NOTES FROM THE ENGINEER : Obedient Waves "The 2nd Stage of Grief"

Obedient Waves is a Los Angeles-based 4-piece rock band : Joanna Devoe vocals/lyrics, Billy Gruber(that's ME!)vocals/guitar, Dylan Halacy drums, and Murv Douglas Bass.

AUDIO:

On kick Shure Beta52 & Beta91 both inside, snare Heil PR-22's top & bottom, toms Sennheiser 421's, and overheads a matched pair of AKG 451's. All drum microphones went into an Allen & Heath MixWizard, then into an Apogee AD8000 to Protools.

A bunch of mics tested on guitar and bass, but wound up using the Shure SM7 on guitar, and a Sansamp 3 channel bass driver DI on bass. Guitar and Bass went straight into a Great River mp2-nv then to the Black Lion modded Digi002r to Protools.

Vocals were handled by another pair of Heil PR-22's, into another Great River mp2-nv, to a cheapo Drawmer compressor inserted pre-transformer, then split to Protools for recording and the Allen & Heath so we had fold back monitor control.

Both the guitars and vocals went from the Great River's straight into my Black Lion Digi002R. Which is the interface from my computer to my whole system, and the best upgrade to ever happen to Protools.


In Protools, my session wound up a slim 12 tracks mixed to 4 stereo stems, output to a Unit Audio 8x2 passive summing mixer back into Protools via the Great River mp2-nv for the make-up gain.

I stereo bussed drums and cymbals separately to crush the drum buss without affecting the cymbals. All lead sounds received a parallel compressor mono buss, which I constantly rode to only help boost things in the quiet parts.

Vocals had a little bombfactory pultec eq, bombfactory 1176 compression, and a d-verb small plate.

Guitar a little slap echo panned to the right and only boosted for solos, and the Bass received some more Sansamp grit from the pluggin version.


The drum kit has the standard panning assignments, but I have the bass panned at 50% right and guitar panned at 50% left, as well as male vocal slightly(5%) right and female vocal slightly(5%) left. It just felt clearer, and it sums to mono just fine.


VIDEO:

We used 2 Hi-Def camera's, a Panasonic 5D & a Sony Z1U, a GO-Pro as an overhead shot, and 2 Flip cameras on little tripods. I cut the shots together in old school Final Cut Express on a Mac Pro 2.8 Ghz with 16gigs of memory, and a smoking new ATI videocard, running Mac OS10.6.8.

I have a passion for recording live music, especially rock and roll, and I make the effort to accommodate every budget.

Contact me to record your next show or rehearsal :

Billy Gruber / CaliforniaSoundControl@yahoo.com / 818 416 0328.