The Folkadelphia Sound: Charlie Parr
<a href="http://folkadelphia.bandcamp.com/album/charlie-parr-folkadelphia-session-2-23-2014" data-mce-href="http://folkadelphia.bandcamp.com/album/charlie-parr-folkadelphia-session-2-23-2014">Charlie Parr Folkadelphia Session 2/23/2014 by Charlie Parr</a>
It's been a while since this blog updated you on any Folkadelphia releases, and that's ok, if you've missed them go to http://folkadelphia.com/ to keep up with all of the latest Folkadelphia action. We'd like to start to bring you more recording related content, so we are going to focus on how we did it (when we do something interesting).
So we are going to start with someone great, where we actually did something interesting. That someone is Charlie Parr, a Duluth, MN based songwriter and folksinger who kept us rapt throughout his session and show (at HUB BUB in W. Philly). Which is why we were able to do something interesting. Often we don't know what we're up against when the artist arrives; we have an idea of their lineup, but we rarely have a sense of the feel for the music as it is being performed on this particular tour.
But Folkadelphia presented Charlie's show the night before the session and we got to hear his voice and instruments, and experience the dark undertones of his compositions and adaptations of traditional folk tunes. So we broke from our patented "dude/lady-with-guitar" mic technique (which I may get around to explaining, though it has undergone some transformation recently) to get the proper feeling for Charlie's music.
We started with our typical single vocal arrangement: a Nuemann 103 about a foot away from the bridge of the singer's nose, angled downwards. For a strong singer this gives a nice full voice, and for us it gives a nice bleed from the guitar (this is going to 2-track, so bleed is a non-issue so long as everything's in phase). We switched things up with the guitar. We wanted something a little darker and smoother so we went with a KM 184 by Nuemann at about an 80 degree angle from the face of the guitar with an axis somewhere between the soundhole and the bridge.
At the show we decided that Charlie's tapping was an important aspect (listen to "True Friends" or "Cheap Wine") but we didn't want the stomping that we normally get: a thud coming up through the mic stand of a sensitive mic. We wanted a tap. So we put a mic on it, an Audix, an Audix SCX25-A lollipop condenser microphone, to be precise. These are from Audix's piano mic'ing kit and there's a pair of them in WXPN's studio (which is somewhat odd, considering there's no piano). If you look at the picture it's looking at Charlie's foot from it's perch on one of those kick mic stands, which, unlike it's peers is directly on the floor. That's the whole stomp, tap and thud. The other stands are decoupled from the floor because, while we don't mind bleed, we don't need one source in every mic.
Now, somewhere out there in the middle of the room, behind the camera, looking at Charlie from about five paces is a Blumlein pair, low to the ground, maybe knee height. We use AKG 414's for two reasons, the first is they are the only mic capable of the necessary figure-8 pattern and there are two of them, and second, at this distance, their signature bright-on-the-verge-of-being-brittle high end works nicely. This is pretty low in the mix, and has besides adding roominess, the purpose of stereo-fying the sound.
That's pretty much it. Sure there's some mixing/mastering magic, that maybe Eric will tell you about someday.... but that's another story.