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!

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)

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.