old school recordings

[ben.]

Want something new to listen to? Tell me what you think of this http://www.skiffleminstrels.com/listen.php

I haven't really heard from anyone about how this stuff sounds on nice home system, and I'm curious...

[artto]

No offense, but this is not an "old school recording". It's simply a modern recording of "old school" music ~ rockabilly and honky tonk

It sounds fine on my Klipsch ProMedia One desktop system hooked up to the computer. Too bad I just moved my office back into the office (after remodeling). I was using my listening room for my office for more than a year. I could easily have routed this through the main system.

[ben.]

No offense taken at all, Art. What do you hear that makes you say that, though?

[artto]

No offense taken at all, Art. What do you hear that makes you say that, though?

Well, first I guess it's more "logic deduction" ~ many of the band members are not old enough to have recorded this long enough ago to consider it an "old school recording". Second, I hear stereo, and I hear multi-track stereo, close mic'd and none of the sonic "qualities" of what an "old school" recording would sound like.

Not to long ago I played in a band that played "jump" blues ~ west coast swing blues. The few CDs we made were not "old school" recordings even though the music was primarily 40's/50's music played very authentically (our harp player Joe Filisko is one of the best in the world). The recordings were all multi-track. If they were authentic "old school recordings" we would have just hung a mic in the middle of the room and recorded monoral.

Hope that helps.

[ben.]

That's fair and good guesswork, too. I was going to leave it be for a while so as not to color people's perceptions of it, but there doesn'tseem to be any interest, so I might as well spill it now.

Yes, it's stereo and most instruments had a mic near them, but my recording techniques were tilted towards older methods. We tried a single mic and it just wasn't happening. We didn't have a good enough or big enough room to make that work (or the budget to rent a suitable space).

So...
Drums - kick miced w/ Audix D4, single ribbon (Apex215) for overhead.
Bass - Beyer M88 wrapped in foam and stuck in the bridge.
El gtr - tube amp miced w/ Apex215 ribbon
Lap steel - tube amp miced with Beyer M500 ribbon
Two ART M-Five ribbons were used - one to capture the acoustic gtr (and his backing vox), the other to capture the fiddle, accordian an both of their backing vox.
A single Apex460 tube condenser (same as Telefunken M13) in sub-cardioid (tried omni but some rejection helped keep the drums reasonably seperate) was used on the vocals.

It was completely live. ART MPA Gold tube pres were used on more critical channels, then into Akai DPS16 multitrack. Mix down was interesting - I came out of the Akai using 5 of its busses into ProVLA-II tube vactrol compressors (and a tube Bellari LA120 as well), then out of those into an Oram OctaMix summing box. From there the stereo mix went into an old US-made ProVLA comp, then into a Korg MR-1 stereo recorder at 1-bit/2.8MHz. Unfortunately, I had to master at 16/44.1 since there is no affordable & useful editing available at the 1/2.8M resolution. The online files are 192k mp3.

It was definitely an interesting experience to make it all work. Thanks for the feedback, Art. I am glad you didn't find the compression to be too apparent - that was something I spent a lot of time on.