The ReGroove Quartet Test Recording…

So! After a long time dealing with township issues, we finally found the time to have some fun and get our old gear out together for the recording of our friends from the ReGroove Quartet before getting into the big construction work. This is a recording that should test our current acoustical potential, just for the heck of it, and see what we could do with the bit of gear we had from our previous home studio… Everyone is being recorded all together, and very few overdubs will be considered (some solos and other glittering such as shakers etc…). Considering the incredible liveliness of our uncorrected raw room, we decided to go with only dynamic mics, which is not something we did a lot in studio, but that has its purpose here, and definitely got me totally turned on once we listened to the unprocessed result. The setup goes like this:

Drum : a Royer SF12 overhead and a crappy speaker cone for the kick (which is freaking us out how good it balances!)

Guitar: GenzBenz amp into a 67′ Fender twin 12” miked with an SM57 in a remote room.

Sax: Sennheiser MD421 as a direct intake and a Cad Trion 7000 as a room mic.

Bass: Ampeg DI into a nice empirical labs FATSO, setup with the transformer coupled output.

Rhodes: into the Fender Blues Jr. miked with a AKG D-25 in a remote room.

Now here’s how it sounds unprocessed, straight out of the take… So no reverb add-ons, no mastering whatsoever:

Épisode Bleue – Take from 08-14-09

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As you can see in the picture, this is a freaking garage set up, but sounds very fine for something without dynamic mixing, laid straight down to 2 tracks, conforming to the good ol’ 1952 standards… We’re recording where there should be the floating control room, hopefully, no more than 6 months from now. All the surfaces of the ceiling will be covered in a flexible thick fabric structure that will enable us to achieve any acoustical conditions from a 5 seconds tail reverb to the ultimate studio dryness, with enough space to record a big ensemble. The back of the church will be separated in half to house the rest area and individual bedrooms for bands who stay.