When we moved to Louisville from Nashville I went from a larger space to a smaller setup. Basically I now have a control room shared with a small isolation booth for vocals, acoustic instruments, etc. and a second room next door for tracking drums, and other loud instruments. There are also several small rooms and closets nearby where amplifiers can be isolated when groups want to track live. The setup is small, but still large enough to do live work if needed. The floor is on a slab, and the windows are treated with “Indows” that improve room isolation a lot.

The studio is in a walkout basement in our home that overlooks Beargrass Creek. Access to the studio is via stone steps that run from the driveway alongside the house to a patio where musicians can gather or just hang out when not recording. The patio has a lovely view of the Creek

The door from the patio leads into a mi-size room where furniture can be easily moved around to set up drums, or other louder instruments for tracking. The door at the end of this room leads directly into the control room. The screen can be used as needed to see others in the control room and vice versa.

Here is a view of the control room / isolation booth taken from the large window on the creek side of the room. You can see that a large closet has been converted into a small iso-booth for vocals, etc.

When isolation is needed, or corners need to be taken out of the recording, I now use a lot of these moveable Auralex gobos. They are amazing and work for just about every application possible.

These can be set up around or in the isolation booth if more or less isolation is needed, depending on the voice or instrument and the frequencies you want to enhance or squash.

From the isolation booth toward the window, here is the view, and the scene out the window. A great place to work on music!

All in all, it’s a great place to hang out and record music! I’ve settled in now and the vibe and the sounds are absolutely first rate.

An interesting story here. The Rev (John Wiley Nelson) is a singer songwriter from Provincetown, MA, who also spends about half the year living in Portland, OR. He is in his 80s and suffered a serious bout of throat cancer two years ago. During his treatments he wrote an album’s worth of material, and entitled the album his “Swan Song,” thinking it might be his last CD. He recorded the vocal tracks during his recovery, and is now on the mend, doing very well indeed! So, perhaps this CD is not his “Swan Song?” We will see. 

The album is fairly stripped down production-wise, mostly acoustic instruments in a folk format. The guitar work was done by guitar genius Kenny Smith. Stuart Duncan recorded the fiddle tracks, and I was delighted to get Chip Bush, Sam Bush’s cousin, who lives near Louisville, to play the mandolin tracks. Randy Kohrs added magical, lyrical dobro tracks. I played bass and added lead guitar on one song, and electric piano on one. All in all, the CD has a lovely feel and is worth a good listen!

Tony Winters, a prominent artist, and Helen Mitsios, a well-known poet and publisher of international poetry, live in New York City. They co-wrote a song entitled Fool for Love, using a country music idiom to express the emotions accompanying a tragic relationship. Tony put down the rhythm and lead electric guitar tracks, I added a low electric guitar track and organ, and Andy Hull added drums (from Nashville). My daughter, Leslie Rodriguez dropped by the studio and recorded the vocals. I added a bass track. We had a great couple of days in the studio tracking and mixing. Here’s a link to the song, Fool For Love.

Tony enjoyed the process so much that he decided to write another song. He returned to the studio a couple of weeks ago on his own with a new song entitled Dragons and Swords. This song has a fantasy feel, in the vein of the Moody Blues, and he wanted some Mellotron in a couple of places on the song, so I obliged him with that. Not my usual cup of tea, but it was fun to invent that element for this song. I also added bass. Andy Hull again played drums. Tony played all the other instruments: rhythm guitar, Tacoma “A guitar” (a small guitar that tunes to an A, and sounds a little like a lute). He also played the very original, signature electric guitar hooks throughout the song. Tony also sang this one, and really did a great job. Take a listen here to Dragons and Swords.

Flat River Band’s New EP

Posted: March 27, 2022 in Recent Projects

I had the privilege to master the Flat River Band’s new EP. All of the songs were beautifully recoded and mixed by Bryce Roberts at Quad Studios in Nashville. One of the cool things about the EP is that the Flat River Band is three brothers, and they cover one of my favorite three-brothers band songs of all time, I Wish You Were Someone I Love, by the Gatlin Brothers. The Gatlin Brothers joined them in the studio on the recording and Bryce did an incredible job layering the vocals. In the just-released video, the Gatlin Brothers join them on stage.

Kim McLean is an amazing, accomplished singer songwriter with credits on albums by Tim McGraw, Trisha Yearwood, and Lee Ann Womack. But she is an incredible performer in her own right and her new EP is a mesmerizing journey into her own life via her seasoned writing and performing talent. We went for a live feel as we recorded this EP in the studio, and it payed off. I wanted to feature her vocals above (literally floating above) the band – so that her voice and the lyrics are felt and heard. The emotion in her voice is everything on this EP, and it can bring you to tears if you’re not prepared.   7m7a4640-edit

A release date hasn’t been announced for the EP, but here’s a sneak preview of one of my favorites on the album on my private SoundCloud account.

After a series of great tracking and mixing sessions, the Flat River Band released its EP and video for their new album titled Every Dog Has Its Day.  Here’s a link to the video for the title song.

When you hear the songs, you can tell that they harmonize like only family can! In the studio, I wanted to catch the spontaneity and energy that they get during live performances so we recorded the vocals all at the same time instead of overdubbing. The feel is great! The review on Billboard.com was great. Thanks for the shout-out to the studio!

Here’s a live performance of the song:

 

Check out the entire album on YouTube (or your favorite streaming service)!

 

 

So, living in Nashville is pretty amazing if you have a studio. Great musicians are available all the time, you can rent gear from several outlets for reasonable prices, and the there are many world-class techs available to repair, renovate, or modify your gear when needed. On that last score, I have been self-modifying several of my microphones, soldering better capsules and capacitors into my Rode N2 and into a Studio Projects B3 large diaphragm microphone.

After using my Miktek CV4 for a couple of years, and basically loving it for most things, I found that I kept trying to equalize a little high end “zing” – evidently due to the way the capsule interacts with the tube electronics in the body of the mic. I read a Tape Op magazine article about a microphone tech in Nashville named Shannon Rhoades, a guy who used to actually work at MikTek, who could do a killer modification on the CV4. After listening to some digital files of the results he is able to achieve, I bit the bullet (literally – this was not cheap) and decided to go for it. I emailed him and then packed up my CV4 and drove it over to his house. When I walked in, I shuffled past a dog, and a guy coming out of the back workroom with a microphone modified for Martina McBride (I believe it was her, or maybe it was Shania Twain), and met Shannon in the workroom Here’s a little video from YouTube of an interview with Shannon in that room (scroll to about 5:45).

The room was full of microphones, all being modified and personalized for various country luminaries, and Shannon asked me a few questions about what I was looking for in the mic. He got the drift, I left, and he went to work. Two weeks later I returned, paid him through PayPal, picked up the microphone and put it into action recording the Flat River Band (a post to come about that later).

After nearly a year with the modified microphone, using it on vocals, acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, and as a room mic, I have to say that it was worth every penny. What was a really, really good $1600.00 tube condenser mic, was now close to a world-class microphone – the kind you’d pay 8 to 10 grand to use. It has that huge, larger than life, “suck you in sound”, with a silky high end, tight and controlled midrange, full and flowery low end that is really nice to have on most vocals and featured instruments. It reminds me a lot of a Telefunken C12, and for about 1/3 of the price. Check Shannon out at https://www.facebook.com/Micrehab/

John Wiley Nelson (a.k.a. “The Rev”) is a folk and bluegrass songwriter residing in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was the manager of WOMR, the local public broadcasting station there form some years, and still acts as DJ for a regular bluegrass show. He has recorded several CDs here at Jonymac Studio. Over the years, he has focused more and more attention on hiring the finest award-winning musicians for his CDs: Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Adam Steffey on mandolin, Randy Kohrs on resonator (dobro), Ron Stewart on banjo, and most recently Kenny Smith on acoustic rhythm and lead guitars. He also brings in Kenny and Amanda Smith to produce and perform his vocals. Due to the busy schedules of all of these musicians, it is impossible to get them all together at one time to record. We have to multi-track, working around their schedules. Here’s the process:

  • The Rev records a rough vocal and rhythm guitar track to click for all songs (I accompany him on guitar)
  • The Rev creates an arrangement sheet, identifying clearly who plays rhythm, fills, or leads during each song.
  • Kenny Smith comes in and records a rhythm track for all songs, replacing my scratch guitar track.
  • Kenny then records any lead acoustic guitar work needed
  • I record an acoustic bass track
  • This improved rough mix is sent to:
    • Adam Steffey who records his mandolin tracks at his preferred studio (sometimes Ron Stewart’s Sleepy Valley Barn in Paoli, Indiana)
    • Randy Kohrs who records his resonator tracks at his studio (Slack Key Studios, Nashville, TN)
    • Ron Stewart records his tracks at his studio: Sleepy Valley Barn in Paoli, Indiana
  • These artists send their stems to me digitally to put into the mix
  • The Rev comes back into the studio and records his final vocal tracks
  • Kenny and Amanda come in to do background harmony vocals
  • Stuart Duncan comes in to the studio here and records his fiddle tracks which provide the “glue” on the CD.
  • The Rev and I do a good early mix for each song
  • I finish the mixing and mastering

Because of the quality of musicianship, this process works wonderfully.

One final thing that really helped this new CD. I’ve been less than happy with the basic sound palette when recording and mixing acoustic music such as bluegrass “in the box” in Logic (Pro Tools is not better), so I added an instantiation of Slate Virtual Mix Channel’s Neve console emulation on each bus, and on the Mixbus, and it made an amazing difference. I strongly recommend this! The sound is warmer, rounder, more listenable. The CD is available on iTunes, Spotify, Napster, and YouTube. To hear the album on YouTube go here!

raalb01556550Credenda is a family band: see more here! Three siblings sing awesome harmonies, and the mother performs on keyboard. They came in and tracked a 6 song EP last summer, and we finished up the mixing in the fall. They released the project a few months ago. Kim Mclean produced the CD and brought in Andy Hull on drums, his son Evan Hull on electric guitar and bass, and Charlie Chamberlain on electric guitar and mandolin. The tracking sessions were very creative and spontaneous, and Mclean gave the artists a lot of room to experiment on each track. The results were beautiful. IMG_9103

We first tracked the drums, percussion, bass and rhythm guitars, along with a scratch vocal track. Because the energy between the siblings was so good on vocals, and I didn’t want to lose that, I recorded the vocals at the same time, after the rhythm and lead tracks were in place. That also gave me an opportunity to try out a couple of microphones I had recently hand-wired and modified, using parts from Micparts.com. I had done their Rode NT-2 modification with one of their RK-47 capsules on my old Rode NT-2 microphone, and their Studio Projects C3 modification on an old C3 I got on Ebay. I had also recently asked Shannon Rhodes do one of his incredible modifications on my MikTek CV-4 (more on that in another post soon!), and used that for the lead vocals. All three modifications took the vocals to a new level, and combined with the live three-part recording, the effect is great! Take a listen here!

My eyes aren’t what they used to be, and I’ve been wanting to get a couple of my favorite preamps (the ones with tiny knobs) up higher and closer where I can tweak them easily. I didn’t want to buy a new desk, so I needed an 8U short rack (12 inches deep only). Poking around online I came across Nice-Racks, which is basically a guy who makes gorgeous all-wood racks in a workshop at home. They are made to order, very reasonably priced, with lots of wood finish options. I chose maple to match my desk. I ordered through PayPal, and the rack arrived in about two weeks. It sits perfectly on my desk. Absolutely  beautiful. I recommend this guy without any reservations!

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All wood, 12in. deep 8U Rack from Nice-Racks