SnowGhost Music

Fresh off a series of shows following The Bleeding Edge Festival, The Mumlers were riding the hype at the speed of light. They were in talks with Galaxia Records, home to Tommy Guerrero and Ray Barbee, about signing a record deal. They were going to use their session with me to sweeten the pitch, having nearly a full record in hand. For a few weeks, Will Sprott, songwriter and leader of the band, had kept in touch over the phone to discuss the details of the sessions. It had always been a dream of his to record to two-inch tape, and he wanted to know if I had a tape machine. Of course, I said, and we carried on about the benefits of tape, tubes, and ribbons. You see, there is a club of sorts that is really into the warmth of the recordings of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The top end may not be as bright as today, and there may be some hiss, but that was replaced by mixes that bleed together well. I'll let you in on a secret about why tape blends better and is so much easier to mix with. In the tracking process, it is generally seen as ideal if you can isolate each instrument on to it's own track, for editing, EQing, and compression purposes. If you are only tweaking the track that needs it, your mix as a whole is better off.

There is also something to be said for bleed, whether it's in the mics at the time of tracking the album, or later, in the mixing process. When your tracks are dry and isolated, your mix may sound sterile and demo-like. To effectively make a bunch of tracks sound like a mix, you need the bleed. With analog tape, the tracks naturally bleed into each other, because it's physically impossible to keep them isolated. In the digital domain, there is no bleed, period. In the digital domain, we mask the discreetness of the tracks by adding reverb. I can't tell you how many times I have gone to mix on tape and just thrown up the faders to find that we are ninety percent of the way there. Not so with digital. I'm not knocking digital, as it definitely has it's benefits, but you just need to be aware of what beast you are dealing with. Will wanted to track to tape, so that was kind of a dead giveaway for the sound that they were going for.

They arrived in one of those seventies passenger vans, like the ones with the occasional eagle painted across the side. The Mumlers were a collective of self-proclaimed band geeks, or a modern day version of the Merry Pranksters, minus the acid, I think. And here they are:

Andy: drums, percussion

Felix: guitar, keys, cello, horns, bass, accordion, Alesis Micron

John: electric bass, guitar, drums, percussion, pedal steel, marimba, fx

JF: guitar, horns, Wurly

Paolo: bass

Mercedes: percussion

Will: lead vocals, guitars

They were a very gracious bunch and absolutely appreciative of the opportunity, as they had not spent any time in a studio of this caliber. We got right to work, first setting everything up in Studio A.

Because a lot of what makes The Mumlers special has to do with their live energy, they stressed the importance of trying to do most of the tracking live off of the floor. This would mean that isolation would be a bit of a headache, but if that meant that they would feel more comfortable, I was game. Besides, I remember the days when all I had was a stereo DAT recorder and would record my band in our practice space, moving the stereo lapel mic around (usually away from the cymbals and more towards the floor to make up for the lack of bass from the proximity effect of having no direct miking) until I got a good sound. To this day, I am a still amazed with the quality of some of those recordings, and the life of them just can't be beat.

So we did what we could to isolate Will, as the lead vocalist, by putting him in the isolation booth. On vocals we had a Telefunken M12 and Coles 4038 side by side, blending the natures of the two very differently-voiced mics. This is a trick I got from Chuck Ainlay. With the very bright M12 you get the edge and the air of a mic that is second to none. With the smooth Coles, you get the present vocal sound that makes the singer sound larger than life. Together, the result is what I call the "super duper vocal sound". Going through our Manley Slam with a touch of ELOP limiting, and even less FET limiting (a unique feature on this channel strip), I can smooth out the vocal with slower ELOP limiter, and not be worried that I may miss an unpredictable peak, with the FET. He wanted to play guitar live, so we made sure to angle the vocal mics up and away from the guitar, which, by pure luck, also helped to brighten up the muddle nature of his voice. By directing the mics in an upward fashion toward the roof of his mouth, we were able to achieve more clarity in the lyrics, which I saw as a strength in Will's writing.

Will bounced between two guitars during our sessions, his Gibson Jumbo acoustic and our Gibson Hollowbody Super 400 jazz guitar. I miked both of them with a pair of AKG 451s, one on the neck at the 12th fret, and one at the bridge, in an ORTF configuration. With my go-to for acoustic instruments and small diaphram condensers, the DW Fern, we got a full body and sparkle from the wood and steel strings, respectively. In addition to the mics on the Super 400, I also ran a cable remotely to a Carr 6v6 amp in our larger recreation room, with a RE-20 on the 15" cone. This gave us the swampy sound that Will seemed to be looking for. In addition to the close mics, we had a pair of widely spaced Sanken CU-44s; they are fantastic as distant room mics because they are so bright and seem to maintain intelligibility, despite being so far away, whereas other mics would get lost in the mud. From time to time we would turn these on to give the electric guitar a super roomy sound, adding some eerie spice to some of the songs.

Andy was a pretty loose drummer so I figured that a warm and roomy sound for the drums would compliment his playing. We set him up in the more absorptive part of Studio A, so the drums were really dry. I went with the Telefunken 270 stereo mic for warmth on the overheads, and on each of the toms I placed a very 70s sounding pair of Beta 56s. The round kick was captured with the standard AKG D112, and I went with my favorite AKG 451 taped to a SM57 on the snare. I had quite a bit of versatility on the drums; for a simple, yet open drum sound, I could really just throw up the overheads with the kick and get a great sound. If I needed a bit more closeness, isolation, or clarity, I could add in the other mics. We had some bleed from the other instruments, but it wasn't enough to warrant using any baffles that would make the musicians feel uncomfortable.

Mainly an upright bass player, Paolo had a very percussive role in the band. This was the instrument that was hardest to work with because he needed to be in the line of site with Andy on drums, but needed the most isolation from the rest of the band. We put him in the corner of Studio A, opposite the drums. We used fairly tight cardiod mics, an RE-20 on the bridge for low end, and a Schoeps MK41 on the neck for attack. We needed to get as much isolation from the use of directional microphone patterns as possible, because of our lack of separation in the room. I ran both mics through the SSL with a touch of limiting and EQ, and blended them together to tape. I also bussed in some DI bass to further clarify the bass track.

For the other multi-instrumentalists in the band (JF, John, Felix, and Mercedes), I set up stations, usually involving a single mic, DI line, and sometimes a send to a remote guitar amp. I wanted to give them the flexibility to bounce around from instrument to instrument, live, to truly capture the spontaneity of the band. It proved to be quite useful, as they like to switch around quite a bit during the course of one take.

JF spent most of the time bouncing back and forth between his French horn and guitar, and would spend moments on the Wurlitzer. On the guitar and keys, we ran him through remote lines into the Bluesboy amp miked up with an SM57, through the SSL with EQ and compression. Felix's station was made up of a 414 through the SSL pre, EQ, and compressor. We miked his cello and nylon-string guitar with this setup and got great results. John spent most of his time on his Telecaster electric guitar or my MSA pedal steel through the remote Fender Vibro King (miked with a 421 through the SSL channel strip as well). He also put some time in on the marimba, miked in our very reverberant glass-mirrored room with a pair of 414s overhead, through the SSL channel strip. At one point, John even laid down some funky Fender Bass, to further my vote for him into the Multi-instrumentalist Hall of Fame. Mercedes flanked John and Felix with a single 414 set to hyper-cardioid, to eliminate the bleed from specific instruments in the room, mostly. On quieter songs we had Mercedes track separately, as the bleed from the tambourine was just too much to control.

The horns got a special treatment as we wanted to make them sound symphonic with doubling and a big-room miking scenario. While JF was on the French horn, Felix was on his baritone horn. I set them up in the larger recreation room, with the spaced Sankens set up 30 feet away. They were actually facing away from the room mics, so the reverb you hear is mostly reflection off of the walls. I close-miked them with 421s, for a little warmth and clarity, if needed later in the mixing process.

This was one of the more free-form sessions I have worked on, because the band wasn't totally sure how to get the sound they wanted, apart from the direction of their newly anointed engineer-turned-guitar player, John. They were young, recently formed, and had not spent much time in the studio, so there was a lot record and see happening. This was fine by me, as they were open to experimentation and we were fairly efficient at getting a sound that they were happy with. We bounced the tapes into Pro Tools so that they could take a hard drive with them to work off of. A few months later, they went to Thom Monahan (Devendra Banhart, Brightblack Morning Light, Vetiver, Matt Pond PA) at The Hangar, as suggested by their label Galaxia, and mixed the record. The sound they went for was very close and more on the vintage side, much like records of the ‘70s. The flexibility achieved in the tracking process, by capturing most sounds with multiple mics, allowed for them to sculpt the sound later in the mixing process.