Gabriel Roth: Recording For Daptone Records

[pkole]

Ψάχνοντας, έπεσα στο παρακάτω άρθρο του sound on sound.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun08/articles/daptone.htm#Top

 

Μερικά ενδιαφέροντα, κατά τη γνώμη μου, αποσπάσματα:

 

"We're not doing a purposely 'retro' thing," he says. "It's not about an ideology. Some people say that there hasn't been a good record made since 1973, and I pretty much agree with them most of the time. But I'm not listening to the old soul records and taking them apart clinically. It's more like a kind of informal schooling. You listen — listen for where the horns bite and the crackle of distortion on a vocal. You don't want to imitate it; you want to let it influence you. One of the things you learn is that sometimes mistakes are what make a track sound great. Music should not be perfect or correct. When we play and when we record, we're looking to find what makes us feel good. We're steeped in those old records, but we're not consciously trying to remake a record from 1962."

 

In one scenario from a Winehouse session, he placed both a DX77 and a Shure 55 close together on the floor, then boosted the high-mids on the DX77 and cut the low-mids, around 400Hz, on the 55, resulting in less definition but way more chunk. "The trick isn't how many microphones you use, it's where you place them," the former audio student at New York University instructs. "One of the big problems with modern engineering is everyone telling everyone else how they put this microphone here and another there, and you have to use this condenser for overheads and this large-diaphragm condenser for the kick, and so on. Once it becomes a formula, people stop using their ears."

 

Roth admits that on the rare occasions when non-Daptone players encounter how he works the studio (it's not for hire), he receives some arched eyebrows. But he recalls a session with famed drummer Bernard Purdie in which he used only a Radio Shack dynamic mic placed overhead and the Akai 'Dictaphone' mic (as Roth refers to it; according to Bob Paquette, owner of the Microphone Museum in Milawaukee, Wisconsin, it's probably an Akai MC50, made in the '60s to pair with home tape recorders) on the kick. The microphones were EQ'ed and compressed together ("When the kick hits the compressor, it needs to step on the cymbals"), and both microphone channels were sent to a single track. "He said he hadn't heard that sound in a long time," Roth recalls after the playback in the tiny Daptone basement control room. "He liked it so much he said he'd come back sometime and do another track for free."

 

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