Ethan Johns - Ryan Adams "Come Pick Me Up"
May 27, 2018 23:40:25 GMT -6
allbuttonmode and mjheck like this
Post by yotonic on May 27, 2018 23:40:25 GMT -6
Ryan Adams Come Pick Me Up, "this is by far one of the best recordings of a band I have ever heard, yes folky acoustic stuff has lots of room but this track is filled out and yet it sounds perfect, there is no "build up" of frequencies, its all so separate, yet because of the room its perfectly glued, not a hint of distortion or mess just seamless, it amazes me that records can sound this good."
With Ryan Adams (as with Ray LaMontagne) Producer Ethan Johns will let the artist cut the vocal and guitar at their own tempo and either play drums live at the same time (as in Ryan's case) or add them later to the original vocal track ala Ray LaMontagne's "Shelter".
According to Ethan Johns, "Heartbreaker was done in 10 days flat, including the mixing,” he remembers. "I mixed that record on the monitor section of the Neve. There's no EQ on those mixes. I had a pan and two echoes, that's it. I had been working through the monitor section of the console and when it came time to mix, I put the tapes up back through the console and it sounded terrible. So I immediately went, 'Fuck that,' and put it back through the monitor section.”
In opting for largely live productions, Johns isn't afraid of leakage, and chooses his microphones in the knowledge that the sounds will be spilling over into different channels. "The leakage on Heartbreaker is good leakage, 'cause it was a nice room,” he stresses. "It was a [Neumann] 67 on the guitar and a 47 on his voice, and two 67s on the drums and a [AKG] D12 on the bass drum. But most of the drum sound you're hearing — probably about 70 percent — is coming through the guitar and the vocal.”
This bold technique has come to characterize Johns's approach to recording. "What you're doing is completely living with the drum sound that you get through the vocal mic,” he explains. "How you set up in the room is going to dictate the sound that you get, so you're thinking about the distances and all that kind of stuff. You're miking the kit to complement the sound that's coming through the vocal mic. It's the way they were doing it in the '50s, and it worked pretty well back then.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Johns is no great fan of compression. "I kind of went through a phase of digging it,” he says. "Sometimes it's great fun, but I think compression is extraordinarily over-used at the moment. The kind of records I like to make are capturing human performances, so the dynamics of those performances are really important. And if you over-compress, you're diminishing those dynamics, obviously. What you're doing is taking away the performer's natural way of making you more and less excited. So you've got to be really careful about how much of that you do, because you could easily find yourself doing yourself a lot of disservices in the big picture.
I have compressors. I've got some [Universal Audio] 1176s and [Dbx] 160s. If you listen to Heartbreaker, there's almost no compression on that at all. There's no bus compression on any of the Kings Of Leon records I've made, none of the Ray LaMontagne stuff, it's all completely open. There'll be minor compression on individual things. If you're recording to digital, you're compensating for the fact that there's no tape compression, so you're trying to soften things. But I tend to record to tape still, as much as possible.”
With Ryan Adams (as with Ray LaMontagne) Producer Ethan Johns will let the artist cut the vocal and guitar at their own tempo and either play drums live at the same time (as in Ryan's case) or add them later to the original vocal track ala Ray LaMontagne's "Shelter".
According to Ethan Johns, "Heartbreaker was done in 10 days flat, including the mixing,” he remembers. "I mixed that record on the monitor section of the Neve. There's no EQ on those mixes. I had a pan and two echoes, that's it. I had been working through the monitor section of the console and when it came time to mix, I put the tapes up back through the console and it sounded terrible. So I immediately went, 'Fuck that,' and put it back through the monitor section.”
In opting for largely live productions, Johns isn't afraid of leakage, and chooses his microphones in the knowledge that the sounds will be spilling over into different channels. "The leakage on Heartbreaker is good leakage, 'cause it was a nice room,” he stresses. "It was a [Neumann] 67 on the guitar and a 47 on his voice, and two 67s on the drums and a [AKG] D12 on the bass drum. But most of the drum sound you're hearing — probably about 70 percent — is coming through the guitar and the vocal.”
This bold technique has come to characterize Johns's approach to recording. "What you're doing is completely living with the drum sound that you get through the vocal mic,” he explains. "How you set up in the room is going to dictate the sound that you get, so you're thinking about the distances and all that kind of stuff. You're miking the kit to complement the sound that's coming through the vocal mic. It's the way they were doing it in the '50s, and it worked pretty well back then.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, Johns is no great fan of compression. "I kind of went through a phase of digging it,” he says. "Sometimes it's great fun, but I think compression is extraordinarily over-used at the moment. The kind of records I like to make are capturing human performances, so the dynamics of those performances are really important. And if you over-compress, you're diminishing those dynamics, obviously. What you're doing is taking away the performer's natural way of making you more and less excited. So you've got to be really careful about how much of that you do, because you could easily find yourself doing yourself a lot of disservices in the big picture.
I have compressors. I've got some [Universal Audio] 1176s and [Dbx] 160s. If you listen to Heartbreaker, there's almost no compression on that at all. There's no bus compression on any of the Kings Of Leon records I've made, none of the Ray LaMontagne stuff, it's all completely open. There'll be minor compression on individual things. If you're recording to digital, you're compensating for the fact that there's no tape compression, so you're trying to soften things. But I tend to record to tape still, as much as possible.”
