That Old School Sound !!!

[telljames]

Hi,

Im looking for advise, i have a job to record music tracks for a surfing documentary and the brief is to re create the sound of the late 60's and 70's music for those that know the movie reference was 'Morning Of The Earth'.

So do you guys have any tips for recording and mixing to achieve that sound, which i guess the best way to describe it is very analogue.

What mics,plug ins etc would you use.

Any help would be great.

Thanks

James

[Scott Goldberg]

Use great mic pres (I like Manley or Neve, Vintech are great too and MANY others),use tube mics or great microphones if you are recording from a live rig. Just make sure they can handle the SPL. If not, record it in dry (you can still use Amp Farm or whatever to help make the track go in smoother.You can also us a Reamp box and send it back out to that and then start experimenting with amps. If you have some Fender amps from that era, try a Fender Super Reverb. They're a good choice for surf music. I am sure there are more.

Once you are in the box, use top notch compressors (probably transparent sounding) and the same with EQs. I like the McDsp Eqs but there are many our there I'm sure a bunch of HD users are using as their favorites. Personally, I always put a high pas filter before the compressor and dial out any low hum, and the a parametric after the EQ. IF you're looking for slap back, Echo farm, or Sound Toys have great sounding delays. There's also Tel Ray and again, I am sure that others will chime in with their favorites.

At any rate, do what you can to get whatever sounds you use go in with a great input chain. Avalon is another preamp. I don't usually track with preamps that have compression built in, but you may get the best results that way, with a Neve, Manley, Vintech, Avalon, Dw Fern...the list goes on.

[Stig Eliassen]

Yeah, listen to Scott. He's REALLY old, so he should know.

Fender guitars and amps, spring reverbs and some good ol' hiss and noise will get you closer.

I suggest that you rent all Kill Bill movies, and listen to the soundtrack. Much inspiration there, seriously. Import reference tracks into your session.

[Scott Goldberg]

Yeah,

Listen to that uber-swine PT Lover too! Don't forget to add any Dick Dale Recordings.

[telljames]

Thanks for your Help.

j

[Scott Goldberg]

You're welcome dude, hope any of that malarkey we wrote works!

[longstrap]

having recorded duane eddy.... use a tube mic about 12-18 inches away. you can not put to much reverb on the guitars. In general distant mic and spring reverb. hope that helps.

[Bob Olhsson]

90% of it was everybody playing togerther in the same room with no headphones and creative use of bleed.

[Groovacious]

I find it very important to add the responsibility of buss distortion, overhead handling and transient design to the whole picture.

1.) I followed the advice of a member here on the DUC and implemented an ANALOG CHANNEL plug in across the master buss, and mixed while having it on all the time.

We need to remember that the Bus on old Boards would distort very early in the game, at relatively low saturation levels and the engineers knew how to take advantage of that.

It is not presumptuous to add an artificial, analog sounding plugin which introduces a similar distortion into the bussing system and "then mix into it".

I also found if I do this and remove it later that the mix would return to it's digital, clear, yet musically somewhat disconnected status.

Inserting it into an existing mix (after the fact) was not successful as I always missed the brightness.

2.) Summing amp.

The most dramatic improvement I got when mixing "in the box" was when I finally bought a Neve 3316 summing amp.
The widening of the stereo image was immediately apparent, so was the "fluff" factor - and it did not improve much more after I bought another interface with 16 more outs and another (cascaded) summing amp:

In other words, for me, ONE WAS ENOUGH!
16 channels of analog summing did the job.
Now I got another problem, the room sucks - but anyways, it never ends, as we all know...!

Good luck with your old school project!

[25ghosts]

i Have worked with an engineer that actually recorded a few songs with the beach boys. He has recorded just about anything with a name in the ind. One of the first hits he recorded was "Imagine" by John Lennon ))

Anyway, I remember in one session with some Jazz amateurs wanting to the real deal. We had recorded a great quality sound and were thrilled. Then the band came in and brought thier reference cds. The were all done in the late 50'ies and were also sounding like that.

As the band said they wanted to sound like that the engineer almost had a fit. He said, are you guys insane? If you had told me prior that you wanted to sound like that I would have used CHEAP mics cuz part of sounding like the fifties is that the sound quality back then sucked.

So if you wanna sound like the beach boys remember this. The Mics they could buy back then, even the most expensive ones, were not half as good as a $200 doller no name diaphragm mic of today.

Good Luck