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“Experience let’s you know which mic you can depend on,” says engineer/mixer Michael Barbiero. “Often you won’t have all afternoon to try ten microphones, so you go with what has worked for you in the past. The most important questions are: Does it work? Is it distorting? Is it giving you the optimum representation of what’s happening in the room?” Barbiero has worked with John Lennon, Metallica, Whitney Houston, Counting
Crows, Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule, Tesla, Velvet Underground, and Maroon
5. He recently worked with Lisa Loeb and finished mixing new albums for Skeeto,
a young emo band, and Canadian rockers Oliver Black. Also look also for a new
Mix magazine article Mike has just written.
MIKE: Actually, it does change. For a live DVD I engineered, mixed, and co-produced with Warren Haynes for the Allman Brothers called Live At The Beacon Theater, I used the same microphones that the band uses live. We sent split feeds to Jensen mic preamps before coming into the truck. In a live application you basically want to make sure that everything gets to tape solidly. Though I did wind up using a lot of the live show’s microphones for the studio CD we did, Hittin’ The Note, I also added some room microphones, including a stereo mic and a pair of old tube cardioid condensers. Warren likes to sing through a handheld condenser mic, and Greg Allman likes a tube condenser. Obviously, in a live application, condenser microphones like those are not appropriate. I’ve found that the human voice is such a variable instrument from individual to individual that there really isn’t one microphone that suits all.
MIKE: Absolutely. As I said, with the human voice it changes from person to person. I recall when recording Whitney Houston’s vocal for “How Will I Know” that Narada Michael Walden, the producer, looked at me as she walked out to check the mic. He said, “Whatever you do, make sure you get this—it’s going to be the take.” Having never heard her voice but having had it described to me as being a very powerful voice by Cissy Houston, her mother, I decided to use a studio condenser mic with a 10db pad, followed by a Neve 32264 compressor set at 4:1. I set the mic pre on the Neve 8068 console to about -35, as I recall, and hoped for the best. I had her going off tape through an LA3A followed by a Pultec EQP-1A with about a 4db boost at 5K, wide bandwidth, and a 3db boost at 100Hz. Whitney ran through the song brilliantly and effortlessly, then she said, “Let’s do it! I’m ready.” Narada told her, “You already did it.” Afterwards she commented that it was the best headphone balance she’d ever heard.
MIKE: Well, this wasn’t recent, but I remember it as a favorite. For the first Government Mule album Warren Haynes recorded simultaneously through two Soldano heads and two bottoms—one a Marshall, the other a PRC. This was his usual setup at the time. His signal was split via a path he’d worked out with his tech that involved a Korg Leslie simulator and a stereo chorus unit. I put a gobo between the bottoms for isolation, placed a large diaphragm dynamic and a dynamic instrument mic on each bottom, and positioned the latter mics facing directly at the driver about an inch from the grill cover and midway between the center and the edge of the cone. The dynamic mic was angled right next to the large diaphragm dynamic on the same driver to be parallel with the angle of the cone. Both amps were then blanketed off, and the phase was perfect. The four mics then came up on a Neve 8028 console I was using with each pair running through a bus to two different tracks and split left and right. Pre-tape I used a UREI 1178 stereo compressor at 4:1 on the busses. In this way, Warren was able to play power guitar as he desired on the fly: clean and up the middle, or in stereo with chorus or Leslie effects.
MIKE: My favorite story about weird accidents goes back to Tesla’s first album, Mechanical Resonance. Frank Hannon had ordered a Gibson double neck electric guitar that he’d hoped to use on the album, but we never got around to using it. On the last day, at about 5 a.m., everyone but Frank and I had left the studio. I was packing up as he was savoring the afterglow of having completed his first professional recording. He picked up that double neck and said, “I just wish I’d used this baby on something.” At the time I remember thinking that if we used it, it’s a tax write-off, so I put one of the song masters back up on the tape machine and said to Frank, “Go ahead, wail away.” Well, he played through the whole outro of the song. I don’t remember which song it was, but he will if he reads this. He looked at me and said, “That totally sucked!” I smiled and said, “Not totally.” Turning off his mics, I pressed play and record thus erasing his performance. All the while it was erasing he was looking at me looking at him like I knew something he didn’t know and thinking, “Mike is way overtired.” But at one point I hit the play button, popping the machine out of record, and this one great lick of his soared above the track. Then I hit play and record again continuing to erase the rest of his double neck’s lead. I never would have taken a chance doing that overdub quite the same way if I hadn’t been running completely on fumes that morning. In the end, Frank’s surviving new lick wound up being on the record.
MIKE: Egos.
MIKE: The Whitney Houston session I described earlier. Not so much because she sang the vocal in one take—which she did—but because virtually everything went perfectly. Every button, every knob, and every performance: the background vocals, the sax solo, everything was magical and done in one take. I attribute that mostly to Narada Walden’s genius for creating a great vibe. I remember hugging him afterwards and telling him that the session might keep me going for years to come. It has.
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