Fun in the studio today

[Bob Womack]

My friend Justin Carter came in to overdub guitar parts on a piece I'm finishing. Someone saw him in the room and asked, "Why aren't you playing?" Well, sometimes you want a different approach on a song. Sometimes you want fresh blood. To be completely honest, it is much easier to produce and record with another person playing than it is to wear three hats. So...


I put the amp in the iso room next to the control room, through that door. I blocked the doors open an inch and ran the cords through the double doors so Justin could sit between the monitors next to me for a smoother running session. Here you cans see most of Justin's pedal board sitting on the chair.


This is a little more panoramic view of the control room and Justin's lovely LP. I am a sucker for a wine red LP - so much so I picked one up as well. There's also more detail on the pedal board in this pic.


The arsenal for the day. We started on the SG, which has quite the history. That was Justin's first guitar years ago, a Gibson SG faded, and got beaten up pretty badly. In fact, there were a couple of headstock fractures that had to be repaired during his last tenure with a band. Eventually he and his father stripped it down and refinished it and took it to the same technician I use for a proper setup and pickup covers. Now it looks, sounds, and feels GREAT.


The mic'd up Orange combo he used in the iso room. This room also serves as a lobby but is thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide with non-parallel walls.


Detail on the mics. They are actually pointed at about 1/3 from the right rim of that left speaker. I put up a Royer R-121 ribbon and a Shure SM57. The Shure gives us the highs and lows and the Royer fills out the middle warmly. Because the room is designed nicely we are able to back off a bit and enjoy some room sound. I can also run some mics to the other end of the room if I really want ambiance.

For about half of the sounds we used the Orange amp and the pedal board. For the rest we used my Line6 POD HD500X that you see on the counter behind Justin. Quite often a change of amp and/or guitar just makes things lie better in the mix. The arpeggiated parts rang nicely on the SG and Orange but leads and chugga-chugga rhythm parts were sounding just a little slim. We switched over to the Les Paul and my Blackface Deluxe model on the HD500X and the leads and chugga-chugga rhythm parts fattened right up.

Justin is also the newest member of our audio team, by the way. we had a blast in the studio.

Bob

[redir]

Nice!!!

[muscmp]

looks like a lot of fun!!

i like to use a fathead by cascade and a 57 for the same reason.

play music!