specifically for CD release, and doing a bigger show at another venue here in town as a “CD release” show.This might turn into a full time gig
Wim…thanks so much! FYI…the tracks are numbered so they’ll sequence properly when you go to burn them but one thing to be aware of…several of the tracks from the James Bond night were performed as medley’s. For licensing reasons, we had to split them into separate tracks (long story short…Harry Fox Agency considers a medley to be a “derivative work” and you have to jump through lots of extra hoops in order to license them).
To make it play as performed, when you burn them, put no gap between tracks 2 and 3, 5 and 6, 8 and 9. They were split insuch a way that they’ll play individually ok but if you burn them with no gaps you’ll get the full impression…they’ll sequence seamlessly into each other.
Sidelined for a bit. Finally getting back to some mixdowns. For those who enjoyed the first Jazz CD, here are a few tracks from the next one.
These are from the Herbie H. tribute show. Enjoy
This was a jazz trio, Key’s, bass and drums. Setup was as follows…
Drums: Oktava MC012’s as overheads, Audix D6 on kick, Audix i5 on top/bottom snare, Sennheiser e914 on HH
Bass: Acoustic bass with piezo pickup-Direct/line out from bass amp, Shure SM81 about 1 ft away, pointed at f hole
Key’s: Yamaha c4 grand-AT4033’s (x2), over high and low registers. Also had AT lav but that was only used for house sound. Elec key’s on “Tell Me A Bedtime Story” are from a Logic electric piano patch run through a “Motion Sound” cabinet (mentioned in a previous post…I included a link). Stereo outs from the Motion Sound run to board.
All chan’s run to Presonus Studiolive 24.4.2>firewire to ADK laptop, recorded into Cubase 4.5. Backup recorder via Studiolive direct out’s to Alesis HD24xr. Mixed ITB on Cubase 4.5 using various Waves plug’s.
Nice, still great sounding recordings!
I thought the delay at the end of tell me a bedtime story’ was a bit artificial though. It can work, but it doesn’t really enter the mix naturally, if you know what I mean.
It’s not a delay actually. The keyboard player hits the vibrato autopan effect right at the end. That’s the way he played it, I didn’t add anything. I did debate collapsing the stereo image a little so the autopan wouldn’t be so extreme…might still do that but one side of me kind of likes the extremeness of it.
, thought I had missed something and appreciated you mentioning it.