Acony Bell - Gillian Welch cover

keith.rogers

keith.rogers

Well-known member
Acoustic cover of a song by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings (off her Revival album).



For the home recording folks, the mandolin, semi-buried rhythm guitar and backing/harmony vocal were recorded using a Beyerdynamic M201. The more-prominent lead guitar was recorded with an AKG C214. Those tracks were done at my home with a Steinberg UR44C, though the M201 went through a GAP 73 preamp, the AKG direct. Lead vocal was recorded at her home using a Neumann KMS 104 through a Focusrite 2i2 (IIRC). All mixed in Logic Pro.

(This is the tune I referenced in the vocal processing sub-forum, where I ended up doing a lot of automation to trim the ends of my backing vocal.)
 
dobro said:
Her voice is EQ'ed just a taste too dark, perhaps. So cut what, exactly? I dunno. Ask Human Planet.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the input.

She recorded that at home, and, yes, when I got that track, it sounded to me like she was pretty close to the mic. There were some LF resonances in there I wrestled with, but I didn't want to ask her to re-do the track. I tried some high shelf on it, but sibilance is something else I had to pick at throughout (mostly mine, though), so I probably got a bit lazy and decided the sound was Ok for a kind of lo-fi mono-ish feel.

If we do another remote collab, I'll go over the recording setup, and maybe suggest a couple takes at different distances.
 
If I was working with this one, I'd try a low shelf cut to start, just to see, and then shift to bell curve cuts to compare. When I use reference tracks, a pattern that repeats for me is that my mixes tend to be darker than pro. So, you know that thing they say about adding reverb: 'Dial in the amount of reverb that sounds good, and then dial it back a bit'. I'm starting to take a similar approach to EQ. And sometimes, after I've EQ'ed tracks and then compared to my references, I'll put an EQ on a submix to make it less dark. And sometimes again, I'll put an EQ on the master bus to achieve that.

Great cover BTW. Enjoyed it.
 
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