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July 06, 2014 | Nick Payne

Recording live

Taking a risk - did it pay off?

When I started on this journey I decided that: “I want to track live as much as possible and I’m not afraid of mistakes”. With the first recording session down, did it work?

On Saturday June 21 we had our first recording session. I descended on our dobro player’s house with the folks from Dear Orphans plus a few guests and we tracked two songs - Never Had A Sweetheart and Old Sydney Town. Present on the day were:

Myself - vocals and acoustic guitar
Carlyn Chen - Fiddle
Jolyon Gray - Dobro
Paul Sun - Double Bass
Richard Galluzzi - guest Clawhammer Banjo on Never Had A Sweetheart
Jenny Shimmin - guest Bluegrass Banjo on Old Sydney Town
Lyn Taylor - in the chair engineering and co-producing

Jo lives in an old textiles factory in Sydney’s Inner West. Being an old factory his place is a long narrow room divided up by bookshelves into their lounge room, bedroom and a music room/study. At one end the ceiling is high and it drops in height towards the other end. The end with the high ceiling sounds “live” (read slightly echoey) and at the other end it sounds more intimate. It was this end that Jo and I set up in by moving furniture out of his lounge room to allow everyone to stand in a large circle.

Mic plot. #recording

A photo posted by Nick Payne (@orphan_nick) on

In the middle of the room I set up a pair of large diaphragm condensor mics pointing left and right. These were the "room mics". Their job was to capture the sound of the room - the beautiful, echoey, musical soup of sound bouncing off the walls and ceiling. In front of this pair of mics was myself and opposite me was Paul on double bass. To the left stood Carlyn on fiddle and to the right Richard and then Jenny on Banjo. By standing in front of (or in between?) the two mics, Paul and I were in the centre of the stero image and then Carlyn in the left speaker and the banjos on the right.

Lyn sat at the laptop with headphones plugged into the audio interface and monitored the sounds and the levels. No-one else had headphones. Since we were recording live we didn't need them - we could hear each other acoustically in the room.

Lyn then hit record and we tracked about five takes of each songs before calling it quits for the day.

Listening back

The next day I did listened back to each of the takes and uploaded them to Soundcloud for everyone to listen to in order to find the best take to use.

Listening back is a combination of listening for mistakes in amongst a lot of sounds versus trying to find an amazing performance. The d-day scenario is having a take with an astonishing performance, but with a really obvious mistake that renders the take unusable (hitting a wrong note/chord, stuffing up the lyrics, etc.). It's nerve racking going through all the effort to organise seven people to turn up to a session, setting up all the gear, getting the takes down whilst accepting the risk that you may not get that great take you're after.

Well the good news, folks, is that the session was a success and the takes sound fanatastic.

Without doubt the sound of each of the instruments is clear and real; the vibe of the performance is captured by the room mics and it sounds like you're actually there; the performances are energetic and emotional.

The most incredible experience, however, was listening back to the takes of Never Had A Sweetheart.

As I listened to takes one through four I took notes. Each take sounded great and it was going to be tricky to choose the best one. When I got to take five every distraction in the room disappeared and I fell deeply into the music. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I knew we had the take.

The astounding thing about this take was not that it was free of mistakes. Nor did it differ from the others in what was played or the quality of the performances. But somehow, for five minutes in time, the actions of each individual in the room melded together as one and the whole became greater than the sum of the parts.

Thank you Carlyn, Jolyon, Paul, Richard, Jenny and Lyn - you take my breath away.

Nick

Technical details for the audio nerds

Nick VOX – Carillon 500 tube microphone > Art Digital MPA II tube pre-amp
Nick guitar – SE1A small diaphragm condensor > Motu 896
Carlyn Chen – SE1A small diaphragm condensor > Art Digital MPA II tube pre-amp
Jolyon Gray – Roland DR80C medium diaphragm condensor > Motu 896
Paul Sun – NT1A large diaphragm condensor > Motu 896 & Behringer small diaphragm condensor > Motu 896
Richard Galluzzi & Jenny Shimmin – Roland DR80C medium diaphragm condensor > Motu 896

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