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"For his center mic I often use a lobar pattern, which some of my fellow engineers think is very strange,” laughs Eric Spitzer-Marlyn. He’s recalling his recording of Thomas Leeb’s incredible acoustic guitar work for Upside Down, the latter’s new instrumental album. “But this is one of my tricks to make an acoustic guitar sound larger than life.” Spitzer-Marlyn, a talented acoustic guitarist himself who also recorded Leeb’s previous album Riddle, owns and operates The Hit Box Recording Studios. Located in the Austrian countryside town of Altenburg an hour from Vienna, Eric likely cherishes recording the sound of Leeb’s two organic, woody guitars there—an 025c and F35c quilted maple/sitka spruce from Lowden Guitars of Ireland—as much as he does other projects he’s attended to since his recording roots in the late ‘60s. That includes no less than his engineering Yoko Ono, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen while at the legendary Hit Factory in New York; his early involvement with the birth of electronic minimal music; his current teaching of location sound, sound design, and television audio production at the Vienna University of Performing Arts and Music; and his on-going close longtime audio and cinematic association with world-renowned film director and documentarist Werner Herzog. Eric’s sound design on the documentary Stalin: The Red God was in 2002
awarded San Francisco’s coveted Golden Gate Award for Sound Design.
ERIC: For sure it does. If I owned all the mics in the world here in the studio, I’d have every approach covered.
ERIC: First of all, I am an old-time guy who still runs the mics into an analogue console, sometimes into a Mackie and sometimes a redesigned M-520 from TASCAM. I even have an old Platinum desk for the real Brit-pop sound, though unfortunately without any service manuals for it. EQ is held to a minimum during recording sessions here because I’d rather change my mic positioning, or the mic itself, rather than use EQ. On acoustic guitars I use a bit of dbx compression, even when recording, so that the signal goes into the computer slightly compressed.
ERIC: Not really. In the old days I used more outboard gear when tracking. Today, there are loads of things in my computer so I can do it all in the mix.
ERIC: First, it all depends on the room you work in. It is always an advantage to know well the room and its hidden problems. Secondly, the instrument or vocal type you have to capture is what matters most: Is it dark or bright? What kind of attack time does it offer?, and so on. Finally, it is the character of the mic itself which leads me most to the decision of what microphone to use in which situation.
ERIC: Basically there are no rules. If you end up with strict rules when it comes to setting up a mic, then you are a bad engineer. My ears come first. In most cases I will sit down in front of the instrument and player and listen before I set up anything. Also, I play acoustic guitars quite well myself and so am absolutely specialized in recording the sound of an acoustic guitar. Regarding my recording of Thomas, I always want to get the sound of ‘wood’ from his guitars, that beautiful ‘Lowden’ sound of his. I have to get very close to the body of the guitar and, quite differently from how most other engineers work, I get very close to the guitar’s sound hole, as well. Because Thomas does a lot of body and hand movement and is always standing during recording, I usually come at the sound hole slightly from above. By using M-S technique, of course, there are two mics at once in the same position self-defining the necessary patterns.
ERIC: Well, I once wanted a real big-sounding electric guitar for a project. After recording it I re-amped the track back through an amp-stack placed in the basement of the building I worked in at the time, then I separately miked the first and second floor staircases. It was a great sound for the record and worked well—but I got thrown out of the location and had to rebuild my studio elsewhere! I knew beforehand that my idea for this sort of huge electric guitar sound would work, but I did not expect to be evicted for recording it. The property owners there seemed to lack humor about my recording techniques.
ERIC: I once wanted to record a singer underwater. Back in those days, it was too early to try this because even stiff mounting the mic caused big problems. Once I got that together, though, the signal then started to crackle due to bad cable isolation. Finally, the mic’s water protection leaked, too, and it all ended up in one big mess.
ERIC: Weak artists and bad musicians who believe and expect we engineers can all fix it in the mix.
ERIC: Working with Elton John and Pavarotti on "Live Like Horses."
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