Recording lute

Hi,

One of my favorite things is recording rare or interesting instruments. A week ago I had the opportunity to record Ron Andrico of Mignarda playing an old guitar like instrument called the lute. It sounds sort of like a classical guitar, only the sound is much more complex due to the fact that the lute has many courses of strings while the guitar has 2 single strings.

I approached the lute recording in a classical style, incorporating the room sound as part of the recording. Usually I would use Earthworks QTC1 omnidirectional mics but for our application we found them to be too noisy so we instead used two Neumann KM86 mics in figure 8, through a Pendulum tube mic pre. The sound was wonderful...

Recording The Sim Redmond Band

This past weekend I had the wonderful, long awaited opportunity to record basic track for The Sim Redmond Band! I've been mixing these guys live for many years, and I mixed a recent CD called "Each New Day", but I've always wanted to setup and do basic tracks with this band.

So we set up in the usual Wilburland fashion, where vibe and energy rule over technical things. The band wanted to setup in a circle so they could feed off each other and boy was it the right thing to do. We got great sounds and with the positive vibe in the room we got 2 day of really sweet tracks! I can alway tell which Wilburland projects are going to be winners by how things sound while tracking. SRB sounded like a finished CD while they were tracking. They are onto something special with this CD.

Like many bands these days they will take the tracks we layed down together home and overdub additional parts and vocals and then bring it all back to be here at Wilburland to mix. I can't wait!