Tracking

Tracking

I used the tracking room and the vocal booth in Gallagher Hall for this project. I knew I wanted Wyatt’s vocals to be controlled and by themselves. Although the idea of acoustic piano and voice sounds great, recording them simultaneously would lead to less control down the line. I took a different approach to recording both the piano and vocals.

Vocals

I used two microphones on vocals, an AKG c414 and a Sennheiser MD421. I positioned their diaphragms to be as close as possible to ensure similarity and even tilted them slightly off-axis downward to pick up more chest resonance. Wyatt is a tenor with range, but his lower range tends to lose body and fullness which is why I wanted to find a sweet spot to compliment his performance as best as possible. I picked up this trick from Chris Liepe an artist, mix engineer, and vocal coach from one of his YouTube videos with Recording Revolution. I’ve also seen multiple artists like Kendrick Lamar, H.E.R., Ozzy Osbourne, etc. tracking vocals with two microphones. I specifically chose a condenser and dynamic mic to account for their strengths and weaknesses. The AKG C414 was dark but I combated the natural sound of the 414 by putting it through the Presonus Eureka channel strip which made my signal brighter subtly. I bypassed the EQ and Compressor and came in hot around negative nine to ten decibels and the Sennheiser 421 sounded surprisingly similar in frequency response. However, I did notice that the low mids or the “body” of the vocals were better in the dynamic mic than the C414 condenser but the C414 had a sweet character in the high mids to highs. The material Wyatt sang was dynamic and I wanted to ensure that I captured the emotion, timbre, and feel that the reference had. Double-tracking vocals gave me an alternative way to create width and depth with this mix just having a vocal and piano. On mixing day, I started in the tracking room for the outboard gear. I’m a huge fan of the DBX 160’s and 165 VCA compressors and I saw we had a DBX 166 XL compressor/limiter I had to try it. I put the attack and release on auto, pushed some of the saturation into the sound with the drive knob, and set the threshold until I got clean, consistent, vocals. I believe I was compressing around two to three decibels on average. This was cool to do and turned out great I blended the mics to get a fuller sound and printed alternate versions of the Greg Gordon style to add width depth and crispness to my vocals.

While doing all of these I kept phase coherence as close as possible between both the vocal and piano audio. I came across digital snaps and cracks when recording for too long so I punched in and out accordingly to get the cleanest re-amps and prints I could.

Piano

I recorded piano in an… interesting way. I love the spacy distance mellow vibe of the piano from the reference to recreate the Piano, I started with MIDI. It’s important to note that ultimately if I thought any of the pianos around campus had a vibe and were in good enough shape I would’ve mic’d an acoustic. I chose to re-amp the MIDI of the plugin because I didn’t want to try to tune a polyphonic signal because Melodyne and pitch correction technology are great but I’m not a miracle worker. I also stand on the fact that a bad initial signal will ultimately impact the quality of the finished project regardless of whether plugins and correction technology always start with quality. I recorded using instrument tracks overdubbing layers of the song chords, accents, and toplines to fill out the arrangement. I used a stock Pro Tools piano plugin called Mini Grand by Air technology. There is a staple in the world of plugins some of their more notable works are the instrument plugins Velvet, Xpand!, Vaccum, and Hybrid but they make plugins for effects, utility, etc. as well. The preset I used was “24 Introspective Piano” It had a nice reverb and overall tone that fit the piece. Then I printed the audio by using a stereo send bus from the MIDI channels to stereo audio inputs “Print tracks” to convert my MIDI into audio. After this, I set up a Roland JC-40 is a guitar amplifier that has solid-state circuitry. I mic’d the center cones of the amp with a pair of AKG c214’s. I wanted an in-your-face warm tone, so I chose to close-mic them and pan them out to create depth. For variety and experimentation, I altered the amp's settings for a couple of prints and ended up with three piano groups clean re-amp, MIDI Print, and vibe re-amp. I routed my original MIDI out of pro tools through a re-amp box into the amp. I used the Pro Art MPA tube pre to saturate and give my piano more soul. I engaged the plate voltage and 20+ dB boost, as well as the phantom power for the mics. My re-amped tracks were a little noisy due to the amp but in the context of the song it's barely noticeable.

Reference's

Breakdown/Key Takeaways

Tracking Info:​

• Vocals:

  • Used AKG c414 and Sennheiser MD421 microphones for vocals.

  • Positioned microphones close and slightly off-axis to capture chest resonance.

  • Influenced by techniques from Chris Liepe's YouTube videos.

  • Opted for condenser and dynamic mics to complement each other's strengths.

  • Used Presonus Eureka channel strip to brighten AKG c414 signal.

  • Utilized DBX 166 XL compressor/limiter for compression.

  • Blended microphones for fuller sound and printed alternate versions for width and depth.

  • Maintained phase coherence between vocal and piano audio.

  • Addressed digital snaps and cracks during recording by punching in and out.

• Piano:

  • Started with MIDI to recreate desired piano sound.

  • Chose MIDI re-amping to avoid tuning issues.

  • Used Pro Tools Mini Grand plugin preset "24 Introspective Piano."

  • Printed MIDI as audio using stereo send bus.

  • Re-amped audio through Roland JC-40 guitar amplifier.

  • Mic'd center cones of the amp with AKG c214's for warm tone.

  • Experimented with amp settings for variety.

  • Used Pro Art MPA tube pre to saturate and add soul to piano sound.

  • Managed noise from re-amped tracks within the context of the song.