Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
…aaaand Jazz Hands!
Something a bit different in the studio. One of the guys had arranged for a Jazz quartet to come in to record, so I jumped at the chance to help out. Aside from being a refreshing change from the guitar bands we’ve been recording so far, it would most likely pose a few new challenges and a chance to learn something other than how to mic up a Marshall Amp and plug a Bass guitar into a DI box.
One thing people have been saying all along is that if you’ve got good musicians, you’re off to a good start. And these guys were not only brilliant, but they were musicians, in the truest sense of the word. That’s not to say the guitar bands we’ve had in arent very good at what they do and great to work with, but this session just had something infinitely more enjoyable about it.
Luckily by the time I arrived the drumkit was set up and most of the mics in place, so the hard graft was mostly done. I was the only one there who had done a proper drum session previously, so I was able to lend a few pointers (having learned from my mistakes, my drum recordings are nothing spectacular!). As well as the drums, we had a double bass, a keyboard and a trumpet. Such is the nature of Jazz music, the band needed to play ‘live’ and be able to look at each other while playing. This threw a few curve balls in terms of isolating the instruments, specifically just the bass and the trumpet (drums are in a separate booth and the keyboard was DI’d).
As luck would have it, Itamar had done his Written Assignment on microphone techniques for Trumpets (!!?), so he set about that (with a Shure KSM 32) while we wired everything else up. For the bass we used two mics, a Shure SE1A and an AKG C414. Initially we had the C414 sitting just above the fretting hand (I know they don’t have frets but I’m a guitarist, I don’t know the proper word) to catch the slappy-clicky sounds (that’s a technical term) on the strings, and the SE1A down low, at the f-hole to catch the warm bass sound. Like I said the band wanted to see each other, and we didnt have any baffles shorter than about 6ft, so we ended up having to turn one on its side and put in front of the double bass to try and isolate it from the trumpet.
With all that in place we did a couple of takes to fine-tune all the levels. Unfortunately the bass wasn’t sounding great and the C414 at the top was picking up too much trumpet. We swapped it round with the SE1A, which is more directional so we were able to use the rejection points to eliminate a bit more of the trumpet.
So after almost four hours setting up, the band had just under two hours to actually make some noise (a fairly typical ratio!). But when they did it sounded awesome! As we sat in the control room listening, it became quite clear that mixing the tracks would require very little effort (compared with the 16 channels of guitar I’ve been wrestling with on my project!). It would be almost difficult to take the credit as engineers for it sounding so good, as it was mostly down to the quality of the band. Although to be fair, I’d learned the lesson after my drum sessions that the more effort you make before pressing that record button, the better results you’ll get, so that four hours (which we could easily have rushed into two and a half) really was worth it!
