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Jazz album I recorded and mixed
Hi! This is the first release from a session that yielded 34 songs in 3.5 days (so 21 hours of recording). There will be 4 albums total, the first is called “Quiet Time.” It will be released to streaming platforms, etc in a week or two, but here’s the YouTube playlist:
Enjoy!
Comments
This song is beautifully recorded and you did an excellent job here.
Thank you for sharing...
Beautiful jazz take on this great old hymn. Well played and recorded. I really like the soulful sound of a harmon mute.
Looking forward to hearing more of these!
Dav
Thank you! All credit goes to the musicians though, they created something beautiful and I’m thankful I was able to capture it.
That should be a playlist of all 9 songs from the album, let me check the link.
Thanks, listening now. You have some top-notch musicians there.
Dav
Yes! Tom hired me though, not the other way around. He is SUCH a great arranger.
You are correct though, the musicians are top notch. They have all played with some very big names. Down to the last one though, all wonderful people.
For anyone wanting the info, musicians on this collection are:
Tom Jennings- Piano, arrangements, producer
Luke Sellick: upright bass
Gregory Jones: electric bass
Jordan Pettay: saxophone
Nate Birkey: trumpet
Brandon Lewis: drums
Sungwon Kim: guitar
Nathan Vickery: cello
Sean Lee: violin
Sessions were recorded at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, May 26-29, 2021
Very nicely done!
And would you care to go into any detail on the production on this project? For example, anything unusual in the process?
Good job.👍
The room is very echo-y, so that’s a challenge when drums are playing with any volume you can hear it. Plus, grand piano with open lid and other mics on sax, upright bass, etc, all pick up a lot. I tried to control it and embrace it as much as possible. On the songs with brushes, it was an asset. I also spent a lot of time adjusting phase, both at the session and in mixing. Izotope rx was used to clean up some noises on tracks, and I also used the de-bleed function and the music rebalance function to work on the bleed when it was an issue.
I used my binaural head on the stage, in the middle of the musicians’ circle, and that is blended in at various levels throughout, so if you listen on headphones you’ll get a little bit of that effect. It’s more pronounced on slower, quieter songs because I could put it higher in the mix.
I tracked through the digico sd9 into reaper, then transferred to logic for mixing. We did overdub vocals (to appear on the coming collections) at their apartment, as well as some organ overdubs by Tom, which I just ran through the IK Hammond b3x that I got in the group buy. That is SERIOUSLY good!
Excellent details and appreciate you taking the time to lay out your process. 👍
Congratulations. Great playing and recording! Can be really challenging recording fully live in a lively space. Did you use any isolation or damping screens within the room? Were the perfomers using headphones? Was the guitar into an amp or DI’d into the mixer? From what I gather above, iOS wasn’t used?
I did use iOS when I used Logic Control, that’s it. For this type of thing iOS doesn’t really work well. Actually, I never checked if auria recognizes the digico UB MADI interface, but it’s class compliant so it might. However, because of the way the board and stage inputs are routed it is a pain to route it to 24 I/o. I didn’t use 24 inputs at once, 19 or 20 was the most, but channels that are coming in 25-48 would have to be remapped and I don’t really want to get into that.
Performers were using headphones- I set up my behringer x32 rack and sent stems out from the digico into the x32 with analog routing (XLR), then each performer used their mobile device to do their own headphone mix. So actually I guess iOS was used there too.
Guitar was both DI and amp; the guitarist has an amp sim pedal that he likes (I think is a strymon), but I wanted an amp as well for some air, so there was a deluxe reverb isolated in a back room miked with a heil PR40 (AWESOME mic). I favored the amp in the mix but the DI is in there as well.
On drums, I brought my acoustic panels from home and some acoustic blankets and tried to do a little absorption that way. I was thinking that if I do this again in that room, I may try using our tent that we bring to sports tournaments, and hanging 2 of my panels from the roof of that over the drums, that could really help.
Mics used were:
Kick- avantone mondo
Snare- audix i5
Toms- ev409
Hat- blue encore 100i
Overhead- 12 gauge microphones black 212 stereo mic
Upright bass DI- fishman platinum pro bass DI/ Preamp
Upright bass mic- beyer m88
Electric bass DI- wolf box DI, lightning boy audio DI, Radial DI (depended on which player on which day).
Piano- 2 Akg 414 xlii in cardioid over strings, audio technica PZM mic in piano foot under bass strings.
Sax- NOS audio active ribbon mic on top, neat microphones worker bee on bottom (placement suggested by Jordan, the saxophonist, and I’m very happy she did. I learned something and loved the sound)
Trumpet- sm57 (boooo….😂actually, on Nate is one of the few times I like the 57)
Violin- NOS ribbon
Cello- worker bee
Self made binaural head, named Larry, in center of ensemble.
Here’s some pictures if you want to see!
Oh, I bought my 4” acoustic panels used from someone, $80 for all 4 together, hence the funky fabric! Maybe someday I’ll replace, but probably not…😂
And a few more
Here you see Larry getting the Benny Hill treatment from Michelle and Brandon.
Great info! I was going to to ask about mics, especially how you mic’ed the piano. I think the sm57 does ok on a trumpet with Harmon mute, I’ve had some good results with it for that too.
You did a great job!
Dav
I absolutely did enjoy. Any tendency I had to analyze was gone in about 10 seconds. Thank you!
Is there a reason you moved from Reaper to Logic? Preferred workflow or something deeper?
Photos are cool to see too, BTW.
Yeah, cool photos. I just noticed the tuning app the bass player is using in photo #7, looks like iStroboSoft. I have that too, it’s the best I’ve found on iOS, outside of the pro piano tuning apps.
That mic setup for the sax captured the sound great. Looks like a fun gig!
Dav
Aha, yes, another hidden iOS moment! The piano there is a little sharp (I think it’s 441 or 442, piano tuner said it doesn’t want to go lower, seems to wind up back there), so Greg like to use istrobosoft to find where it is every time.
And 57 works really well on Nate because he has a very dark trumpet sound. In the past, when I tried ribbons on him it was way too dark and other mics never seemed to quite capture him correctly. I love his dark sound by the way. He said the other mic that has worked well over the years when recording is a u47, but I happened to be $15,000 short when I went to buy one. 😁So 57 it is!
Oh, and as for the sax, Jordan has an unbelievably beautiful tone on both alto and soprano, so that definitely makes capture much easier! But her suggestion of using 2 mics was a good one, it gave a lot of dimension. I think I originally was only going to use a condenser in front of the sax (not at the bell!), which is what I usually do live for her and others, but for recording I’ll be keeping that setup when I can.
Which leads to a thing I’ve definitely learned working with people like this- I ask them if they have a way they like to be miked or if they have had other situations where someone used a certain approach that they then liked the sound, and I try to replicate or build on that. Luke and the beyer m88 is another example of that- and the m88 is his. I’ve learned good things about cello miking from Nathan as well, even though he’ll deny it! But he’s recorded a lot (he plays in the NY philharmonic) so learning his experiences of where and how people have miked him is valuable.
I’m rambling a bit, but you got my mind remembering a lot of little things, and this is a good way for me to put them more at the front of my mind, so I hope you don’t mind.
I prefer to mix in logic over reaper just for the layout and the way I can manage effects and such. However, I often track sessions like this in reaper, where I’m basically recording the same group in 3 hour blocks, because I can line up a rough mix and export each song individually with one click. That makes it really easy to give the producer roughs to review right after the session. If I’m working on something that’s just one song at a time, I will track in logic now. And when we did vocals and keys at Tom and Michelle’s apartment, I had those sessions in logic at that point.
I have mixed plenty in reaper in the past, and I used to make fun of logic, saying reaper was easier. But, in the past few years, logic has been really comfortable. I do wish it had batch export though.
Oh, and one more reason that I just thought of for program choice! I used the Mac mini that’s at the desk to track, and logic isn’t installed on it. Not my account and it has a small ssd, so very easy to just have tracks live and reaper on there (with my reaper license) since they take up no space. Then I just bring an external drive.
One more iOS use too that I just thought of, for every session I do- Goodnotes, which I use to keep track of takes, so session notes, keep revision requests, etc. I lose paper very easily, so I love Goodnotes for that stuff.
Thanks for the info on how you use Reaper and Logic.
I use Goodnotes for all of my figuring things out sessions -- math, circuits, UI doodles. It's great for all that sort of stuff. I've used it for a long time now, but I just found out a couple of months ago that it had a Mac version. Now it's really useful for me.
Agreed. Most definitely one of the most useful tools I’ve ever purchased. The Apple Pencil and Goodnotes is a GREAT combination. I have ADHD and therefore paper and I don’t stay in sync very well, but having all of my papers available across iPad, Mac, and iPhone in Goodnotes is very good for me. Even if I have something somewhat disorganized it’s very easy to find it and then organize properly.
When I eventually upgraded to Catalina one of the benefits was that I could use the Goodnotes Mac version again.