Skatebottom Sound Studios

Howdy fellow-travelers,

We had a good session recently with veteran recording artist Rick Fleek here at Skatebottom. While his last album was all recorded in pieces, this pair of songs was recorded with more of a live vibe. Ace session drummer Dale McFarlin put down a smokin' groove while Rick did rhythm guitar and I held down the bassline. It was a good reminder of the benefits of recording bands playing together - there is a level of interplay and interaction that is really hard to achieve if you do the parts one at a time. Dale has insisted lately, in fact, that he would much rather do it this way if there is a choice. It's more to keep track of from an engineering standpoint (especially if the engineer is also playing in the session!), but is well worth it. The final product had elements that were added later - Rick's vocals and some piano parts that I laid in. It's a good way to work, allowing us to capture a live band feel for the rhythm track, but giving us the freedom to do multiple takes on vocals.


Rick Fleek & Albert McDonnell @ Skatebottom Studios

Rick is releasing the duo of songs as a CD single, available at Capitol Records. The 'A' side is 'You're in Love', which has more of a rock groove than most of the songs off his album. It features Rick on electric rhythm guitar, for the first time here. You can also check out the piano chops of Bertronomous Maximonous on the tune. The 'B' side is 'You're Going to Miss Me When I'm Gone', which begins and ends with a funky bass groove with a clave accent in the drums and an open-textured acoustic guitar figure, and segues into a dreamy George Harrison influenced ballad with Rick's trademark Roy Orbison inspired vocals.


Albert McDonnell & Rick Fleek @ Skatebottom Studios

Rick gave me a rough design for the CD label which I executed in a metallic purple background with white text. The CD printer is really putting out some nice results. Big smiles when Rick saw the finished product. Look for sample selections of the tunes here at JuneauMusic.com!

warm regards,

Albert

For more information about the single, click here.

Well Collette's CD is finally out and the response has been great, from what I hear. Tuning into KTOO this morning, the first song on Cross Currents was from the album, and I didn't hear it, but Buddy told me that he heard another different cut on this afternoon. They must have it propped up in the window of Master Control, easy to grab. OR... maybe it's tucked away in some obscure corner, and all the DJs got to play it so bad, they spend hours looking for it so they can put it on the air. One of my favorite bits from the album is Doug Bridges' cool sax work on the title track - is he a sweet player or what?

Lessons to learn from the experience? Well this is one thing I tell many a prospective studio client - if the band is ready and rehearsed on all the material, recording can go fast (witness Crabgrass' recent album, recorded in 3 sessions). If that's not the case, expect to take longer. Now, I didn't know it would take 5 years, but - WAS IT WORTH IT? You bet - if you like your cards.

Other news from around Skatebottom is that I have finally pulled my big Mackie 24x8 console out of the room and replaced it with a Big Knob. All the boat anchor was really doing was propping up my computer keyboard, which is a hint to explain why it wasn't needed anymore.

In other news, my CD printer just arrived today - now in addition to burning big runs of discs, I can print on them as well. Look for a new higher level of locally produced media coming your way soon.

Cheers all my loyal readers and sorry for the big delay in new updates. I'll try and get back in the swing for summer, I can post in between gillnet trips.

kind regards,

Albert

This is a message specially intended for the men of Juneau. I play in this Salsa band, and we play out a bit, and I happen to be in a position to know that there are a lot of women who love to dance salsa, and there are not nearly enough men who know how... do you see what I'm getting at? This is not terribly hard to learn, but it's very fun to do - what does 2 plus 2 equal again? There is another section of Juneaumusic.com that tells all about where and when to take salsa dance classes (with Heather and Antonio, the venerable god and goddess of salsa in Juneau). Don't delay, start today, yada yada. I went to a class last Monday and it was really fun and a good workout too. Do look into it, won't you?

I've been hard at work these last 2 weeks on an upcoming play at the high school called 'Once on This Island'. I'll get to the gory audio details shortly, but first I want to rave a while about the show itself. You should go see it! It's a high energy musical with really awesome dancing, singing, and playing. The cast is all high school students. I had never seen a high school play here before, and I am very highly impressed. The show is set on an imaginary island a lot like Haiti. There is a strong element of African music and dance, and the choreography by Zoe is especially brilliant. She was the lighting designer too, her creative stamp is indelible in this show. There is a live pit band, led by Patrick Murphy. There are 2 percussionists, 2 wind/horn players, bass, and piano. TJ is a big standout musically - an amazing drum virtuoso in fact. I highly recommend you check this show out. The cast is about 50 people, and they sing their hearts out on some really beautiful music. I am way inspired, and I think you will be too.

OK, enough raving, I'll go over how we are amplifying the show now. Starting with the band, we have one mic for each instrument (a DI for the bass). For the first few days I was working on it we were using an electronic keyboard for the piano, but then we switched to the Steinway that was there, and the music really came alive. Lorrie Heagy, the pianist, was able to play with much more expression and dynamics.

We were able to come up with 13 wireless body mics, so we devised a plot whereby by switching mics between numbers, we were able to pick up a good part of the solo spots we had to cover. The actors wear the transmitter clipped on to their waistband in most cases, and the cable goes under their shirt, up over their ear, and the mic element is taped to their cheek with transparent medical tape. We get pretty good pickup using that placement. This is the biggest show I've done using this kind of mic'ing, and I've learned a lot about how to make it work. Chris, our sound board operator, works from the libretto and unmutes each mic just before it's needed, and mutes it again right afterward. This way, actors never have to think about turning them on - they stay on for the whole show.

There are a lot of big choral numbers in the show. When the chorus is way out front near the audience, they project well, but they also sing a lot from the back of the stage. To amplify this area, I hung 2 choir mics from above about 12 feet above the stage, and taped PZM mics to side posts on either side facing in. It's a pretty dramatic enhancement of the sound. Since the main speakers are hung pretty far forward, we get good gain before feedback from these mics.

We mounted a monitor speaker above head level in the back area of the stage on either side in the wings, and put a mix of the band in these monitors (favoring the piano for pitch cues) so the singers could stay with the music. We also put a monitor in the pit, which is sunk below the stage, and sent it a mix of the body mics of the principal singers so the band could cue off of their voices.

Back at the mixer, I knew I wanted to be able to control the 3 different groups of input sources seperately, so I routed the chorus mics to subgroup 1, the band mics to subgroup 2, and the body mics to subgroup 3. Set up this way, Chris could bring the band mics, for example, in and out with only one fader, rather than having to mute six channels separately. So throughout the show, he will bring the chorus mics in and out as needed, or adjust the level of the band to compensate for different dynamic levels on stage. In addition to this, and to all the lav mic adjusting he's doing, he is also cuing sound effects from a Minidisc player, and setting levels for those. So he's a pretty busy guy back there.

Bottom line - go see this show. It opens Friday, February 18, and runs this weekend and next weekend.

all for now,

warm regards,

Albert

Well, we had a fun time playing salsa (and related musics) at the Montessori benefit last Sunday. What a great dance floor really, and it looked like it had recently been refinished - top drawer all the way. Tito, our erstwhile big voiced singer now from Puerto Rico, was in fine form. We much appreciate that he flies the guys in the band little cues like 'sing now' or 'play horn mambo #1 now' (in sign language of course) to keep us on track. Playing music well is largely a matter of listening very well to the musical enviornment. The better we do that, the better we play. Remember that!

I pause to muse occaisonally on the many formats that I have used in my career thus far in the recording studio business. My very first recordings were made to a 4 track cassette portastudio. I just made a few of those, of groups that I was playing with. It was a fun way to start out.

Not long after that, I wanted to try digital recording, and was able to borrow a Sony portable DAT walkman from Jeff Brown. This was probably around 1990 - oops, I still haven't returned that thing. Actually, I still use it sometimes for remote recordings or sound effects gathering. Recording to 2 track DAT requires that whatever mics and sources that are being used are mixed to tape, in other words, the mix recorded is the final mix. I used a 12 channel Yamaha live mixing board to route my sources to tape. Some projects on this format were Andy Fowlers 'Cabin Fever' cassette, Port du Nord's 'The North Door', and Jane and Betsy's 'Through Your Eyes'. I still enjoy listening to them. Something about getting the performance down live with no overdubs brings out good things from musicians. The recordings from this era were made in the big group house I lived in, Windy Ridge, or my first commercial space, a suite of rooms above Heritage Coffee downtown.

Downtown one day I saw a flier for a complete 8 track home studio setup for sale. It turned out Eric Torgeson was selling the gear, a studio based around a Tascam TSR-8 half inch analog 8 track recorder and a Mackie 1604 mixer. This was a big step up for me for flexibility. Projects on this setup included Buddy Tabor's 'Meadowlark', Burl Sheldon's 'Tidal Lore', and Steve Zarate's 'Homecoming'. This was when people were first being able to produce CD runs for smaller local acts, and it was pretty exciting. On this setup, I started off mixing down to the Sony DAT, but upgraded not much later to a full size Tascam DAT deck bought from Bob Bahghart. My studio moved around to different locations including Tony Teng's house and a sublet cabin out Thane Road.

I wanted to add more tracks, and at this time the big deal in project studio recording was MDM's - modular digital multitracks. The idea behind these units was that each one could record 8 tracks on digital tape, but they could be synchronized to run together to add 8 more, and 8 more, etc. I opted for the Tascam format for my first one, which I intended to use in sync with my Tascam half inch deck for a total of 16 tracks. That worked fine, but I didn't do much work in that 'split' format. It was kind of a pain using 2 different types of tape on the same project. I added a second Tascam MDM (a DA-38) which gave me 16 tracks of all digital, and that proved much easier. This was my recording format for years after that, when I moved to my present location in the basement of the Gold Street building. I recorded quite a few albums in this format, including ones by Jane Roodenburg, John Knight, Sarah C. Hanson, Peter Jon Gillquist, Panhandle Crabgrass Revival Band, Eric Holle, Rainee Godwin, and Buddy Tabor. Sixteen tracks was usually sufficient for the folky/grassy kind of stuff we were mostly doing. During this time I made a transition from mixing to DAT to mixing straight to computer hard drive, using Sound Designer 2 on a Power Mac 5400 with about a 2 gig hard drive. I could pretty much only do one album at a time on it until I added a slightly larger external hard drive.

Salsa Borealis was recording the 'Mambo Jambo' album on the MDMs when I got a faster computer, a 500 MHz G4 PowerBook with a 40 gig hard drive, and a MOTU 828 audio interface and the Audiodesk multitrack software. I transferred the tracks from digital tape to the computer and finished up the project that way. The power of the software mixing enviornment was really fun to experience compared to mixing on an analog console. The best thing about it is that after the mix is done, all the mix data is saved with the tracks so if you want to go back later and make one little change to the mix, you don't have to try to recreate all your manual settings on the mixer - it's all the way you left it. During the transition phase, several projects that were underway went through the same thing - tracks on MDM getting transferred to computer via the 828. New projects begun since then have gone straight to hard disc, which is where we're at now, albeit now with a newer, faster computer and a lot more water under the bridge.

It all makes you wonder what will be the next format? My sense is that we're at a solid place right now and I don't expect that major changes in the basic way we record are due for quite a while. But who knows? I thought the same thing when I was recording to half inch analog tape! In any event, I still have the TSR-8 and the DA38s for archival purposes - you never know when we'll need to remix something that we recorded 15 years ago. Last fall, Rick Fleek brought in some reels that had been recorded in the mid 1960's by Dennis Egan in the governor's mansion and we dubbed them to CD. His band was playing songs like 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' back then.

Do I need to keep these posts shorter? I get started and I want to tell the whole doggone story.

Ah, now for some pie...

warm regards,

Albert

This Saturday, the 29th, Salsa Borealis is playing (along with the Thunder Mt. Big Band) at a fundraiser for the Montessori School at Centennial Hall. We are really excited about it because it is a reunion for us with Humberto, our great lead singer whose job with the Coast Gaurd took him to Puerto Rico and away from us a couple of years ago. Tito (his nickname) is a singer in the Latin tradition of big, fine, expressive singing and mucho charisma. We had a great time playing with him when he lived here. He's with us for one night only until he heads back home after a trip to Anchorage. We're talking about returning the favor and making a band pilgrimage to Puerto Rico for some gigs there. Come on down to Centennial Hall Saturday for fun salsa and swing dancing, and support a great school program too.

Time for the technical part of today's blog. This is for people who are not familiar with the basics of digital sound and music recording. I was musing today about digital recording and it such an incredible thing, you may be interested to understand it better. For CD - quality audio, the sample rate is 44100 Hz, and the word length is 16 bit. That means that for each sample that is recorded, 16 digits are used to record it - 1's or 0's. And it is sampled 44100 times per second. That's the part that really gets me. Over 44,000 times? Per second? How do they do that? When the sound is played back, there must be a converter that translates all those samples back into an analog waveform - again, 44k times per second. And that is built into your tiny little Discman that you carry around in your pocket. Does that amaze you? It does me.

At Skatebottom Sound, we use that sampling rate, but we record our basic tracks with much bigger samples - 24 digits instead of 16. It's a bit like pixels in digital photography - the bigger the sample, the better the resolution. Many studios are marching ahead to a brave new world of higher sample rates too - like 48k, 88.2k, 96k, even up to 192k. There is ongoing debate on whether anything is to be gained by using higher sample rates. By some people's reckoning, 44.1k sample rates allow us to record any frequency up to 22 kHz, which is well beyond any human adult's hearing range, and even young children are known to be able to hear up to 20 kHz. I won't go into it, but an argument can also be made for the value of sampling more times per second - it gets pretty esoteric (as if it's not already).

One reason not to jump on the high sample rate bandwagon has to do with hard drive space. If you take twice as many 'pictures' of the same duration of audio per second, you need twice as much disc space to hold it. We have 500 gigabytes of storage on internal drives, so we could work there - gee though, files get huge in a hurry. And it also gets to be a bigger job when it comes time to be archiving finished projects.

Speaking of archiving, let me tell you this: when we complete a CD project at Skatebottom, we backup all the multitrack song files, as well as the finished mixes, on CDR (actually now we're starting to use DVD). Who knows, maybe someone who records here will go on to be a famous star and then we'll be glad we did. Or if you record here, you'll be glad we did if you ever want to come back and remix or edit something in the future.

Speaking of people who may go on to be big stars, we recently spent an enjoyable afternoon with a young woman of about 10 years of age named Marie Peterson (or was it Bonnett? not sure). She and her mother Karen brought in a little karoake player, I brought in a TV set, and she recorded 16 songs in 1 session. She wants to grow up to be a singer, and let me tell you, she has a mighty good start on it. Good work, Kit! (That's her stage name). We made up a disc with her picture on the cover and ran off 20 copies, which will be on their way to her relatives soon.

Other folks with projects under way at Skatebottom currently are Riley Woodford, Buddy Tabor, Scott Miller, Tony Tengs (the Preserves), Collette Costa (actually hers is pretty much finished), and the Panhandle Crabgrass Revival Band. Whew! No wonder I feel like I have no spare time to catch up on the drudgery! Time for the blog, however...hmmm.

Stay tuned for updates soon on the aforementioned projects, and on the history of recording, Skatebottom stlye.

warm regards,

Albert

Hey I think I'll brag about the signal chain here at Skatebottom Sound a bit. Why should you care? Well, it's like this: the signal chain at a recording studio is the bottom line when it comes to what kind of sound that studio can produce. But most folks who record here never really know what their sound is going through on it's way to the CD.

The basic chain in an acoustic recording to a digital format is this: microphone, preamp, compressor (if any), A/D converter, storage medium, D/A converter, speakers. An overview of our A-list gear goes like this:

There are several different mics we use for vocals, depending on the voice. Typically we'll try a Shure KSM32, an Audio-Technical 4033, or an AKG C414 as first choices, Though sometimes we have gotten good results with a Sennheiser MD421, a Beyer M130, or a Beyer M500... there are others. One singer did an extensive mic shootout and chose, believe it or not, a Shure SM81. The good thing is that we're not limited by a small choice here - if one mic isn't doing it, there are plenty of options.

My favorite mics for many string instruments are a pair of Neumann KM185 small diaphram hypercardiod condensors. They sound great on close mic'ed guitar or banjo, and I also use them as the main stereo pair when recording the Juneau Symphony at JDHS auditorium. This pair of mics probably gets more hours of recording time than any others I have. To round out that category, we also use a pair of Rode NT5's, a pair of Shure SM81's, and also have plenty of dynamic mics like SM57's and 58's, and drum mics from Beyer and EV.

The big shot in my rack of mic preamps is my Great River solid state pair. I almost always use one of these as a first choice for an overdub. The sound is strikingly clean and full when compared to most lower cost preamps. When tracking a band session, there is good company for the Great River - I have 4 channels of Sytek pre's, 4 channels of Focusrite ISA pre's, 2 channels of Presonus, 2 channels of ART tube pre's, and if that is ever not enough, I pull out a Mackie 1202 mixer for 4 more. The availability of some superior preamps gives us an edge over a studio that is tracking everything through the stock ones in a budget mixer.

I often track some sources like bass and vocals with light compression. For a big fat warm sound, I like to use our Anthony Demaria Labs ADL 1000 tube compressor. Even with little or no compression happening, sounds going through it acquire a bigness that I really like. For more mundane compression jobs, we use either one of 4 channels of Drawmer comps or an RNC (Really Nice Compressor!)

The quality of the conversion of the signal from analog to digital is another part of the chain that many people do not think about in their recording experience. Ocuppying the pride of place just below my monitor is an Apogee Rosetta 24 bit A/D converter that, like the Great River preamps, always is the first choice for conversion. In fact, I really enjoy this setup: the KM185's to the Great River pre's, to the Apogee A/D, and that's it. It's short, and very sweet - I like that purist approach. When more than 2 channels are required, I next turn to the Focusrite ISA428, which, in addition to housing 4 great sounding preamps, doubles as an 8 channel A/D converter. And for really big sessions, our MOTU 828 firewire audio interface supplies 8 more channels of conversion for a total of 18 at once!

All this digitized audio is streamed to the computer via the MOTU 828. The computer itself is an Apple dual 2.5 GHz beast, which, at the time of this writing, is the fastest computer available from Apple. We record our sessions at 24 bit samples, giving us an enormous dynamic range available. We record in MOTU Digital Performer, and use an extensive array of plugins from Waves for signal proccessing inside the box. The speed of the computer is such that, as yet, I have never had to limit the number of tracks or plugins in use because it couldn't keep up. (Not that our usual production style typically requires unusually high track counts or tons of FX, but it's good to know that the horsepower is there when needed).

Monitoring at Skatebottom is on the Mackie HR824 active speakers - they speak truth.

That raps up the tour of our signal chain. Waay more than you ever wanted to know, right? Well heck - audio is our passion. You may not need to know every twist and turn of the signal chain for your music, but do know that we take it seriously and work hard to get it good.

kind regards,

Albert