With the arrangement sorted out from the control room pre-production sessions, Vance heads into the tracking rooms to place microphones and dial in the drum sound with the band.
See how Vance Powell:
Places microphones on the drum kit
Builds a drum tent over the kick drum
Sets up the Studio A live reverb chamber
Explains why he used a U47 in pre-production and is using a fet 47 during production
Dials in the drum tones on the legendary Blackbird Neve 8068 console
Checks polarity on the drum microphones
Sculpts the knee microphone by inserting his custom pedals
Explains how he gain stages Pro Tools to always have the rough mix with the faders set at unity
This is your chance to join Nashville legend Vance Powell and The Weird Sisters at the world-famous Blackbird Studio and watch them craft "Live And I Learn" from Start To Finish.
00:00:25 So, next little part we're
gonna do here is start getting
real sounds,
not demo sounds, but real sounds,
for the drums.
00:00:33 I've set up the mics with Lowell.
00:00:35 And he's patched them in the console
and other outboard sort of gear
but I haven't placed them,
they're just out there.
00:00:42 So we're gonna go out and
I'm gonna place them where I think
they're gonna sound good.
00:00:48 Because that's really all we do at first.
00:00:50 We put them where we think
they're gonna sound good.
00:00:53 Sometimes it is, sometimes it doesn't.
We'll see.
00:00:55 I kind of am a big fan
of this kick mic sort of back a bit.
00:01:03 I kind of don't really love it
like right on the drum.
00:01:08 Some people do, I'm not a big fan.
00:01:10 Hey Lowell,
we don't have any like
Auralex, anything like that that
I can put over the top here?
We have some packing blankets.
00:01:19 Packing blanket,
we have to make a little kick tent.
00:01:22 -Intensity, 'intentcity'?
-Yeah.
00:01:24 So let's actually go...
I'll come down in here
and I'm gonna skew
it up here a little bit.
00:01:35 Out here.
00:01:36 I just wanna make sure that this
diaphragms are kind of in the same plane.
00:01:43 You notice here there's a top
and a bottom floor mic.
00:01:47 I love the sound of the floor
tom mic'd top and bottom.
00:01:50 So there's a pair of Josephesons on this.
00:01:54 Then... That is helpful.
00:01:56 I kind of really like
the outside of this hat,
right on the edge there.
00:02:03 And then.
00:02:09 Maybe.
00:02:11 And that like this.
00:02:21 Alright, cool.
00:02:23 You noticed a little 'knee mic' here.
00:02:25 This is my 1101 Ampex.
00:02:28 I love it to get the side of this
snare, the body.
00:02:33 And the batter here.
00:02:35 And just kind of this whole area around
the drummer's knee.
00:02:39 You know, this drum is pretty
pretty deadened, not a lot of tone.
00:02:44 So, it should be pretty
tight and kind of cool.
00:02:46 And that will work pretty nice with the
big, open, ringing Keplinger snare here.
00:02:54 I'm gonna bring this
overhead up just a little bit.
00:02:59 This is the talkback mic,
which is totally in my way.
00:03:04 This is a spare microphone
that we ended up not using.
00:03:08 So, I'm gonna come up a little bit here.
00:03:14 And then,
I'm just kind of square this off.
00:03:28 Nothing like...
00:03:31 be right at the edge of my reach.
00:03:38 Now, we're gonna go back a little bit.
00:03:45 This is just a little loose.
00:03:50 Something like this.
00:03:54 Something like that.
00:03:56 I love these Latch-Lakes.
00:03:59 Alright, something like that.
That will be great.
00:04:02 What's really nice Lowell
is that we've got a really nice
spot for our tent to go
right over the top.
00:04:11 OK, here we go.
00:04:12 Tent...
00:04:13 Tent'o Drums.
00:04:16 Yeah, Drum'o Tent.
00:04:18 Here we go.
00:04:20 I don't know,
like this or something like that.
00:04:23 I don't know, yeah,
it's kind of doubled...
00:04:26 Double trouble.
How about that?
OK, we're gonna go like this.
00:04:32 Something like that.
Yeah, that will work.
00:04:37 I don't think we'll have to tape anything.
00:04:40 Look at that. It's a tent.
00:04:42 And then, out here, in the room out here
there's
this D19.
00:04:50 A couple things we're gonna do here.
00:04:53 We're gonna
open this door.
00:04:59 Chock it here.
00:05:00 Chock-a-block.
00:05:03 And then...
00:05:18 And then this guy here, I kind of want it
no directly,
behind the drum.
00:05:26 I'm gonna torture this.
00:05:29 Poor little D19.
00:05:34 And do something kind of stupid here.
00:05:39 This is an experiment.
00:05:41 I'll kind of do like this.
00:05:47 It's out of the way a little bit,
something like that.
00:05:52 Cool. That's cool.
00:05:54 This door we're gonna close.
00:05:59 Because there's loud ass
bass going there.
00:06:02 We'll see what we've got here.
00:06:04 There's little tent I built
out of the kick drum.
00:06:07 Part of the reason for that is that
where his ride sits
is kind of right in-line with the
side of my kick drum microphones.
00:06:16 So if I wanna add some top-end
I end up getting a bunch of ride in it.
00:06:19 So we made a little tent
to basically isolate the microphones,
which are not inside the kick drum
but they're back about that far
from the ride cymbal
and the crash cymbals.
00:06:30 It's just the kick tent.
00:06:31 Why would I use a real
47 here in the control room
versus a FET 47 and a D12 out there?
To be honest with you the reason is that
this small kick drum was tuned up
pretty high and had a nice thing,
I knew it wasn't going
to get played very loud.
00:06:49 That one he's gonna play pretty loud.
00:06:51 And so that required more of
a rock sort of kick drum sound.
00:06:56 But in here it just needed
to be a little bouncy
and boomy and the U47 is great for that.
00:07:02 U47 is a great kick drum mic
about that far back.
00:07:06 If it's in a regular Rock'n Roll kick
but he was just playing it kind of quiet,
so it was about that far back.
00:07:12 And it sounded great.
So, that was the reason.
00:07:15 Just a heads-up.
00:07:17 Hey, you got me?
Awesome man.
00:07:22 Just play the groove, you're not
gonna hear anything immediately.
00:07:25 I've got to get a lot of things here
together before I send it to you.
00:07:29 So just play the groove
and we'll go from there.
00:07:32 First things first,
I always love to start
with the overheads.
00:07:41 These are just the mic pres,
down all the way.
00:08:02 I don't like to really
do a lot of EQ to this.
00:08:05 I like to just kind of leave them be
for the moment.
00:08:08 If I'm doing EQ I'll just do it later
but I just love the sound of that R88
and that and the
Neve is just pretty great.
00:08:21 The next thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna listen to
these sort of room and chamber mics.
00:08:49 The next thing is I wanna
listen to this D19 mic.
00:08:52 So, I need that down here.
00:09:11 So now I've got an 1176 in the insert,
I wanna see what that's like.
00:09:25 All-buttons baby!
Then we've got chamber.
00:09:52 A little EQ here,
basically just kind of taking a little
bit of the bottom off.
00:10:14 Just listening to a little bit of gain,
adding a little bit of the chamber in
to this D19 mic.
00:10:24 Nice.
00:10:47 Just listening the phase relationship
between those two mics.
00:10:52 I usually almost always have to flip the
overheads out
to be in-phase, not polarity,
but in phase with the snare.
00:11:00 So I'm just gonna flip
those out of phase now
and then see if that works later.
00:11:12 OK, the next thing I'm gonna do
is start bringing in the
low-end part of this equation.
00:11:18 So, now the kick drum.
00:11:21 We'll do the FET first.
00:12:39 This is both mics, here.
00:12:45 That's the other one.
00:12:47 Which didn't have a lot of low-end.
00:12:49 Like, at all.
00:12:53 It's kind of OK.
00:13:08 OK, hold on a second here.
00:13:38 OK, cool.
00:13:39 So, what I'm doing here is
I'm adding the two mics together,
adding a little bit of EQ
compressors off over here.
00:13:46 1176, I like that.
00:13:47 Very Rock'n Roll, sorry.
00:13:50 So I'm just adding
these two mics together.
00:13:52 One of them is very ticky because
it's down in front of the hole.
00:13:55 They're both outside of the drum.
00:13:57 The other is right on the skin,
which is what I really like,
I really like the sound of that.
00:14:01 And then I'm combining those two together
and just adding a little
bit of EQ here and there.
00:14:15 One of the great things I love
about these desks and this desk
is that if you do 10 or 11 dB at 100 Hz
it still sounds really good.
00:14:23 And so I really like that.
00:14:26 Now I'm gonna add a
little bit of the overhead in.
00:15:12 Cool, just listening to stuff.
00:15:14 Let me hear what the
snare drum sounds like.
00:15:44 A little bit at 200.
00:15:49 Now we're gonna listen to
see if the phase relationship
between the snare drum
and the overhead are correct.
00:16:29 Yeah, you know
Sometimes the solos work.
00:16:32 There you go.
00:16:51 So now, the next thing is
the knee mic.
00:16:56 I wanna show you,
this is on the two channels
but it doesn't have to be,
it's really on one.
00:17:00 And it's just one channel.
00:17:02 That's my little Ampex knee mic.
00:17:04 So, here's what it sounds
like just the way it is.
00:17:07 I'm gonna add the snare
and check our phase.
00:17:20 That's correct. So, normal.
00:17:26 Now, I'm gonna put the insert in.
00:17:29 And this is where all gets wonky.
00:18:07 Here's the deal,
there's two pedals back here.
00:18:10 One of them is a Pigtronix Polysaturator.
00:18:13 It's a pedal they don't make anymore
but there's a lot of them out there.
00:18:17 And then the other one
is an non-obtainable
pedal that you can't buy.
00:18:23 It was given to me by good friend
Lowell Reynolds
for my birthday one year
and it's called the Beard Verb.
00:18:32 It has a beard like mine
and it has Happy birthday
uncle Vance' on the back,
which is pretty awesome.
It's my name on it.
00:18:43 Who is the designer?
Robby Marco made this.
00:18:48 It's an analog bucket
brigade and then distortion.
00:18:51 I never use the distortion because
I put the Polysaturator in front of it.
00:18:57 But something about it,
even with the echo all the way down,
I think the echo pot is broken
because with it all the way
down it still cuts the top off.
00:19:06 And I just really love the way it sounds
and it's awesome.
I'll show you how I'm gonna use it.
00:19:26 You can hear that it just gets thicker.
00:19:29 Everything is thicker,
dirtier and greasier.
00:20:06 What I'm doing here
is listening to the timing.
00:20:09 I kind of want it to kind of have a
little triplet sort of push-pull thing.
00:20:35 OK, a couple more little things.
00:20:37 One of them is a compressor
on the bus for the kick and snare.
00:20:42 So, I'm gonna go and see what's
going on with those two guys.
00:21:09 And I just wanna a little bit
of those two compressors.
00:22:01 Hold on one second, right?
We're gonna send some click to you.
Play at tempo.
00:22:50 Alright, hold on one second.
00:22:52 Let me hear your tom, just single stroke.
00:23:32 A couple things here.
00:23:33 One, I have a mic on the
top and one on the bottom.
00:23:35 This is the top.
00:23:39 Pretty normal tom sound.
00:23:42 Here's the bottom.
00:23:45 And notice it's a different pitch.
00:24:00 We know the polarity
on the top is correct.
00:24:03 But we're going to put the bottom in now.
00:24:06 So here's just the top.
00:24:12 And that sounds like floor tom.
00:24:14 That sounds correct.
00:24:15 Now let's add the bottom.
00:24:22 Much much bigger and nicer.
00:24:26 Now let's listen to the overhead.
00:24:43 So to me it feels like
it flipped the whole floor tom
upside down, out of phase.
00:24:53 Play a little bit with the tom in there.
00:24:55 Not like ride on it or anything
but just kind with some hits.
00:25:56 You might be seeing me
adjust these pots right here.
00:25:59 These are the send to tape pots.
00:26:02 A lot of times they're faders
but on this console they're little pots.
00:26:06 A question:
Where do I start?
Normally what I'll do is have
the mic pre all the way down.
00:26:12 Most mic pres start
at about 20 dB of gain.
00:26:15 So I'll have the mic pre down
and then what I'll do
is put the fader at zero
with this send to tape down.
00:26:22 Then I bring the send to tape up
till I get the level I want.
00:26:26 It's a little complicated because
I'm combining two channels
of kick drum to one track,
I'm combining two channels of snare
to one track.
00:26:35 So, those are things you have to kind of...
You've gotta mix.
00:26:38 You've gotta mix the track
as you're going along.
00:26:41 And you know, that's just
something that kind of happens.
00:26:44 But that's where I get my gain staging.
00:26:46 The other part is,
the kick drum is pretty loud in the mix,
snare drum is pretty loud,
but I don't really wanna drive
the mix really hard.
00:26:54 If I just bring up the fader up
at the zero with just the kick
I'd say the VU, stereo VU,
is maybe -3, not 3,
probably -4 or -5.
00:27:07 And the snare adds a little bit to that,
the toms add a little bit to that.
00:27:11 But basically the whole
drums should be about -3, ish.
00:27:16 Your mileage may vary.
00:27:17 So, that's kind of the idea.
00:27:19 There's no EQ whatsoever.
00:27:21 The EQs are completely out on the snares.
00:27:23 And no EQ on the toms either,
which is really cool.
00:27:26 No EQ on the overheads.
00:27:28 A little bit of EQ on the kick
because you kind of almost always
have to have some EQ on the kick.
00:27:33 And a little bit on the knee mic,
I just took a little 220 out.
00:27:39 But that's kind of it.
00:27:40 So, yeah. Check it out.
00:28:01 The two EQ settings, one of them is
the FET,
I really just love that big round,
the front head, the front skin.
00:28:08 And basically I'm just adding
a shit ton of 100 Hz.
00:28:12 Because I just really like
that 100 Hz sort of thing.
00:28:16 Then, at 220 Hz,
because I'm adding so much at 100,
I'm taking 220 out.
00:28:21 I know, I know, I could probably get away
with not having as much
of either boost or cut.
00:28:26 But this console sounds so beautiful,
so great,
that turning the knobs all
the way up is really nice.
00:28:32 And that's the deal,
the D20 is out away from the kick
but it's in the hole.
00:28:37 So it's getting the snap of the batter.
00:28:40 And that's a really cool sound.
00:28:42 That's kind of the drums.
00:28:43 Nice and simple.
00:28:45 I'm gonna probably turn some knobs
and stuff once the band is playing
but that kind of get them balanced out.
00:28:51 There's a couple things I want you to see
and I want you to sort of try
to live by this as much as possible.
00:28:57 If you noticed,
in the Pro Tools session,
if you notice, on my console,
all the faders are at zero.
00:29:05 Why are they around zero?
Very close.
00:29:08 Because this is what I want
my mix to be.
00:29:14 I want the drums to be balanced
without having to move a
bunch of faders over there
or add plug-ins or any of that crap.
00:29:20 So that every time I play this back,
in any studio, anywhere in the world
this faders are at zero.
00:29:27 That means that if I send this to Fab
or I send it do Mick Guzauski
or to anybody,
anybody that I really respect,
they're gonna be able to open
this in whatever system they're on
and play and the rough
mix will be right there.
00:29:42 You're gonna see as I go along,
the bass is gonna be around zero,
the electric guitars are
gonna be around zero.
00:29:48 The vocal is gonna be
around here around zero.
00:29:51 And so, anywhere.
00:29:53 So when we leave Blackbird tonight
and go to Sputnik tomorrow
I'm gonna put the faders
up at exactly the same place
on my desk and guess what,
the rough mix is gonna be there.
00:30:03 It's gonna be cool. And that's the key.
00:30:06 If you're recording
something and it's too loud,
turn the fader down.
00:30:10 No! Don't turn the fader down,
it's too loud, turn the mic pre down.
00:30:15 Or the send to tape,
which is what I've been doing.
00:30:18 Adjust those.
00:30:20 Or most of the time,
most people have a pre-amp,
just turn the pre-amp down.
00:30:24 Turn the pre-amp down till you
hear it do what you want it to do.
00:30:27 That's the key.
00:30:29 And then, anything else you need to do
you just got to work around the gain.
00:30:33 Also, you can see,
looking at the Pro Tools session,
I'm not really driving anything hard.
00:30:38 And the main reason is we have 24 bits,
we don't have to.
00:30:41 We don't have to drive
anything very hard.
00:30:43 There's no reason why we can't
record and not
have the mix bus just
slamming all the time.
00:30:51 Next, we're gonna move on
to the bass synth
and then the electric guitar.
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Vance studied electrical engineering in Missouri and started his career in live sound as a front-of-house engineer. In 2002, he moved to Nashville in order to become studio manager and chief engineer at the legendary Black Bird studios in Nashville. In 2006, he co-founded Sputnik studios along with Grammy-winning engineer Mitch Dane, still in Nashville.
Vance Powell has won 6 Grammy awards working with rock artists such as The Raconteurs, Kings of Leon, Jack White, Pearl Jam, The White Stripes, The Dead Weather and more.
Powell's domain of expertise is definitely mixing and producing rock music. As shown in his pureMix videos, Vance likes to experiment and create new fuller and exciting sounds using all kinds of pedals, echos, analog outboards and plug-ins. Vance was used to recording to tape and definitely has an analog approach that makes him commit to fewer good sounding tracks rather than piling up takes in Pro Tools.
His goal is to make something new and warm that fits the band's vision with upfront snare drums and powerful guitars. Rocking.
