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JOSH HOYER’S ‘COOKED RAW’
Soul singer/keyboardist Josh Hoyer and band capture the essence of live
performance on their new album by recording direct-to-disc in Welcome
to 1979 Studio (Nashville). “They learned of our ability to do directto-disc,
and it’s tailor-made for a band like Josh’s,” says studio owner/
engineer Chris Mara.
Typical live recording issues—balancing isolation with vibe and sightlines—arose,
but Mara’s greatest challenge involved live-mixing Hoyer’s
keys. “He had a multi-keyboard with a B3 patch to change from B-3 to
Wurly, but they dropped that at a gig the day before. I said, ‘I have a real
B-3 and Wurlitzer. That’s even better.‘ What I didn’t think of was, I don’t
know these songs, and he will do a verse on the Wurly and reach over for
a lick on the B-3 while singing, and vice versa.
“We had to set up two vocal mics, and I watched him like a hawk with
my fingers on the faders for the vocal mics; I couldn’t just mute them, I
had to crossfade them. Later, I commented to Cameron Henry who cuts
our lacquers and was running the lathe, ‘I’m a better engineer this evening
than I was this morning!’”
Mara EQ’d his two vocal mics (a Bill Bradley U 47 and a Miktek CV4)
similarly, and kept the recording chain identical after the mics with both
bused to an Avalon 737 compressor and dbx 160 limiter. As whole album
sides were cut to lacquers, the engineer used Pro Tools as a reference so
the lacquers could remain untouched.
“It was fun watching the band listen,” Mara recalls. “In most sessions,
everyone’s listening to themselves, but on this they’re listening to the
Josh Hoyer and
Soul Colossal in
Welcome to 1979
whole thing, complimenting each other’s playing and listening as a
band.”—Barbara Schultz
Photo: Nickolai Hammar
JIM LAUDERDALE,
‘SOUL SEARCHING’
The latest from Grammy-winning artist/songwriter Jim Lauderdale is
a double-album of original songs offering two takes on soul music: On
Disc 1, Lauderdale went to Memphis to make a classic soul album recorded
by the great Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell at Royal Studios. Recording/
mix engineer Leslie Richter calls Disc 2 “pseudo psychedelic social commentary
country music”; it features more roomy guitar sounds (and no
horns), and was tracked in RCA Studio A in Nashville.
“Everybody was on the floor together,” Richter says. “I had Jim behind
a baffle playing and singing at the same time. The bass amp was open in
the room next to the drums, and I put the guitar amp [miked with an AEA
R84] in a little hut so it was sort of isolated. I actually had two mics in that
hut because I wasn’t sure if we were going to have one electric guitar or
two. That ended up benig a blessing in disguise; I ended up using quite a
bit of the second mic [an AEA R92] as a room mic, for space and effects,
instead of having to create that in the mix.”
Lauderdale sang into a Shure SM5 during tracking, but Richter put up
a Neumann U 47 in House of Blues Studios for his vocal overdubs on the
Disc 2. She also recorded some of his final vocals for Disc 1, and for that
session she used an RCA 77, deferring to the choices that Mitchell had
made in Memphis: “On some songs we used an MCI JH536 pre from our
desk, a vintage AKG 414, and an original Teletronics LA2A,” Mitchell says.
“But on others we used the MCI pre’s, an original Universal Audio 1176 ,
and Microphone Number 9, the RCA 77 DX that Al Green sang all of his
classics on.”—Barbara Schultz
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MIX | OCTOBER 2015 | mixonline.com