Maja And David – Fiddles & Foot Percussion

Posted on February 15, 2018February 15, 2018 by royerlabs

Maja & David – Fiddles & Foot Percussion

Fiddles both miked with SF-2 ribbon microphones.
Foot percussion – Mojave Audio MA-100 microphones

Signal Chain:
All mics to Universal Audio 8p’s using Neve 1073 mic pre plug-ins. A/D conversion done in the 8p. Recorded to Pro Tools. Recorded in a Kansas City hotel room during Folk Alliance.

Engineers: Dan Ankney and Nathan Heironimus

Maja Kjær Jacobsen and David Boulanger lay down some great fiddle and foot percussion. Things really get moving around 1:30 into the video. Hard to believe this is two people playing when you hear it!

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Fab Dupont / Will Knox

Posted on October 22, 2014December 23, 2014 by royerlabs

Acoustic Guitar – SF-1
Violin – R-121
Banjo – SF-2
Standup Bass – R-122
Drum Overhead – SF-24
Drums, Tom-Toms – R-122
Drums, Kick – R-122V
Drums, Hi-Hat – R-121

Producer: Fab Dupont. Engineer: Meredith McCandless

When our friend Fab Dupont set out to record singer/songwriter Will Knox’s album “The Matador And The Acrobat” with engineer Meredith McCandless, they decided to track the album entirely with Royer ribbons (except for a condenser on Will’s vocal and a dynamic on the snare). Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the recording process that Fab and company so kindly put together for us.

Vocals & Guitar: Will Knox
Violin: Clayton Mathews
Banjo: Kyle James Houser
Standup Bass: Chris Anderson
Drums: Timur Yusef

Visit Fab’s website at www.fabulousfab.com. Visit Flux Studios at www.fluxstudios.net.

Puremix.net is an educational website featuring a wide assortment of videos on recording, mixing, mastering and much more. Puremix.net was created by Fab Dupont; his partners in Puremix now include Ben Lindell and Ryan West.

Foghorn Stringband

Posted on September 5, 2014April 20, 2016 by royerlabs

Bluegrass Band – SF-24
Acoustic Guitar – SF-24
Fiddle – SF-24
Mandolin – SF-24
Standup Bass – SF-24

Recording Engineer: Stephen Schauer

Recording Chain: See Recording Notes below

Foghorn Stringband playing live at Old Style Guitar Shop, presented by The Bluegrass Situation. Great performance of the old Stanley Brothers tune We’re Going to Paint the Town and Kennesaw Mountain Rag. Caleb Klauder on mandolin, Sammy Lind on fiddle, Nadine Landry on bass, and Reeb Willms on guitar.

Recording Notes from engineer Stephen Schauer:

I had a wonderful opportunity to shoot and record a little video of Foghorn Stringband for Ed Helm’s traditional music website, The Bluegrass Situation (www.thebluegrasssituation.com). This kind of music is close to my heart, so it was a blast to get this time with such an amazing and talented group of folks.

We had an hour with the band and a crew of just 3, so I had to operate a camera AND run sound. The audio setup had to be fast and simple with great fidelity AND not clutter the frame. Using a Royer SF-24 in the center of the band allowed them to play in a traditional way – gathered around a single mic as was done for the last hundred years. It allowed them to huddle up close, and a great performance that you can only get when the band can really hear themselves and play off each other’s energy. The sonic character of the mic was a great complement to voices and the strings.

Regarding the technical side, we kept it simple so I didn’t need to do much fancy footwork in the edit and mix. I had the SF-24 front and center and tried to contain the performers within the front lobes of the figure 8. The room was tiny, but thankfully it was trapezoidal so there were fewer standing resonant tones in the room. The SF-24 is 9-% of what you hear in the recordings.

I panned out the Royer 60% left and right until the soundstage felt like it matched the visual, I put a little notch in the EQ around the lead singer’s voice to help bring it forward, and rolled off the bass of the SF-24 with a mellow high pass curve set at around 70hz (to clean up the room tone and leave space for a close mic I had on the bass, which was panned to match her position).

I had an AKG 451EB on the floor close to the bass, with a low pass filter set for 700 Hz, and a Beyerdynamic MC834 in the adjacent guitar showroom for nice real room ambience that I could mix in later if needed, rather than relying on reverb plug-ins. The MC834 had a high pass filter set at 500 Hz, and the mic was mixed back about 5 dB.

On the master, I pushed up the 300-1200hz about 1 dB, used a little preset compression that sounded good, added a tiny bit of reverb, and used a limiter with about 2db threshold to get the overall levels up for the video.

I recorded directly into a Tascam HS-p82 with no outboard preamps and mixed it all in Reaper with the stock plug-ins, on my laptop.

-Stephen Schauer

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Jamie Laval & Ashley Broder – Full Mixes and Isolated Tracks

Posted on June 16, 2014April 22, 2016 by royerlabs

Mandolin – SF-24 (one side of microphone only), R-122V
Fiddle – R-122V

1) “The Bridge of Cally” (Jamie Laval)

Engineer: Jay Manneschmidt

Instruments recorded live, within 6 ft of each other, with separation achieved by using microphone’s null points.

Recording chain: SF-24 and R-122V through Gordon preamps, into Lavry Gold A/D converters and recorded into Sequoia/Samplitude at 88.2 KHz. No EQ used.

1 a) Full Mix

1 b) Mandolin
Mandolin: SF-24 (only one side used, for a mono recording) twelve inches from mandolin, pointed at the 12^th fret.

Violin
Violin: R-122V twenty-two inches away from violin, slightly above the strings and 45 degrees left of center from the “F” holes.

2) “Levantine’s Spinning Barrel” (Laval, Broder)

Engineer: Peter Cutler.

Recorded during live broadcast on the Los Angeles radio show FolkScene.

Mandolin & Fiddle: Two R-122V’s; one in front of the mandolin (pointing at neck/body joint) and one above the fiddle. The null points of each mic were positioned to reject bleed, giving each instrument isolation from the other while being played in close proximity. (See photos)