stokesloft-blog

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Three Dead

The newest act so far, three Dead didn't have any material for me to see or hear beforehand so there was a level of trust I had to put in which I hadn't before. I had prior knowledge that all members had been through BiMM music school and so had a fair amount of confidence in getting them in without any sampler. As a three piece, the band were light travelling, a bass amp and guitar amp were set up in separate rooms on the floor below, taking a direct feed from the bass amp combined with a pvm bass mic about a foot back from the grill. The guitar amp was mic'd with an AKG c414 padded down to -12 dB (a distortion pedal was used for both gain and for tone so I had to attenuate the signal with the pad) Vocals were closely mic'd with an SM7B as can be seen in the footage, which proved very effective at minimising drum hit transients due to its very low impedance design. For the drums I used a (now commonplace for Stokes Loft set up) pair of Oktava mk-012's with cardioid capsules and -10dB pads to attenuate the loud signal. An sm57 captured the snare about 6 inches underneath the drum and a D112 captured the bass drum, again about 6 inches away. Because of the small setup and isolated guitars the production for this session was a lot cleaner than the full band set up in the 'Quasar Sounds' private gig footage released a week earlier.

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Bronwyn Leonard

https://youtu.be/46ALnngs1X4 Initially Bronwyn's music was introduced to me at a gig I played a while back at Mr Wolf's. Since then she's made strides in getting a collection of studio recordings together and through conversations we've had I greatly sympathise with the 'vintage' aesthetic she's after. I was therefore pretty chuffed when she got in contact looking to do a Stokes Loft session . We had both expected to be recording a larger band (Drums/Percussion, Bass, guitar) but through the bands unavailability we had to narrow it down to what we eventually went with for the session, Piano (midi keys into sampled piano) and Vocal. Because of last minute changes to the scheduled day I had to undertake and set up this session on my own, but the small scale setup meant this wasn't too much of a problem. To try and get a sense of liveness to the recording I ended up playing the sampled piano, a grand piano in Kontakt, out of some monitors placed in the corner, as if Pheobe (Bronwyn's accompanist) was playing there. This bled into the 414 microphone which was just set to omni. Bronwyn sang nice and close into the mic, I remember thinking at the time the microphone technique is great - the louder, "human race" parts compared to the softer "they tell me" gives a good range to the song itself. Thankfully Bronwyn and her team brought along some lights which we set up around the performance area...I think stylistically it works, gives an extra something to focus on video too...which I had used in a pan focus shot for the intro and title. Session was positive, I got the sense we all found it easy working together, noting the possibility of a full band thing in the future. My biggest concern was the battle between multiple takes and a single full length take. For this one I went for a single take so didn't have as much freedom to move for different lighting. Really please with the sound straight out of the DAW so I used a little subtle compression on the vocal to just catch the one "human race" that pushes just a little too loud for my liking, and a bit of slow gentle compression, just to see if it 'glued' things together a bit.

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Jonny Morgan Band Live Session

Originally intended as a pilot episode, an artist I play bass for, Jonny Morgan happily agreed to film a couple of songs after a rehearsal that evening. https://youtu.be/8fDiI49o0M4 For the sake of time I suggested a stripped back setup of vocals, guitar, bass and percussion, and then we met somewhere in the middle with a little change of plan and ended up setting up a Komplete Kontrol s88, using electronic piano sounds through Native Instruments Kontakt, a Shure SM7B for vocals, direct and AKG C414 ii plus an SE 2200a (I think) paired in mid-side, capturing pretty much everything but with focus on guitar and vocals. Oktava mk012 pair with cardioid capsules for OH, simply left and right sides of the drum kit. A PVM 512tn(again, unsure on exact model) placed about 6inch from the front bass drum skin. My thoughts for what to aim for are mostly based on representing what's there in the room, emphasising some elements with EQ and in this case a fair dose of mid sized room reverb. The drums could in my opinion do with being a lot more direct, the drummer (Bill Giles) has great dynamic range, but he is playing with brushes to intentionally be quieter so I should have put a snare mic in or brought the OH mics down a bit. The Camera work on this consisted of a GoPro stood overlooking one side of the band, mixed in with shots which were taken on the C100ii by friend and collaborator on the project, Dan Brown, who also assisted in monitoring sound levels whilst I played during setup. Used an old version of Premiere pro to edit this one together, which meant workflow was slow. Wasn't sure about the interview footage as we had both become tired by that point, but after talking it through with JM we agreed on putting it in anyway. Spirits were high during the session however that was always expected given that we work on music together all the time.

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Looks Like

Tumblr is a good place for me to write about the Stokes Loft live sessions. Will be mostly content on the production side of things and on sessions in particular.