House Cafe Show

Recently my band, The Slam Daddies, played a show at The House Cafe in Dekalb, IL.  I have always liked this venue and enjoyed playing there.  While at the show I helped load in and set up all the equipment.  After that I began to talk with the sound guys about the venue and what kind of setup they use.  They use a basic setup including a 32 channel mixer with some outboard compressors and eqs.  The monitor mixes are made using the sub groups and aux sends and distributed using a headphone distributer.

     He let me observe as he dialed in the mixes and set up the stage microphones.  It was a great experience getting to observe and participate in this show.  I got to see how things were routed and mixed to compliment the room.  The House Cafe is a small bar/cafe setting so there is no need for an over the top setup.  They use the standard Sure SM57's on the drums and guitars.  They only mic the toms, kick, snare, bass, guitar, and vocals.  The cymbals are not miked because of the smaller room.  They carry through the room without having to be miked.  Overall this was a good experience talking with the sound guy and observing the way he works.

Mixing Session with Joe Hamgeri

     I've been working with this artist for awhile now at Energy Command Studios.  He's a bluesy, rock type artist and has a lot of talent.  We are now in the mixing stages of his songs.  This song, Genevieve, has a particular feel that he wants.  He wants the drums to have a John Mayer Continuum sound to it. He also wants the vocals to have some characteristics of Coldplay's Viva La Vida.  The kick drum I eq'd to give it a more pillowy sound.  To have it sit well with the bass guitar I dropped the mid from the bass and boosted the attack to bring out the punch.  To give the drums that Continuum feel I used a lot of room sound and overheads topped with a slight plate reverb.


     The electric guitars had more of a warm mid range tone so I decided to keep the overall tone and just notch out certain frequencies to place it in the mix.  A little delay and reverb were added to the guitars to make it sound more like a blues club.  For the vocals I used a plugin called Izotope Nectar.  This is a vocal suite that has a bunch of plugins that work with each other to really give the vocals a nice sound. I dialed in a great vocal sound and moved on to the piano.  The piano is a MIDI track using one of pro tool's virtual instruments.  The sound being used is an electric piano with a little vibrato on it to give it a slight organ feel.  It sounds great mixed into the song and really polishes the song and gives it that sound the song is going for.


 No audio clip of this song is available yet as we are still in the early mixing stages.  However, there is a single and an acoustic song on his myspace to give a feel of the upcoming songs.


http://www.myspace.com/joehamgeri

'Dinner Party For Three' recording

      I have been working with this band for a while now.  I've been recording them out of my home studio as opposed to the studio I work at.  They are a three piece band that play indie rock music.  They saw my website and wanted to record.  They came in for a few days to lay down the tracks and then came back for some editing sessions.  I recorded everything into Protools 8.  I miked the drums with a full setup and using a stereo pair of Rode NT5's as overheads.  The kick and snare were stacked with sample layers to help treat the quality of the drums.  A Blue Bluebird microphone was used on vocals.

     I used a three mic setup on the guitars which used two close mics and one room mic to capture ambience.  They recorded six songs with me.  All songs were recorded, mixed, edited, and mastered by me using Pro Tools 8 and mastered in Sony Sound Forge 10 Pro. Some experimenting was done while finding guitar sounds and a Digidesign Eleven Rack was used to add some interesting guitar tracks.  A couple of the songs involved some complicated mixing using a variety of effect routing to achieve some great sounds.  There was some nice reverbs and delay that I found worked well with the vocals and complimented the style of music.  All in all it was a great project and very fun to work with these guys.

other songs from the project can be found at the band's myspace:  www.myspace.com/dinnerpartyforthreemusic

Audio Clip: Click Here
                (song owned by 'Dinner Party For Three' band)

Singer getting ready to record vocals

guitarist finding his tone

me at the board mixing

equipment hyperlink images come from my home studio website:  www.homeroomstudios.com