V
vredensgnag
Gjest
Bones Howe gjorde Nighthawks at the Diner og Foreign Affairs sammen med Waits, og brukte da 16-spors og et stort antall mikrofoner.
Men han ville noe annet med Small Change - og det er slett ikke gjort slik du beskriver det, Mr. T.
"We set up at Heider's for that record the same way I used to make jazz records in the 1950s," says Howe. "I wanted to take Tom back to that direction of making records, with an orchestra and Tom in the same room, all playing and singing together. I was never afraid of making a record where the musicians all breathed the same air. Leakage is not a problem. In fact, it's a good thing it holds a record together. Where leakage is a problem is when you put the musicians in different corners of the room and use headphones. If you use the directional qualities of various microphones and set the players up so that they can see each other and hear each other without using headphones, you'll find that they will naturally tend to to balance themselves. What comes through the wires is more natural-sounding and three-dimensional. It's the room that adds that third dimension. You learn that in film scoring the score is never fighting the dialogue. The element with the most presence is always up-front. In recording music, the room becomes like the score to the dialogue of the music.
"The choice of the room is critical, then, because it's like an instrument itself. There's one record that I didn't make that's a great example. Miles Davis's Round About Midnight was made at the old Columbia Studios on East 30th Street in New York City. The sound of that studio was amazing. Jazz records tend to be dry-sounding, but that room had great natural echo. The musicians on that record were set up in a semicircle on stage, close together, and the sound of that record is the sound that came off that stage and bounced back into the microphones."
Tom Waits's voice itself is a unique instrument. For that, Howe went back to his old standby, the classic RCA 77 DX ribbon mic. "The 77s have three cardioid settings," he explains. "V1 and V2 were different low-end cutoffs, and 'M' was for music recording. The V1 setting had a high cutoff, which made it good for radio announcing; the V2 position left a lot more low end in there and made it a great vocal microphone." The signal ran through a UREI 1176 compressor/limiter set with what Howe swears are the best parameter settings that can be configured on it for vocals: threshold/attack at 6, release at 7, and a 12:1 compression ratio. "Tom popped and spat a lot when he sang, so the 77 was perfect, because it's very hard to pop that microphone, so you didn't need a pop filter. Plus he liked to get right on the mic, so he would sit at the piano and I hung it from a boom so it would hang down in front of him. On some tracks we'd set it up directly in front of the band and he's stand in front of the drums and sing. On 'Step Right Up' you can almost hear him flipping pages of lyrics. He was always surrounded by the music and the records sound like it. We never used headphones. Never.
"We set Tom up in Heider's Studio 4 on the piano and built the orchestra around him. I just told the musicians to balance themselves, and they did. They were actually thrilled to be able to work like that. The 'cellos and the violas would come in and listen to a playback and then go out and adjust themselves accordingly. Each pass got better and better. I had two AKG microphones on the 'cellos and two Sennheisers on the violas, and whatever came out of the rhythm section got into those microphones, too, but it just made the whole thing sound better."
På Small Change brukte de mic på Waits og på saxofonen, og lot rommet blø inn i opptaket, uten å "lage det på kjøkkenet etterpå".
Legg merke til hva som skrives om at cello og viola kom inn for å lytte til playback, og så justerte spillet sitt i neste omgang - uten at det ble rattet i miksepulten, en god indikasjon på hvor få mikrofoner som ble brukt til denne platen.
Men han ville noe annet med Small Change - og det er slett ikke gjort slik du beskriver det, Mr. T.
"We set up at Heider's for that record the same way I used to make jazz records in the 1950s," says Howe. "I wanted to take Tom back to that direction of making records, with an orchestra and Tom in the same room, all playing and singing together. I was never afraid of making a record where the musicians all breathed the same air. Leakage is not a problem. In fact, it's a good thing it holds a record together. Where leakage is a problem is when you put the musicians in different corners of the room and use headphones. If you use the directional qualities of various microphones and set the players up so that they can see each other and hear each other without using headphones, you'll find that they will naturally tend to to balance themselves. What comes through the wires is more natural-sounding and three-dimensional. It's the room that adds that third dimension. You learn that in film scoring the score is never fighting the dialogue. The element with the most presence is always up-front. In recording music, the room becomes like the score to the dialogue of the music.
"The choice of the room is critical, then, because it's like an instrument itself. There's one record that I didn't make that's a great example. Miles Davis's Round About Midnight was made at the old Columbia Studios on East 30th Street in New York City. The sound of that studio was amazing. Jazz records tend to be dry-sounding, but that room had great natural echo. The musicians on that record were set up in a semicircle on stage, close together, and the sound of that record is the sound that came off that stage and bounced back into the microphones."
Tom Waits's voice itself is a unique instrument. For that, Howe went back to his old standby, the classic RCA 77 DX ribbon mic. "The 77s have three cardioid settings," he explains. "V1 and V2 were different low-end cutoffs, and 'M' was for music recording. The V1 setting had a high cutoff, which made it good for radio announcing; the V2 position left a lot more low end in there and made it a great vocal microphone." The signal ran through a UREI 1176 compressor/limiter set with what Howe swears are the best parameter settings that can be configured on it for vocals: threshold/attack at 6, release at 7, and a 12:1 compression ratio. "Tom popped and spat a lot when he sang, so the 77 was perfect, because it's very hard to pop that microphone, so you didn't need a pop filter. Plus he liked to get right on the mic, so he would sit at the piano and I hung it from a boom so it would hang down in front of him. On some tracks we'd set it up directly in front of the band and he's stand in front of the drums and sing. On 'Step Right Up' you can almost hear him flipping pages of lyrics. He was always surrounded by the music and the records sound like it. We never used headphones. Never.
"We set Tom up in Heider's Studio 4 on the piano and built the orchestra around him. I just told the musicians to balance themselves, and they did. They were actually thrilled to be able to work like that. The 'cellos and the violas would come in and listen to a playback and then go out and adjust themselves accordingly. Each pass got better and better. I had two AKG microphones on the 'cellos and two Sennheisers on the violas, and whatever came out of the rhythm section got into those microphones, too, but it just made the whole thing sound better."
På Small Change brukte de mic på Waits og på saxofonen, og lot rommet blø inn i opptaket, uten å "lage det på kjøkkenet etterpå".
Legg merke til hva som skrives om at cello og viola kom inn for å lytte til playback, og så justerte spillet sitt i neste omgang - uten at det ble rattet i miksepulten, en god indikasjon på hvor få mikrofoner som ble brukt til denne platen.
