New call from the Abendrot guys!
This time the Abendrot crew got me into studio to try out some gear, the AnalogueTube AT 101 stereo mastering compression and their Everest 701 clock unit, the same one I tested out on a past testing session we had some months back.
This time thou I put my teeth on the real deal, meaning I was able to do an A/B’ing between this unit
and the regular AVID internal clock available on a recording session
In order to put this to practice I went to the Toho Gakuen SSL studio facility where they invited an exceptional acoustic duo,
Hiromi Takai on vocals
and the long-timemissed guitar wizard Mikio Fujioka. (We all miss you, little man).
They were asked to track the same single tune live for couple of takes in order to change different clock units at every run and catch the difference.
The mic set up itself was easy but really very effective sound wise:
The acoustic guitar, the instrument itself was not really an actual studio guitar with rich low ends and full body but more like a performance guitar, pretty thin on the bottom end.
So in order to get the best recording sound out if it I use my preferred close mic’ing technique,
meaning a condenser mic on the 12th fret, very close to it.
For that this time I tested an Ear Trumpet Labs out, quite interesting.
and then I put an M-149 on a player perspective position
(basically besides the player’s head on the right side facing downward with a little angle to the guitar top).
For the vocal I tested Bock Audio 251 mic out.
All this mics went into an PAU Audio 805 pre amp, pristine and very delivering unit.
Again I was very keen to hear what it would happen with all this clock switching deal.
so we tracked 2 different takes with the 2 different clocks
we started playing back afterwards
and when we started to A/B playing back…
“bam”, the truth!
And the truth was that the sound was completely more opened and wide broadband with the Evergreen 701 unit, no doubts about it, really
I then a-dd some regular plug-in reverbs to embellish the guitar and the vocal’s track.
And even on that the Evergreen unit made the tri-dimensional space truly happening, giving me and the audience around me, a really pure sonic experience.
Like icing on cake, the very last “toy” of the day to play with was the 2-channel compressor Analog AT-101 Fairchild replica which I inserted on the warm acoustic guitar mic (the M-149 track) and on the vocal track.
The AT 101 does not need any presentation: it’s been the most evaluated replica of the Fairchild 660/670 used at Abbey Road, Metropolis and Electric Lady studios, just to name a few.
So I put it in the chain and by varying the time constant control I could emphasize some 5-6 KHz on the vocals
something you may need, for example, on really low end male vocals with flushy attack; but I also got some interesting mids; on the guitar track I was happy with pretty much all different time constant settings,
getting nice and controlled low-mids,
and giving me back what I was trying to get from the guitar in the very first place,
meaning a warm body in a very natural fashion.
What a day!
