Target Market and rediscovering an Electro Voice 727 ceramic CB microphone
I'm helping a buddy put together an archive of St. Louis releases, and I revisited Up On The Moon by Target Market. This was one of the first for-real albums I recorded, and I hadn't listened to it in years for fear that the production would be embarrassing in hindsight. I was happily surprised, and listening to it reminded me of some tricks I haven't done in a while.
On the song "Lakes And Streams," for example, I tracked the vocal with 2 mics, the Audio Technica 4050 and an Electro Voice 727 that I bought at an antique mall for $20. The EV 727 is a ceramic, omnidirectional mic with a sweet distortion that you expect from a mic designed for CB radios.
This mic has been hanging out in a box unused for years, so I dug it up and used the same 4050/727 setup for a session last night:
The client - currently nameless but previously known as Blackwater Remedy and Mississippi Hangover - is a blues-rock band who always requests I make things sound "mid-fi," or simply tell me to "Do the Black Keys thing." This double mic setup was perfect for this use, and some sidechained compression allows for the 727 to take over and keep buildup of those nasally distorted frequencies down.
I stopped using the 727 because i couldn't get it to fit in the mix right. Anyone who checks out that Target Market song will probably agree. Of course, that wasn't the mic's fault, and now I'm inspired to try some other techniques I tried when I was getting my feet wet with the knowledge I have gained in the years since.
Oh, and "Highways" by Target Market is still a total jam.