Recording - February 2017 - 18

JEFF HAMILTON RECORDS

you're hearing three acoustic guitars
played live at once in the intro. Then, while
Gordon, is singing I'm quietly putting down
the acoustic guitar and I pick up a shaker
for a little bit, gently put that down, and
pick up the tambourine for the chorus...

This kind of blows the whole "perfect
mic for each different instrument"
theory out the window!

Right, it's all about how you play to
the mic.

I notice that there's maybe one or two
songs with an electric guitar part?

One is on "Memory", I think. That
was one of a few guitar solo overdubs
that Gordon did.

It blends in so well, like it's right
there in the middle of the space.

The reason for that is, that particular
room at BC studios is just a cavernous
cement room, and so I put the guitar
amp where Gordon's position was when
the three of them were set up, right after
they were done tracking together. I just
used the same [acoustic] guitar mic that
was right there, so it was as if he played
it with them. We were getting the same
ambience of the room.

What about room or ambience mics?

There was a lot of room miking going
on. I know we used a single Mojave
MA-300 in omni mode into a John Hardy mic pre into an ADK CLA-2 optocompressor. That mic was placed in
the center of the circle of musicians in
mono. We also had a pair of Mojave

"We were on
the road, so we
weren't carrying
a mic package.
We were at
their mercy..."
18

RECORDING FEBRUARY 2017

MA-200s as left and right room mics
into a pair of Seventh Circle mic pres.

When you were tracking, did you
play to a click?

None. Absolutely no click at all. The
three tunes that Gordon had worked on
in LA, he used a click initially. However,
we found when I stripped [the tracks]
down to just his guitar and vocal, with
the the click in it just didn't work for
their feel. So in the end we didn't use a
click on anything.

When everybody was tracking, did
you kind of stage the headphone
mix in everybody's ears how it was
set up in the room?

No, we never used headphones at
all, except the overdubs.

Even better. So it was just what
everybody heard in the room?

Yes, and playing dynamically to each
other, including Gordon singing the
lead vocal.

Did that pose any problems, since
musicians are notorious for needing
more of themselves at all times?

apart at the ends of the V. In Nashville
it was a smaller box studio so everyone
was about 4' apart and I filled in the
holes with the other musicians set up
"orchestrally"; in other words, here's the
guitar section, here's the bass section,
here's the horn section, here's the drum
section, and then the auxiliary musician.

Sounds like from the above examples,
you tracked with compression and
such, getting your sound "to tape".

I always track with with some
compression.

On everything?

Well, not everything. Every lick,
acoustic guitar... yeah, actually, now
that I think about it...

[laughing] ...Everything!

[laughs] Well, I never use compression on my channels, and I don't think I
did on the accordion, but bass for sure.
The vocal for sure. Snare drum for sure.
And overhead... but very, very light
compression, because I didn't want
to be stuck with "Oh f*ck, I overcompressed this!" Just mainly for peaks.

The biggest problem on a few songs
was Gordon singing too loud just to hear
himself. So I had to think of what to do so
that he wouldn't be over-singing. I ended up setting up a little guitar amp and
feeding the vocal mic into the guitar amp,
and placing the guitar amp facing up like
a spot monitor. I was originally wary of
that bleeding in the mics, but what did
bleed in was a cool lo-fi gritty sound, and
I ended up using some of that as well. I
probably did mic that as well, now I think
about it. So that was an interesting hurdle to
overcome, but that's something a producer
handles on the fly sometimes.

Tickling the meters.

How far were people from each
other? Was everyone in separate
corner or gobo'd off?

It was on a Neve 5116 vintage
24+8.

There were no gobos used whatsoever. It
was set up in a V. In New York it was just
the three of them with the drums about
10' away at the point of the V and then
Brian and Gordon would be about 4'

Exactly. And to get a certain sound
off the vocal. I always invariably track
how I want to hear it in the end.

I know John Agnello mixed the
album. Did you sit in on the mix
sessions as well?

John and I locked ourselves in the studio
for four days and mixed the record.
We took our time, due to the many
locations it took to complete the tracking for the record. John did a great job
making everything consistent!

What did you mix on?

I forgot to ask, but I assume you
tracked and mixed in Pro Tools?

Yeah, Pro Tools. Martin at BC had Pro
Tools version 5 or 6 and I hadn't seen
that stuff in years. And then the rest was

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