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!