So, yeah, lately I’ve been spending a good chunk of my free time experimenting with recording, not to mention a decent amount of money on the necessary equipment.
If you walk into my apartment, the first thing that will catch your eye, probably, is the black 2 x 12″ Laney speaker cabinet sitting horizontally on top of a cream-colored Panama 1 x 12″ cabinet. The Laney cab is mic’ed up with a pair of dynamic mics, and on top of the cab are two Vox amps: My treasured AC15 head unit and its grittier cousin, a 15 watt Night Train (Gen 2). Sitting next to the Night Train G2 is Weber MiniMass attenuator, which helps immensely in making sure I can get the aggressive rock guitar tones I want that you can only get with a tube amp set with its master volume on full blast without the expected amplitude. Without that attenuator, I would have had my neighbors breaking my doors down and getting my inconsiderate ass arrested by now.
To the left (as you walk in) of this set-up is a folding chair, in front of which is any one of my electric guitars leaning against the kitchen counter. As I write this, I’ve got my bootleg personalized red Trini Lopez plugged into the rig. I’ve not had my hands on this particular guitar for months, so I’m getting reacquainted with her with a view of having her return to active duty as my main play-out guitar.
As you take a seat in the folding chair (I don’t have much furniture, and my apartment resembles a laboratory more than it does a domicile, for the most part), you’ll see an assortment of guitar effects pedals sitting in front of the Panama cabinet. The first pedal in the signal chain is a tuner pedal, so when you turn the amplifier on, Job 1 is to make sure your guitar is tuned properly.
There are a lot of cables on the floor. Some are guitar signal cables; some are mic cables; some are power cables that lead to the amp and to a Fostex digital multi-track recorder. The Fostex sits on a couple of boxes next to the folding chair, within easy reach of anyone in the chair. Finally, a set of headphones is plugged into the Fostex.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in that folding chair in recent days, the headset perched on my melon, strumming familiar riffs, and moving mics around, just acquiring experience with the effects of mic placement on the signal captured by the recorder. At this point I can’t say that I’ve been making music, per se, but all this is me building something up brick by brick.
The latest experiment has to do with studying the effects of recording guitar parts with multiple mics. As I mentioned, I’ve got two dynamic mics made by different manufacturers aimed at one of the Laney’s two speakers. Each mic is pointing at different spots of the speaker itself, so each one is picking up a different frequency range. I’ll start varying mic positions more before moving on to repeating the experiments with yet another different dynamic microphone.
After that, I’ll be repeating the exercise with a cardioid condenser microphone, which is an altogether different type of microphone.
Some people, maybe even most of the ones I know, would think all these experiments is a waste of time, and boring. I disagree (obviously). Honestly, experiments and tweaks of this ilk might be tedious for most folk, but I find it all fascinating. The world of sounds turns me on. I imagine visual artists share a similar fascination with lighting and shadow, or gradients of color.
That’s really what I’m doing right now. I’m trying to learn how to paint with the sounds I’m getting from all these different mic positions and options. Once I get enough experience, then I’ll start using that acquired knowledge to best capture the music I make.
So, yes, right now I’m just dabbing on a stroke here, a line there. Hopefully it’ll all come together into something beautiful (or two, or maybe more) someday.
Really, art in any form is endlessly compelling and fascinating.
Joe-Pinions: Scribbles and Sketches 