Studio Session - Take an insight

 TalkBox and acoustic guitar setup

Hey dear fellows,

 

I'm back with another insight into our work. The past month, we could keep up our pace and recorded a lot of stuff. For instance, all piano, synthis, TalkBox, and accoustic guitar parts are done. What's left now, are bass-parts and vocals which we intend to record within April.

In this post, I explain, how we record the TalkBox and how we set up microphones for accoustic guitars. For synthis and pianos, I don't have to explain a lot. It's mostely plug and play, though we always plug stereo for controlling. 

Let's start with the TalkBox part which only Julien recorded. The set up remains the same, as we use the TalkBox for live. You fix the hose to a Shure SM 57! That’s it. The sound is produced by Julien’s Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier with the most powerful channel he has. What’s different to our older records is the fact that we now recorded the TalkBox for each song stereo. That pushes the TalkBox-sound a little bit more in front of the mix. 

The acoustic guitar parts instead were quite complicated to find the right set up. If you didn’t know, in studios you usually use to record acoustic guitars at least two signals. One to focus on the strike of the strings, the other to catch the sound of the whole body. The third track mostly takes the DI of the guitar. Though we could have worked with three tracks, we wanted to try something new. Because we use different acoustic guitars with different electronic and sound systems, we left out this possibility. But still, how to catch the strikes and body sound? The body sound is easy. We installed the SM 27 and pointed the membrane slightly turned away in place of the neck and body’s end of the guitar. It’s important to note here that we didn’t set any kind of filter on the microphone itself. But how to solve the issue with the focus on strikes? After trying different things, I installed a SM 57 and pointed it from the bottom of the acoustic guitars onto the strings. Both mics together produce a fantastic sound. As I told you before, we used different kinds of acoustic guitars. Throughout, we used our Takamine 6-String for rhythms and solos. For special sounds and special parts, we used my Yamaha 6-String for finger picking parts. It just sounded somehow lighter and easier than the Takamine did. For one song, we use the Yamaha 12-string. Because its boy is much different than the body of the others, I couldn’t record with the microphones. It sounded awful!  That’s why the 12-string was recorded over its electronics and DI. 

Bellow, you find two pictures showing the setup of the TalkBox and the microphones for the acoustic recording sessions. In the next session, I hope to talk about vocal and bass recordings. 

Until then, stay tuned for more information and keep on rocking.

Enjoy Seasplash!