I like to occasionally see how close I can come to the sound of some recording I like. I usually fail miserably, but it's educational. Last night I tried something a little different for me. I happened across Calum Graham's tune "Grace" and was struck by how "cinematic" it sounded. Calum has a tutorial on playing it, and there, his guitar just sounds pretty normal, like someone playing guitar on a webcam :-) So it seems like there's some interesting stuff going on in Antoine Dufour's recording and mix. We had a thread about Antoine and Calum a while back, so I thought I'd give this a shot.
Calum's track can be heard here:
https://calumgraham.com/grace
I used the album recording (down in the list of tunes), not the video, which may be the same mix, but is a lot quieter.
So right off the bat, the obvious stuff is the pad that comes in during the opening, and seems to keep going right thru the tune. Also, lots of reverb... And a nice warm sound with a big bottom end. This is very different than the sound I usually go for, but it was interesting to try.
The pad is an Em chord, and I created it by just playing GBE at the 12th fret, and then putting on a *long* shimmer reverb, fading it in. My shimmer verb doesn't seem to accentuate the same notes as what's on the recording. I'm not even sure this is a shimmer, maybe it's a synth pad...
For reverb, I used a Lexicon Hall reverb, about 3 seconds, with an 80 ms pre-delay, and laid it on heavy :-)
Calum seems to get a pretty big bass sound on the recording that's not at all there on his instructional video. It may be from a pickup to add some solid end. But I've also seen that Antoine uses the MaxBass plugin. I don't have that, but I have the UAD VoiceOfGod plugin, which is similar, so I used that. A bit of EQ to try to match somewhat, a little compression, and I'm as close as I'm going to get, I think.
Calum's recording is pretty hot. For a quiet, gentle ballad, it measures -12LKFS. I level matched mine in Audition, tho it's not perfectly matched.
Anyway, here's what I came up with, for better or worse. Not exact for sure, maybe not even close, but it was fun to try. This was recorded on my Tom Doerr guitar. Standard tuning, 1/2 step down. I used both Schoeps and Brauner mics.
If anyone has any thoughts, suggestions, or tries this themselves, it'd be great to hear what you think.