Audio Production

My Take on the Boston Area Definitive Audio Student Summit

October 1, 2008 October 1, 2008 I went to B.A.D.A.S.S. this weekend, and despite its suspect naming, this event was really interesting. I attended several great events and met some really cool people. The lectures I went to covered recording Country and Jazz, compression, and how to get a job. I also saw a rather strange rant on how compression should never be used and how awful SM 57’s are. Probably the most interesting lecture was J Franze’s presentation on recording Country music. First of all, I had to sneak into J’s lecture 'cause I didn’t realize they were giving out tickets. This turned out to be fine but it was still funny. J Franze works primarily out of Nashville, TN. He records established artists as well as developing up and coming bands. He gave a lengthy presentation on one of his last sessions at the The Tracking Room. The Tracking Room comes complete with a basketball court-sized live room and a rock room (yep, that’s a room made of entirely rock surfaces).  He showed us some of his microphone set-ups, talked about the importance of individual multi channel headphone amps, and told us all about the inner workings of the Nashville session players.  Maybe my favorite mic technique he talked about was the Ringo mic. The Ringo mic is a lone omni directional room mic placed back from the drums and then compressed within an inch of its life.  I thought the mic really added a nice feel to the mix he was playing for us. J spent some of the lecture telling us about a very interesting project that he has been working on.  He had been asked to digitize and master a set of tapes of Grand Ole Opry artists such as Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr., Loretta Lynn, and Jerry Lee Lewis. To make a long story short, these recordings were something of a legend and it was unknown whether or not they even existed. A label in California decided to try to track them and succeeded. J brought in a sample of the performances, which were all fantastic. The most entertaining was a Jerry Lee Lewis set where he was very drunk. Apparently he tried to play it off for the first half of the performance but halfway through admitted he was drunk to the audience: he very obviously had completely forgotten the lyrics to Great Balls of Fire. It was hilarious.