Recording: "I Fall Hard" by Todd A

Recently in January, my friend Todd A and I began to work on another recording of his song entitled "I Fall Hard." Very catchy tune that he has recently released on iTunes.

Differing from the "IRL" E.P. that Todd A and I recorded last year, this track included multiple layers of acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, percussion, and drum set. With even these basic tracks found on your standard rock/pop/country tune, there are many considerations that the recording engineer must make.
For example, how many layers of guitar? Will they be up front, in the background, and what timbre will the instrument(s) have? Will the vocals sound crisp and clean, or smoother and warm... uh oh, I'm starting to get into really esoteric (bordering nonsense) territory once I start using terms like "warm" and "crisp." Maybe I'll avoid those for now. Let's just talk about mics and mic placement.

Acoustic Rhythm Guitar

As I do customarily for non-solo steel string acoustic guitar, I miked Todd's Yamaha acoustic using an XY stereo pair of Audio Technica AT2020s. The AT2020's are excellent for acoustic guitar; they nice;y capture pick attack without sounding too harsh and have just enough low-mid without getting boomy from proximity effect. The stereo pair was placed 16 inches in front of the guitar, centered at the end of the fretboard.

Why XY? This ensures mono compatibility, represents a wider tonal palette of the guitar than a single mono microphone (as one microphone is oriented more towards the body of the guitar, while the other is more aimed towards the neck), but does not have a super wide stereo image (as opposed to other stereo miking techniques) to keep "out of the way" in a busy mix. Miking in stereo better illustrates distance from the sound source through parallax, the way that two ears can determine how far and which direction a sound source is... kinda like how having two eyes allows you to also see how far something is.

It was important to keep the acoustic guitar a certain distance in this song, being that the lead vocal could be overshadowed by a overly present acoustic guitar. Todd's particular guitar has a very percussive and cutting tone, and so keeping enough distance between it and the mics were necessary to attenuate some of the sharpness of the attack.

The Guitar Riff

Todd used my Fender Telecaster (MIJ) into a Vox Brian May Special, a cool little solid state 5 watt amplifier with only the basics: gain, tone, and volume. I love the amp cause you can get some nice vintage, twangy tones from it. Also if the gain knob is kept low, but the tone and volume are maxed out, the speaker does this awesome freakout-thing where it starts distorting and sounds like it's going to tear at any moment. Cool! Hopefully the neighbors didn't mind, too much.

Anyway, I miked up the amp using a Shure SM57 up close and an AT2020 a few feet away, and up a little higher to capture the tonality of the amp more similar to what it sounds like playing in the room. The close mic and distance mic were then blended together to taste.

Here's a different angle to show the distance of the AT2020. Sorry about the poor quality of the photograph.

The guitar riff played on the electric guitar was also mirrored on Todd's Baby Taylor. This guitar has a considerable amount of bite in the pick attack, and a rather short sustain which adds to the percussiveness of the guitar. Wanting to capture the percussiveness without the sharpness, I used an SM57 pointed out at the bridge to capture more body/wood resonance, and an MXL V67 condenser pointed at the strumming hand to get more of the picking sound.

The MXL V67 worked pretty well, balancing out the bright Taylor sound with the mic's inherent mellowness while still capturing the picking sound. The SM57 lent a somewhat dull sound in this application, but when blended together with the V67, gave just the right amount of body to stand out in the song above all the other acoustic and electric sounds.

You can listen to "I Fall Hard" and other songs by Todd A by visiting his website.
www.toddamusic.com/