This past Friday, I went off to Steve Friedman’s recording studio to mix down a live recording of the feature Dave and I did in April at Emack & Bolio’s in Roslindale. Steve records the open mike there, and I slipped him a few extra bucks to record my whole set. I thought I’d give you a little peek behind the curtain, into the process.
Steve and I go way back – he’s recorded all three of my previous live releases. I trust him, and he knows my style really well. Typically, he’ll send me a rough mix of the live recording, so I can get a sense of what we need to address. I tend to like a “dry” mix – not a whole lot of reverb – which sets me apart from a number of his other clients. In this case, I listened to the rough mix a couple times, and identified a bunch of things we needed to pay attention to.
First, the drum sound needed work. Drums are hard to record; it’s one of the things that sets the pros apart from the amateurs. I’d never try to record and mix drums myself for a public music release – I just don’t have the expertise. Steve told me he’d played with it, but he’d had some questions, and so he didn’t worry too much about it for the rough mix. When I got to the studio, we homed in pretty quickly on the snare mike – it was the only microphone of the drum mikes that had enough body to make a difference. Steve reshaped the equalization on the snare until the kit sounded fuller and punchier, and I was happy.
Next, there were a couple lines I needed to try to rerecord. Since I can never remember my own lyrics perfectly, I’m always dropping a line here and there, and while I did a better job than usual that night, I still wanted to try to keep a couple of the songs I’d muffed. The problem, in live recording, is that the vocals bleed all over the other microphone tracks, so what you can overdub is really limited. We tried overdubbing two lines; one of them worked, the other one didn’t. I think I’m going to try to keep the second song anyway.
Next, we removed the pops. When you sing into a microphone, there are some consonants – typically “p”, but sometimes “t” and “k” – which tend to “pop” into the microphone. Steve tells me that windscreens help only a little bit, and unfortunately, I seem to have a particularly “poppy” singing style. So much so that Steve has named one of his effects settings after me. He selects the offending consonant on the vocal track, and applies the “bayer” effect preset. I got a really good laugh out of that one.
Then, we cleaned up background noise. In a live recording, you want some audience noise – e.g., laughing in the right places, applause in the right places – but not other audience noise – e.g., people talking over your introduction, or dropping plates. We found a number of places where we needed to remove audience noise. This can be a tedious process, because you have to find all the mikes where the audience noise is audible, and it typically involves removing the drum tracks as well. So this was only possible during introductions and song conclusions; in fact, we removed the drums in a couple places where the snare was resonating with the applause.
Finally, we made our decisions about where to snip. I made a point, during the show, of putting a break between the introduction and the song in a number of places where I knew I was going to want them to be separate, rather than talking over all the song intros as I usually do. We decided which portions of the introductions we’d keep, and which we’d discard; and for the introductions we kept, we inserted a track break between the intro and the song, so I can use just the song track when I make the song available for download, for instance.
All this took four hours, which is fast for editing a 35-minute set. Part of it is that I’m not going for perfection here (I can’t, since some of the performance is a bit sloppy), and part of it is that Steve is really good at what he does, and part of it is that I’ve done this a bunch of times before. The key is to know what you want; without it, you’re going to waste a ton of money and time. I’m very fortunate that I’m good enough that I can make a good live recording, and I’m very fortunate enough that I have Steve Friedman to polish it for me.