 |
|
|
|
|
|
Like a real Floridian, there hasn’t yet been a hurricane tough enough to keep Miami engineer and studio owner Doc Wiley away from his work—that is, no longer than the time of the forced evacuations. Wilma was rough on Doc and his gear, but he barely skipped a step carrying on with his pre-storm season plans: Building a new Digidesign ICON-centered studio, Sonic Nerve, his second Pro Tools production studio in South Beach. If it’s fresh hurricane samples you’re looking for, look no further than Doc’s new Miami studio next to the beach. Wiley, an experienced certified Pro Tools instructor, applies the same approach
to tracking rock rhythm sections as he does to getting quality vocal performances
from the best voices in the business. He did so with U2, Prince, Ricky Martin,
and Christina Aguilera while at Joe Galdo’s legendary South Beach Studios
in Miami before building his first studio, DigiNote. Since moving on in 2003,
Doc often now collaborates with producer Kevin “She’kspere”
Briggs (Destiny’s Child, TLC, Pink, Backstreet Boys) in their recording
and coaching of some great vocal talents, as well, including one of the greatest
voices of all—Whitney Houston.
DOC: It doesn’t. The Golden Rule is “Gold in, gold out; crap in, crap out.” Unlike analog, with digital you do not have to compensate for tape machine parameters or tape noise reduction, for instance Dolby or dbx compression.
DOC: Once the first takes are recorded, it’s all about the alternate takes and the art of knowing how and when to ask a vocalist—even a Whitney—to give more. But most of all, a vocal recording engineer will not be able to move on until the vocalist gets out what they believe in their head is their best take. You spend your time doing this until that vision is recorded before you ever introduce with them the idea of doing alternate takes, or “safeties.” It’s just like tracking the rhythm instruments: I’ll first record the vocalist singing several full passes through the song, so that they can get their whole idea completely out, then we’ll talk about alternate takes.
DOC: I never use EQ or compression—ever. If it is not a good sound to begin with, I get a better instrument, or move the mic closer, or get a better mic, or get a better musician. I was lucky to have worked with Roger Nichols and, like him I’m a big fan of using no EQ or compressors. I just run all my microphones through the mic preamps and straight into Pro Tools. When I’m tracking drums I record the overhead mics very soft so that I have lots of transients to work with when I edit the songs before mixing.
DOC: I could do a white paper on this question alone…
DOC: Like a number of records I’ve done in this fashion, I recorded an entire “demo album” last year with a band called Shufly—in under 30 hours. So, I had to have their drums up and ready to record in 20 minutes! With so little time to set up, which was the whole approach of the project, I just used four mics on the drums: an old cardioid dynamic on the kick, a unidirectional dynamic for the snare, a pencil mic for the left overheads, and a supercardioid condenser vocal mic for the right side. I didn’t mic the hi-hat exclusively, so I leaned on the left overhead for my hi-hat sound and just went for a great overall stereo image of the drums. I rolled off the overheads and just a little in the low end in the mix to get a perfectly naturally sounding kit. Including the drummer, we were all very comfortable with the sound of his kit, and especially with his hi-hat sound.
DOC: Yes! We used an elevator shaft as a delay chamber by placing a speaker at the bottom of the shaft and a microphone on the elevator. Depending on what floor it was on, it gave us a different type of delay! Also, last year there was a song on which the guy vocalist had everything together in the song but he just wasn’t sure about what to sing in the outro verses—he was lost there. So for one of the alternate takes I had him scream the entire song as loud as he could! It was a very Radiohead-ish type of song, you know, an ‘I don’t believe you broke my heart’ kind of song [laughs.] Just drums, bass, and big chords. I told him to scream his lines through the whole song, and it worked.
DOC: Capturing lightning in a bottle—learning how to have the record button on at the right moment and time.
DOC: Working with U2. ----------
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
© 2008 Vintage Microphones (a Galaris LLC company). All rights reserved. Compare Pro Audio Prices! |
||||||
