This is a real-time shoot of a prototypical tracking session, with no smoke or mirrors. Going from scratch to a rough mix in an hour or so with mic choices and placements, preamp choices and mic swapping for tone shaping. All steps are explained and commented.
Tracked with Avid ProTools HD|Native, full line of Royer Ribbon mics and Mojave Condenser mics, UA 4-710, UA610, Great River MP2NV, Great River EQ1-NV preamps and eqs as well as Dangerous Music Monitor ST, Dangerous Music Summing and Focal speakers.
00:00:00 Let's just play that and listen
to the...
00:00:02 to the room mike.
00:00:04 There's a Royer Ribbon,
SF-24V which is a
stereo tube ribbon mike.
00:00:10 Right here.
00:00:12 Why did we put it here?
Because those drums are loud.
00:00:16 Compared to that guitar.
00:00:18 So we moved it away from the
drums and tried to have a balance
between all the instruments.
00:00:22 Just the room mike
sound like this.
00:00:30 Can you believe how much
bass drum there is in it?
Considering how far it is
from the bass drum.
00:00:36 You are a mean bass drum player.
00:00:43 This gives you an idea of what
it sounds like on stage.
00:00:46 Tomorrow when I mix the song
I'll be able to use this to give
kind of a messy vibe to it so
it doesn't sound so clean.
00:00:53 How about you play the
bass microphone?
You hear a little bit of the...
00:01:04 Vocal, a little bit of the drums.
00:01:06 But the bleed is clean because
it's a ribbon so it's nice...
00:01:09 Clean bleed.
00:01:11 How about the vocal mike?
Sounds great.
00:01:25 And what's going on
with the violin microphone?
That's not as good but once
he switches to the bow it will be perfect.
00:01:40 This to show, don't be
afraid of the bleed.
00:01:43 If the bleed is clean,
if the drums aren't sounding ****
in the violin microphone
then it won't ruin your
drum sound. I saw you.
00:01:52 Bleed is not necessarily bad.
Bleed is the sound of the records we like.
00:01:56 You know like everybody talks
about, whatever,
The Beatles,
Pink Floyd or whatever.
00:02:02 Bled like crazy.
00:02:04 And it's OK, it won't hurt you.
It won't bite.
00:02:07 - Yes.
00:02:08 - What do you mean by clean bleed?
The way I see it and that's a very personal
thing, you have to form your own taste.
00:02:14 The way I see it
is, if I bring a microphone up
and there's another instrument
bleeding, for example
in the violin microphone
I'm hearing the drums.
00:02:21 If I like the tone of the drums in the
violin microphone I consider that clean.
00:02:26 Very often,
for certain microphones maybe
of lesser quality,
or maybe if you pick the
wrong microphone,
when you bring up the violin
microphone
the sound of the drums in
it is horrible.
00:02:34 It's honky and peaky.
00:02:36 So whenever you're gonna push your violin
microphone your drum sound is ruined.
00:02:41 It's the same principle we showed you
about moving the microphones a little bit.
00:02:46 It's the same principle for
recording drums.
00:02:49 Although we love to think of
it as one instrument,
it's hell, there's eight of them
right there.
00:02:54 And they all bleed into each
other.
00:02:56 Don't try to make them
don't bleed.
00:02:58 Just try and make sure that
the bleed is OK.
00:03:04 Move them.
00:03:05 Move this way,
try a different pattern.
00:03:08 Try a different microphone.
00:03:10 Make sure the phase is not off.
00:03:12 Try a different preamp.
00:03:13 Try a different player.
00:03:17 Now we're gonna record
the whole song.
00:03:21 And then we're gonna
listen to the whole song.
00:03:23 And see what we've done
together today in
tracking a band from scratch
in about 1 hour and 50 minutes.
00:03:31 The first thing we're gonna do
is ask the phenomenal Will Knox band
to record the whole song without me
interrupting. Isn't that amazing?
Here we go.
00:06:36 Rocking!
Notice how nobody touched any
faders while we played it back.
00:06:51 Your head didn't get cut off.
00:06:56 Everything kind of worked
together as a band.
00:06:59 With this...
00:07:01 Microphone into preamp into
converter thing
sounds as good as many records that
you hear out there.
00:07:07 Because care was taken into placing
the microphones in the right place
and because it's also the
phenomenal Will Knox Band.
00:07:19 And the phenomenal Meredith McCandless
is the engineer.
00:07:27 I'd like to remind you that the seminar
was put on by, can you put the thing on.
00:07:33 Organized by Dangerous Music,
who's very dear to me.
As and engineer they help me
get to where I am as far as
my knowledge base.
00:07:43 And they make phenomenal
monitoring and summing.
00:07:46 It was put together also with
the help of Mojave and Royer Microphones.
00:07:50 It's all Mojave and Royer microphones
on the stage right now.
00:07:54 Universal Audio who provided some of the
preamps and compressors and also
and also the plug-ins that I'm gonna
use tomorrow to mix the song.
00:08:02 Great River who provided EQs
and preamps
for this.
00:08:08 Focal who put the speakers
and then Avid and Pro Tools.
00:08:13 These are the people who made it possible
for you to see this
so please be kind enough to come back
tomorrow at 11:30
to see the song being mixed and hear it.
And lastly as a thank
if you like the song it's on the first Will
Knox record which they have here for sell.
00:08:28 Because they are professional musicians.
00:08:30 And then there's also a second record
and both those records,
the second record came out as
a comic book, it's pretty cool.
00:08:37 You don't get a CD you get a comic book
and then you download the songs.
00:08:40 Which is pretty nice.
00:08:41 And both these records were produced by moi
and recorded and mixed by Meredith and moi.
00:08:46 Thank you very much, I hope to see
you tomorrow at 11:30 AM.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Fab Dupont is a Grammy winning NYC based record producer, mixing/mastering engineer and co-founder of pureMix.net.
Fab has been playing, writing, producing and mixing music both live and in studios all over the world. He's worked in cities like Paris, Boston, Brussels, Stockholm, London and New York just to name a few.
He has his own studio called FLUX Studios in the East Village of New York City.
Fab has been nominated for Grammys 6 times, including two Latin Grammys and has received many other accolades around the world, including Victoires de la Musique, South African Music awards, Pan African Music Awards and US independent music awards.
I was interested how the vocal mic had no plosives; my experience with ribbons has shown pops and plosives are normally a problem when the mic is that close , even with a filter. The Royer seems to be very useful.
Cheers, Ross
Devilstrip
2015 Jan 17
Very informative Fab! Great way to reinforce theory with lreal world experience.
AdRi__Forn
2014 Jun 14
"Because they are professional musicians" Funny and so real ;)
lpkyer
2012 May 08
Extrêmement divertissante et instructive cette série vidéo. Ton sens du PR est incroyable !
carter1210
2011 Nov 26
Wow, amazing. Where can we see the mixing video?
LuisSantos
2011 Aug 31
Very Nice!!
I actually like better this perfomance sound , than the original on "youtube".. yes of course this was better conversion.. but actually all the dynamics on this sound is GREAT! I hope someday we have albums like this ;)
111Entertainment
2011 Aug 26
AWESOME video series Fab!!!
You're the only person I know that can record a live band while explaining the process and be entertaining... all in 1 hour!!!
