 |
|
|
|
|
|
Picture yourself in front of a double stack row of Marshall amps feasting upon your heavily affected guitar signal chain. It’s all feeding back into the four 20-inch floor monitors at your ankles as the massive multi-arrayed concert sound system saturates your best lead and rhythm riffs into the hearts, minds, and ears of 50,000 devoted concert followers. Thus was the recently former life of Adam Williams. The original guitarist of “Boston action rockers” Powerman 5000, Williams called it quits in 2005 to focus on producing new artists and his friend and PM5K vocalist Spider One, the latter for film and game audio projects from Adam’s Los Angeles home location, QiLab Studios. “It’s just my living room here,”he says from his QiLab apartment
where, thanks to a fast Apple, his sound is as large and dynamic as he needs
it to be. One of his top collaborators is an insightful, positive rising hip-hop
rapper named Life: The Guardian. “I’ve got a walk-in closet in here
that I’ve turned into a vocal booth. I’ve learned how to build bass
traps, and exactly where to hang overhead diffusers, too. Living in L.A., I’m
always trying to learn as much as I can about studio acoustics and sonic treatments.”
ADAM: I've actually been doing more programming than recording lately. Today, I'm working on a hip-hop track using a sample from David Lee Roth's song "Damn Good."
ADAM: Well, vocally speaking, unless I'm going for something extreme, such as a very distorted vocal sound, I like to start with a pretty flat "normal sound” at first. Then, depending on how and where we want to take it, I'll start tweaking things with the mics from there. For guitar amps, for example, it's usually one or two mics: One right up to the grill, the other moved around [in the room] until something sounds cool. Sometimes I use phasing to EQ the sound, and other times I'll try to find a strange little ambient corner of the room to mic.
ADAM: My latest piece of gear is Focusrite's Liquid Channel, so at the moment I'm exploring what it is capable of doing with a mic signal. The mic goes right into that and directly into Pro Tools.
ADAM: Sometimes, if scheduling is important, I'll go with something that I'm familiar with and know will bring the results I'm looking for quickly. Other times, I'll try something I've never tried before just to keep things interesting. As for mic choice criteria, I always ask myself: 1. Are there any inherent EQ boosts in the mic's design?
ADAM: I definitely want to warm up the sound of a digital recording, at least a bit in the digital domain and conversion of things.
ADAM: Hmmm...usually just sticking a mic into something odd works every time: Inside a Slinky, a shoe, a toilet or wherever. Some of those ideas don’t sound like they'd work acoustically, but they do.
ADAM: They all work. Failure is subjective.
ADAM: The balancing act of keeping everyone happy. This includes the vibe, as well as the sounds, that are captured through all the microphones.
ADAM: In terms of a playing gig, it would have to be a show I played with Powerman 5000 long ago in Atlanta as we were just starting to tour outside of Boston in the early ‘90s. Robbie Robertson, who was working at Dreamworks at the time, saw our Atlanta set and complimented me on my slide guitar playing [Note: Wow!] Another memorable gig would be playing on the 50-yard line of Giants Stadium for one of the Ozzfest tours. As for the studio recording and technical side of things, I'd have to say that watching Chris Lord-Alge mix a Powerman 5000 record as he encouraged me to pick his brain—that was memorable.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
© 2008 Vintage Microphones (a Galaris LLC company). All rights reserved. Compare Pro Audio Prices! |
||||||
