Lucynine piano session and other news!

A-B miking with Sennheiser MD441

Hi everybody, sorry for the long break, here again with juicy news.

First of all I quickly recorded a short 5-pieces Piano Solo EP you can listen to and/or purchase for 3€ right here: http://molen.bandcamp.com/album/aftermath-flood

But maybe the biggest news (and I'm proud to announce it) is that I started working on the next Lucynine release!!!

It will be extremely different from "Chronicles from Leri". A radical change of direction both for what concerns the sound and the approach in the realization. This mainly because this time I'm using exclusively acoustic and analogue instruments and effects. Only tracking and mixing will be done in digital, but no virtual or digital instrument will be used to produce any sound.

Blackboard as an acoustic screen

Now I'm going to give you some technical info about the tracking of the piano for the song I'm working on these days.

This song was born in a weird way. I wrote the lyrics before the music. Then I recorded a quick prepro, using a virtual rhodes to write down the harmonic structure and the internal microphone of my MacBook Pro for a vocal line. After a few days I had decided I loved that song so much that I recorded a definitive vocal line (yes...before having... "the song"! I sung on the fake rhodes track).
I let some friends of mine listen to the result and they all said, without talking each other, "Hey, this could be perfect with a real piano, voice and nothing more!". Well... I immediately thought it was not supposed to be a ballad: I needed to record all the instruments, to write down a complex arrangement, etc. But. Why not? So I presume this song will be released in two different versions: the "rock" one and the "piano" one.

Close to the hammers!

I'm next to complete the "piano" version right now. You'll also hear a strange electric bass line. Anyway, two days ago I recorded the piano part at the Cuneo Conservatory of Music. I played on a pretty good Kawai mezzacoda. I used a couple of Sennheiser MD441 really close to the hammers in A-B configuration (I love that "woody" sound). I also used a matched pair of Schoeps mikes (Colette series with cardioid capsules) in a large ORTF configuration to capture the room. They were placed about 3 metres far from the piano, 1mt by the floor, pointing to the piano. Well, a bit lower because there was a noisy neon lamp on the roof and I tried to avoid capturing it. This is the reason why I also used the blackboard you can see in the photos as a screen for the close mikes. It worked. I used a RME Fireface 800 as A/D converter and my KRK headphones as monitoring system. Klotz cables.

Take a look to the photos, if you like. I'll keep you updated.

Enjoy!

A day with Monya Russo

Hi everybody,
today I had the privilege to have with me in my studio one of the best singers I've ever worked with, Monya Russo.

She's really young but has an impressive talent and ...curriculum! Try to search on Google and you'll agree. ;-)

She came to Molen to record all the vocal tracks for her next single. 68 voice tracks (main voices and tons of backing vocals) in 4 hrs, with no pauses, without ever appearing unfocused or tired. She came with her sister Selena, who's also her manager.

One of the things that impressed me most is her (very rare) ability to emit the so-called "acuti di fischio", extremely high-pitched notes that sound very similar to a whistle but are produced with the vocal cords and not, in fact, whistling.

I made a short video with her explaining a few notes about it.

 
Looking forward to working soon again with her!

With her sister Selena..

With me.

 

Trip to the Real World Studios

The watermill with the exterior of the Big Room.

Hey buddies,
sorry for this long break but I've just come back from Bristol, UK.
Cool city with tons of cool music.

I went there with my mate Mattia Garimanno, the owner of Ænima Recordings, the indie label I work with.
The first day we went to Box (Wiltshire) to visit our friend Marco Migliari, producer at Real World Studios, famous studios founded by Peter Gabriel, associated with his label, the Real World Records Ltd.
There we also met our mates Maurizio Bulgarini (who's been in Erasmus Placement at the RWS for three months) and Galileo Tarricone, who were there to work on a few tracks with the singer Valentina Camilleri. Maurizio and Galileo are the owners of DoubleDominant studios in Turin.

For me it's been the second time there, but I can't hide that it's always exciting to cross that threshold. And most of all, this time I could take a lot of photos (the previous time it was night...).

The studios are built as a little village around the old watermill which represents the centre of RW. Marco works as a freelance producer in a little mixing and mastering studio called the Green Room, located in a hangar inside the complex of RW, which covers a very large area.

In the Big Room

Inside the watermill you'll find the well known Big Room (one of the biggest control rooms in the world) which houses the SSL 9000K XL mixing console (where I'm sitting at in the photo), a lot of preamplifiers, additional outboard equipment and effects you can see in the shootings below, a 7.1 main monitoring system (customized) with a huge screen (used when they're working with video, but hidden in all other cases). The console is mounted on rails to be moved in case of need. There's also a secondary mid-field stereo monitoring system (sometimes more than one) which often changes (now they're using Mackie and Focal, last time I remember I saw a couple of NS-10).

Wooden Room

In the same building you can see the Wooden Room, which is designed to function as a flexible live room. It features a more lively acoustic and a booth, mezzanine floor and movable acoustic screens. This room can operate as a more budget-friendly studio, independently (with a temporary control-room setup) or, most commonly, the two rooms are used together. (wikipedia)

I had previously seen the accommodation area with the kitchen (they also have a French on-site chef), living room, etc.

But this time the biggest thrill was being able to enter Peter's personal studio, also called "The Writing Room". Unfortunately I could take photos of that place, as it is, in fact, a private area. But I'll keep all I've seen there in my mind as long as I live. Vintage synthesizers, tons and tons of outboard equipment (often vintage and/or custom and rare), the tape masters, instruments, effects, stuff, wow... amazing, believe me.

Looking forward to getting there again.

In the meantime here's the full gallery of photos I took: follow this link.

See ya, mates.

IR for Apple Space Designer, AGAIN!

Da crew!

Ok, let's go outside the Molen Lab for a while, guys!

Due to the success gained yesterday with the Vermona experiment, today my Conservatory mates, the producer Fabrizio Barale and me decided to play with our school's rooms and environments in order to record other impulse responses and create other custom Space Designer presets.
Our classrooms have the great disadvantage of being huge, quite empty and located in an attic with concrete walls and floor tiles, then extremely reverberant. Terrible when you work and record, but great for the reverberations! The results were astonishing.

Gear: Apple iMac, KRK VXT8, RME Fireface800, a pair of Schoeps condenser microphones (Colette series with cardioid and omni capsules). We used a mono source (one VXT8) to play the sweep and the stereo pair of Schoeps to record it.

We ended with the 6 different presets I'll describe here below.

CAVE CLOSE. AB miking with microphones about 3 meters far from the source and 5 meters far from each other. 1 meter high from the ground.

CAVE FAR. Source and microphones at opposite ends of the room along its longest side, mikes quite higher from the ground than in the previous set (about 2 meters). Distance between mikes: unchanged.

CAVE FURTHER BOTTOM. As the previous one but with the mikes pointing to the ground and really close to it (low frequencies boost).

Metal Furniture.

METAL FURNITURE APOCALYPSE. We took an empty metal wardrobe, put it in front of the speaker (4 meters far from it) and put the mikes into it, one in the upper left and the other in the lower right.

METAL FURNITURE APOCALYPSE EXTREME. The same as the previous one but with glass doors closed. (Surprising result!)

THE ROOF IS ON FIRE - WIDE VERB. We recorded this one in the corridor with speaker in the middle and microphpones at opposite ends, about 15 meters far from the source. This time we used omni capsules. Great wide reverb this one, but unfortunately louder on the right side.

YOU WANNA STUFF? I GIVE YOU STUFF!

You can download all the presets from this link, for free:
www.sergiobertani.com/molen/conservatorio_cuneo_SDIR.zip

Hope you like it! Remember: if you use these reverbs in your productions, please don't forget to put our name in the credits list!

VERMONA Spring Reverb IR for Apple Space Designer

One month ago I purchased the awesome Vermona Retroverb Lancet, a rich analog spring reverb ...and much more.
Today I decided to make three presets for the Apple Space Designer convolution reverb to recreate perfectly the sound of the vintage reverb into the well known Logic Pro plug-in .
I used the Impulse Response Utility to record a sweep passing through the Retroverb and I did that three times using three different positions of the "spring tone" knob: dark, mid and bright.
It's been easy and quick to do the deconvolution and load the result into Space Designer.

The three presets can be downloaded for free from this link: www.sergiobertani.com/molen/vermona_retroverb_SDIR.zip
You'll get a zip file including all the files you need and a text file with instructions to install the presets correctly.

Enjoy!
(and if you REALLY enjoy, please make a PayPal donation at sergio[at]sergiobertani[dot]com)

Producing Rudy Saitta - Ch.0

Hi mates, and welcome to the "Chapter Zero" of this new production by Molen.

Let me introduce you my friend Rudy Saitta, very talented young singer and songwriter from my own town. To tell the truth he is Sicilian, but he moved here in the north when he was a child. He attends the course in pop music at the Conservatory of Music of Cuneo and that's where I met him first.

A few days ago, in collaboration with the independent label Ænima Recordings, I decided to start working on the full production (arrangement, recording, post-production, mastering and videoclip) of the next single by Rudy.

He came to me with a handful of songs recorded crudely with just guitar and vocals, so that I could decide, without being distracted by different sounds or arrangements, which of these was the one with the most potential.

I chose the one that convinced me more and today we started working on it.

First step: structure. We built a quick midi guitar guide and set up a list of markers to divide the whole song in sections.

Second step: vocal guide. I made Rudy record a rough vocal line so that I'll have a voice track to use as a reference when I work on the arrangement of the song.
I recorded this track using an SE Z5600A (tube condenser microphone) and an Audient ASP008 as a pre-amp.

That's all for today. Stay tuned and check out for next updates!

Bucket-Brigade and Analog Delay

Hi mates!

Just bought a really satisfying analog delay: the Electro Harmonix Deluxe Memory Boy. I love it.

As soon as I pulled it out of the package, I could not resist the temptation to open it and see what was inside and how it worked.

This delay is real analog and true bypass. The technology it uses is called Bucket-Brigade. The Bucket-Brigade is the classic technique the firefighters use to extinguish the fire, when they put themselves in a line and pass each other buckets full of water.

The first BB delay lines were made of series of capacitors which stored the audio signal incoming. The signal was moved along the line of capacitors, one step at each clock cycle. Now the line of capacitors has been replaced by integrated chips that serve the same purpose. Tap tempo and modulation are digitally controlled, but the signal (both the dry and the wet one) is never A/D or D/A converted in the whole process, as in the classical bucket brigade delay processors. The digital circuitry in the DMB has absolutely no effect on the sound.

I tried it along with the SIEL Orchestra and it sounds awesome. I'm sure I'll use a lot this combination in my next musical productions.

Huh... waiting for a spring reverb arriving in a couple of days. ;-)

Keep in touch for the next update!

New Arrival: SIEL Orchestra.

SIEL Orchestra MK1

The SIEL Orchestra is an analogue synth I've been looking for for a while. I bought it today from a keyboardist from Turin. Interesting price, perfect conditions, completely working. And it's not so obvious, since this keyboard is more than 30 years old!

Little history, taken from wikipedia.
"The Siel Orchestra is an analogue subtractive synthesizer, which was produced by Italian manufacturer Siel from 1979 to 1982. The original Orchestra was very limited but still a very characteristic instrument for its time. It produces its sounds from a divide-down oscillator network and therefore has 49 note (unlimited) polyphony. Although it contains 4 sections of presets (Brass, Strings, Reed and Piano), each which contain two sounds, the only parameters that can be edited are Vibrato (LFO), Brilliance (for the Brass, which also has a separate 'Brass Attack'), Attack and Decay. This ultimately means that the Orchestra cannot produce many different sounds; however because of its Italian origin and its distinctive routing, the Orchestra sound is not matched by any other similar synthesizers.
The Orchestra was later bought by ARP Instruments to be slightly modified, relabeled and then sold as the ARP Quartet. This version replaced the Reed section with an Organ one, however aside from that the synthesizer was almost identical.
The Orchestra does not support MIDI or any other means of communicating with other electronic instruments, however it does include a volume pedal socket which could be mistaken for a MIDI port."

I can just add that one of the main reasons why I was looking for this synth is the end of "Machine Gun" by Portishead. That "terminator-like" sound is made with an "Orchestra 2", but can easily be made also with the first version of this keyboard. I definetely love it.
And looking forward to matching it with an analogue delay like a Deluxe Memory Boy (arriving next Friday).

Tips to warm up the digital sound - PT1

Ok mates, this is for guys (like me, sadly) who play guitars and basses through software emulators or try to recreate the real sound of analog or acoustic instruments like drums, Fender Rhodes, Hammond, analog synths, etc. using virtual instruments.
Today I did a little experiment with a loop played by me and composed of drums (played and programmed on a sampler), bass and guitar (played through virtual emulator) and a wurli (played on a virtual instrument).

This is the mixdown with only software plugins/emulators:
Vintage Loop - DIGITAL

The experiment is to try to give a kind of "analog spice" to the digital sound. I decided to work on drums and guitar.

First of all, let's give a real room ambience to the drums. So I recorded my own room ambience with a stereo couple of microphones (Se4 by Se Electronics) put in ORTF mode, while playing the drums track through my VXT8 (bypassing the subwoofer). The pre-amp (Audient ASP008) is set with a hi-pass filter on 250hz to avoid bass frequencies resonances.

Afterwards I passed this track through my TL Audio A2 with maximum compression and tube stage set next to the peak limit.
This new track is to be kept at very low volume.

Later on I worked on guitars.
I put a microphone (an Se4 again) off-axis against the woofer of one of my two Equator D5. I chose this monitor because of the coaxial tweeter, to avoid phase problems.

As I did for the drums track, I passed the signal again in the A2 using the tube to get a real tube harmonic distortion.

The new mixdown is here below.
Vintage Loop - ANALOG

Obviously it's not a macroscopic difference, but this kind of processing can provide great results if used with taste and courage.

Good evening, mates.

Yes, but ProTools sounds better...

Hi guys, just done a little test... for personal curiosity, not polemics.

I wanted to compare a bunch of playback engines of the main DAW's and audio players. The software programs I chose to make this comparison are Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, OSX Preview Player, iTunes and Cog (awesome and recommended free audio player - link to download).

Aligned Files with max zoom ratio

To do that, I wired the built-in output of my MacBook Pro with the MOTU 828 MK3 connected to my iMac. In the MacBook Pro I played the same audio file (mono, 24/44.1) with all the software I mentioned above and recorded the analog output of the laptop with my iMac. The quality of the connections and converters should be insignificant, since I used the same configuration throughout the duration of the test.

Once I got all the recordings I aligned all the files using the maximum zoom ratio and compared them all, each time inverting the phase of one of the two I was comparing.

The result is surprising in some way.

They're all different from each other, but still quite similar (no abyss at all), except for the file played by Ableton Live, which really has nothing to do with all the others (this, in a way, makes me suspect something wrong).

The two couples of files which are more similar to each other are: ProTools/iTunes (!!!) and Cog/OSX_Preview.

I want to clarify that I absolutely didn't want to make a comparison between the algorithms the DAW's use to process or bounce the audio files, but only between the sound engines during simple playback.

If you like to try the comparison by yourself, here you can DOWNLOAD the files. Just make sure they're well aligned when you upload them in your DAW.

G'nite, mates.

Studio setup

Ok, guys, let me introduce you my studio.

There are two main configurations: the mobile studio and the resident one.

Mobile setup

The mobile is quite simple: MacBook Pro + MOTU Ultralite MK3 (HD 192 converters) powered through FireWire connection, so that I could even record with no power supply. Listening system: the reliable KRK kns8400, wonderful headphones, flat and precise.

The studio setup is based on a powerful iMac (i7 3,4GhZ quadcore, 16GB RAM, SSD disk + 1TB SATA, graphic card Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB) plus a MOTU 828 MK3 (HD 192 converters).

The control room is entrusted to the quite good Mackie Big Knob, which also works as a phono preamp for the turntable (Pioneer-something) and sometimes as a preamp for other sources as mp3 players, etc. I often use it as headphones amp too, when I don't need more than 2 outputs. When I need more I can use the Behringer Powerplay, but sincerely it's more like "huh, every studio's got one, so... if needed..."

Equator D5

The Big Knob manages two systems of monitors: KRK VXT8 + subwoofer 10s (f***in wow) and the surprising Equator D5, coaxial, amazing on acoustic music, voices, reverbs, etc.

Outboard: TL Audio Ebony A2 (routed on 3-4 828 out and 9-10 in). I find it really useful and I like pretty much its sound, especially referring to its price range. I use it often just to warm the sound, by simply passing the signal through the tube, with no comp or eq. I also love the eq when used in gain mode and the compressor, but often used bypassing the tube stage (it keeps the transients more clear and precise when used in class A mode).

Ebony A2

Audient ASP008

An Audient ASP008 provides me with 8 pre-amped channels. Love this machine, handy and transparent.

The rack

I don't have many microphones, since, when I need to record "big" things I refer to my mate Mattia Garimanno, owner and manager of Ænima Recordings (Cavagnolo - TO), very nice studio and indie label I work with. Anyway I use proudly a stereo couple of Se4 and the amazing Z5600a (tube microphone) by Se Electronics. I also have a couple of Shure SM57 and a Sennheiser e845s.

Everything in the studio is cabled with Klotz cables.

Yamaha MOTIF ES8: the arrangement area

I use a Behringer UMX250 as little keyboard and controller and the Korg Nano Kontrol.

Instruments: Yamaha MOTIF ES8 is the main keyboard, but I mostly use it as a master keyboard rather than as a synth. I also play a custom Squier Stratocaster (tuned in drop C with strings 12/60 and humbucker Seymour Duncan Hot Rails), a custom Squier Jazz Bass (tuned C-F-Bb-Eb with 110 strings), a Korg Monotron and a Moog Theremin.

Instruments and... MUSIC!

Sometimes I use a Geloso tape recorder to process mono signals, but since it has an awful sound, an awful time reliability and awful gain/output control... I can use it only for experimental reasons.

A HP Elitebook is used as media center (it manages all my digital music and video database and the backup system and it's wired to the router, so that every mac or pc connected via wifi or LAN can easily enter it.

Come and have a coffee with me, guys.

Welcome to MOLEN.

So. Mates. Welcome to my new blog. I decided to put this page on to share with you all my activities in the studio.
Here I'll post news, photos, videos, tips, etc...
If you're interested in these kind of things, please follow me in this trip and share this blog with your friends.

Let's go. \m/