Hawthorne's Curve (Part 1)

Many of my neighbors have been asking me if my band is getting back together. While it's hard to say if that's true, I have been recording bands at my home project studio. This past week, I had the pleasure of producing Hawthorne's Curve, a North Carolina based modern rock band.

The four piece band arrived last Thursday. We tracked drums on the first day, all guitars on the second day, and completed acoustic guitar tracking on the third day. Also on the third day, we completed one master vocal take. It was a complete joy to work with these guys.

I tracked everything reasonably flat, meaning no audacious EQ or undoable compression settings. I'm finding that the tracks will require a little bit of thinning out, but that's a good problem for a mixer to have.

The band has booked one additional day to finish up vocals.

The band is a fairly traditional four-piece rock band. The drummer, Timmy, had a second snare drum. I wondered about how that would affect the imaging, but it really didn't change much in the big picture. The extra texture seems nice in the rough mixes.

The bass player, Rhob, plays a five-string Tobias bass. The extra low string added a nice dimension at times. He's a seasoned player. His tone was very well rounded on the bottom end. I even had to roll a little off, as you can see to the right.

Roger, the guitar player, was very skilled. He played mostly through a 50 Watt Marshall with vintage 30's. He performed all of the songs with one or another variety of Les Paul. A Shure 57 Mic sounded great on his rig. The morning he arrived to track his parts, he ran into the control room shouting "You boys ready to melt some faces!" He was excited to record and his tracks have a lot of life.

John Hawthorne, the group's leader, principle singer and acoustic guitar player, tracked most of his stuff on the third day. I used a DI line and a front mic on the acoustic guitar to give it some stereo depth. He usually plays with some chorus effect on his acoustic guitar. The DI line lends itself well to that purpose. We completed one master vocal take and plan to finish up vocals on the next recording date. His vocals have a lot of grit and personality to them. I've never recorded a heavier band, so this will be very fun for me to finish.

What do I do with an acoustic bass?

I love the challenge of recording instruments that I'm not used to recording. Yesterday, at a tracking session for John Gillespie, I got my first opportunity to record an acoustic bass.

Even with acoustic music, I typically prefer an electric bass. The electric bass is a known quantity--fairly easy to record well. John is working on a 19 song album at my studio. He thought, and I agreed, that it would be wise to change up the bass tone a bit from song to song. An acoustic bass seemed like a good option for five of the songs.

An acoustic bass is a different beast all together. All of the rules apply for acoustic guitar, except there's the issue of it being a lower octave and more air being displaced by the lower waves. The go-to mic for this kind of thing is a condenser mic. Most engineers would lobby for putting the mic about a foot away from the instrument. I didn't do this.

I took a line signal from the instrument's pickup. The direct line from this acoustic bass sounded a bit clacky, so I rolled off a considerable amount of highs. Still, I wasn't getting the low that I wanted from the direct line. Rather than boost a bunch of lows on the EQ, I reached for a dynamic floor tom mic. I put the mic as close to the sound hole as I could. I was very pleased with the result. The lows are full and resonant and I didn't have to compress or EQ at all. That's what I shoot for.