The One-Mic Song

Ever heard of the statement, “limitation leads to innovation”? In my book, 56 Mix Tips for the Small Recording Studio, I discussed the concept of setting yourself a lofty goal while limiting your available resources (like imposing an unmanageable time-limit or limiting yourself to one plugin). This approach forces you to discover new techniques, and hopefully, results in a great learning experience and an exceptional outcome. But the key to success is coming to the party armed with enthusiasm and persistence.  In this blog, my challenge was to produce a high-quality multitrack recording with only one microphone, and it turned out to be one of the most rewarding and enlightening recording experiences I’ve had in a long time. The microphone: a small, omni electret condenser microphone. Say hello to the 12Guage microphone’s Red12.

 Let's get one thing straight: I’ve got a locker full of decent mic’s. I could easily have reached for a flashy-badged, big-brand microphone, and made the entire one-mic-song experience a whole lot simpler by using a mic that was better suited to the range of sources I was about to record. But what would be the fun in that? I was well aware that the more difficult the challenge, the more rewarding it would be (I periodically challenge myself to write 10 songs in one hour, I’ve shoe-horned myself into writing an entire song around one chord, and more, and something good always comes from it). 

I chose the Red12 because it seemed like the least versatile microphone in my locker. Firstly, it had a single omnidirectional pickup pattern which meant I would be recording more room ambience than with a cardioid mic. Secondly, with its small diaphragm, it would likely capture less low end, like the kick drum of the drum kit. Thirdly, I expected it to have a higher self-noise than a regular phantom-powered condenser mic, which could present a problem when stacking many tracks with compression applied. 

The upside was that the microphone seemed to have a reasonably neutral character with no proximity effect, and certainly not artificially hyped in the high-mid frequencies like some cheap condenser mic’s. The Red12 is also ridiculously small and capable of fitting into the tightest spots. But most of all, this microphone is a talking point. Who even knew you could make a microphone from a shotgun cartridge? The artists involved said stuff like, “is that thing real?”, and “look how small it is!” If you’re interested in grabbing a Red12, they’re available for a measly US$35 from Brad at 12guagemicrophones.com (I’m not affiliated with Brad, I’m just giving him a shout-out).

Breaktime

I wrote Breaktime a few years back, and it seemed like an excellent song to dig out and record due to its diverse range of instrumentation; rather typical of a modern song recording. It also had a full drum kit - the biggest challenge, for sure. The song was about my daughter who was only a toddler at the time. It was a busy period in my life, and I was acutely aware of the need to balance my work/family time. In essence, the song was all about reminding myself to take a break and spend it with the people that mattered most to me. 

I am fortunate to be surrounded by gifted muso’s who were keen to give up their time and talent and be a part of the project. So, I want to say a big thanks to Dave Morello (drums), Nikki Hartnett-Clarke (my lovely wife), Bridget Chasemore, and Annie Gee for the backing vocals. And I’ll give myself a pat on the back for being bass player, guitarist, lead vocalist, producer and engineer.

I realised early on that the finished song’s vibe and character could be determined somewhat by the sound of the drums; capturing the entire drum kit in mono with this small microphone would likely impart a unique sonic signature to the recording. I was happy with this possibility because I liked the idea of the song having a unique flavour.

The big decision I made early on, was to focus on the song-writing and production in preference to my desire to fuss with this cute li’l red microphone. This was important because, although the recording was an essential part of the process, I knew that nobody would care about the recording quality if the song was shite. I’m pretty sure that while proper recording techniques are essential, they mostly go unnoticed by the average listener, who is more likely to notice whether the song is good, or not. This wasn’t to say that I was going to ignore the quality of the recording over the composition. Instead, it was a case of, “the microphone capture is critical, but the composition and production, more so.”

Check out the unmastered final mix below:

Recording

The entire song was multitracked in separate sessions, with each session being limited to the one Red12 microphone on the source (I only have one of these mic’s so it wasn’t like I had the option to cheat and throw on more mic’s). 

I started the entire project by recording a demo using electronic drums (Izotope idrum), DI’d instruments, and singing rough lead and backing vocals into an SM57. I sent the demo to my buddy, Dave-the-drummer, so that he could get familiar with the song before coming into the studio to record. As usual, this worked a treat, and Dave nailed the song in three takes. I ended up using his first take! 

Drums

The drum kit was a Sonor Martini with Paiste cymbals and hi-hats. This was a small jazz style drum kit with a 15” kick drum, 12” snare, a 13” floor tom, and an 8” rack tom. This is a tiny drum-kit with a big personality! The skins were fresh, and the kit sounded lively. It was recorded in my small sound-treated tracking room.

Image 02: The Sonor Martini drum kit with Paiste cymbals and hi-hat.

I experimented with the mic in various positions, including directly over the kit and out in front. I recorded each of locations, finally settling on a mic position to the side of (and the same height as) the drummer’s right shoulder, about a foot back from floor tom and aimed at the kick drum. This gave the best balance between all of the drums without excessive cymbal wash. Even with this mic position, the Red12 seemed to slightly emphasise the harshness of the cymbals in the 2 kHz - 4 kHz range. 

The snare was quite bright and due to its small size, sounded a bit like a piccolo snare. I was looking for a slightly chunkier sound, so we draped a tea towel over the top and fixed it around the rim with masking tape. This reduced the brightness and added a little more thump while retaining the right amount of snap since Dave hits the rim when playing the snare (he goes through a lot of drumsticks!). The kick drum was a little resonant, so we dampened the ringing with a piece of semi-rigid sound insulation foam that fit perfectly between the skins inside the drum. The toms also rang a bit, so we dampened these with drum gels, which controlled a little sustain but without the deep boingy resonances.

Check out the original recording of the mono drum track using the Red12.

The Red12 added a unique flavour to the drums, and I really liked it for this point of difference. However, as I anticipated, the kit lacked the low-end punch that I was looking for. This required quite a bit of processing to bring out the low end of the kick drum in the mix (see my mixing notes later). One thing to note about miking a drum kit is this: every mic has its own sonic signature, and when you use multiple mic’s, you get a blended colouration that brings out the best in each drum tone while giving a balanced and neutral sound to the kit. However, when you use only one microphone, the tonal colour of that mic is emphasised over the entire drum kit recording. This is precisely what happened with this drum recording. Not a bad thing, by the way. Just different.

 Image 03: Mic position was about 1.2m above the floor.

Bass

Recording the bass was a straightforward affair. I was immediately impressed with the sound capture of the Red12 on the bass amp with almost zero tone-tweaking required. The bass recording chain was a Fender Squier 70s Vintage Modified Jazz bass (a fantastic sounding bass for a Squier. The first time I used it in a recording session it was selected over a Fender Urge signature and Musicman Stingray) - into a Fender Rumble 40. There was no DI’d bass for this recording. You can see the Red12 aimed directly at the centre of the speaker cone and around one inch back from where the grille cloth would have been. I only removed the grille because it made it easier to see where the mic is being positioned relative to the speaker driver.

  

Image 04: Recording the bass

Guitar

The recording chain for the main rhythm guitars was a Squier classic vibe telecaster into a Vox AV30 into one of the ‘clean’ settings with a touch of grit dialled in with the input gain. The Red12 was aimed directly at the centre of the cone for a relatively full and bright tone. I used all of the three different pickup settings on the Tele to get a little more tonal variation into the recordings. I also DI’d a few tracks through a Joyo AC tone into a TC Electronics Hall Of Fame 2 for a very spacious ambient flavour that added significant depth to the mid-range of the mix.

Image 05: Guitar recording

Vocals

I set the Red12 up in the control room for all vocal recordings. This mic is so small it almost disappears into the mic clip, and was all but invisible once the pop shield was up in front of it.

The vocal elements comprised one lead vocal and four backing vocalists. The BVs were all recorded on separate occasions by a different singer. Backing vocals came to a total of nine tracks. I would have loved to get the three girls around the mic and really get some serious gang recording going. However, the separate sessions with each singer gave the opportunity for more individualised production of each recorded performance. This was particularly useful since the skills and experience were different for each of the singers. In my experience, vocal production during the recording is one of the most critical steps in the entire recording process, since vocals feature so prominently in many recordings.   

Image 06: Vocal recording

Other tracks

For added vibe, I rendered and looped a couple of bars from within the mix, and these formed the intro for the song, and an interlude later. A crowd noise was used for added vibe and thickening during the chorus (thanks to www.sfx.co.uk for the free crowd noise).

  

Processing the mix

During the mixing process, I used some parallel tracks (duplicated tracks with different processing) on the drum kit and the lead vocals to get the sound I was hearing in my head.

As mentioned earlier, backing vocals were layered during recording, for a full and expansive vocal sound. I also re-amped the rhythm guitar tracks to put some space around the guitars. This was done using the TC Electronics Hall Of Fame 2 reverb pedal (man, I love this thing).  

Image 07: the DAW session in Tracktion 

This image shows a snapshot of the 30-track recording session in Tracktion. If you’ve read my book, Macro-mixing for the Small Recording Studio, you’ll know that I’m a fan of group processing (this is where you route ‘same’ tracks to a group and then add VST processing to the group buss before you start processing individual tracks where possible). For example, in this image, the track labelled ‘G.GATS’ is my stereo group track for all of the guitars. Similarly, all my backing vocals go to G.BV, and lead vocals go to G.LVOX. I tend to do a lot more processing on the groups and less on the individual tracks. The drum tracks were a little different in that each duplicate was heavily processed and sent to the G.DRUMS group. However, to avoid latency problems with the drum tracks, I rendered the processing into each drum track rather than have a stack of VST plugins on each track.

Compression; how we love to talk about it. I love compression. I just love what it can do to the sound of a song. But to be honest, I screwed up the first couple of mixes by over-compression. So, I went back to basics by removing all compressors and mixing into a compressor on the mix buss. From there, I added compression on the group busses and left it at that, except for some careful tone-shaping compression on the drums and lead vocals. The bulk of my compression settings were made to emulate vintage levelling compressors because they sound most transparent and preserve the transients in the material. Using Izotope Alloy, I set most attack times at 30-50ms, soft-knee, RMS detection, with auto-gain makeup. Peaks were soft-clipped on the stereo mix compressor. If your mixes are suffering from that typical small and squeezed sound, then you’re over-compressing, and you’re killing your transients.

Points of interest:          

1. There are the four duplicated mono drum tracks (blue) with different processing. These include the original, a drum room that was created by re-amping it through the TC Electronics Hall Of Fame 2, a version where the transients were emphasised with compression, and a ‘thump’ track that had processing to accentuate the kick drum and general low end of the drum kit.

2. The lead vocal track is duplicated three times with each track having different processing to emphasise original tone, transients, and saturation. 

3. Note the nine (crimson) backing vocal tracks at the bottom that are all panned symmetrically across the panoramic soundstage to give a balanced left-right sound to the recording.

4. I used an ambient crowd-in-a-bar track to provide texture and thickness to the choruses.

OK, so there’s quite a bit of processing on this song. Check out this mix of the song with only the original unprocessed tracks, then scroll back up and compare it to the processed mix version.

Image 08: Re-aping guitars and drums through the TC Electronics Hall Of Fame 2 gave tones of space and depth.

Panning Profile

Here’s the panning profile for Breaktime. The most noticeable thing is that elements are panned into position for maximum separation relative to their frequency. Note the width of the low-level ambient sounds (indicated by blue dashed line). Notice how the guitars are panned around 60% either side, yet the ambient elements are panned very wide. I usually pan rhythm instruments full width, but it left a kind of hole in the mix panorama, which was very obvious using earbuds (a lot of music is consumed this way nowadays). Panning them slightly narrower gave the mix a more cohesive sound, which I enhanced by re-amping each main guitar through the TC Electronics Hall Of Fame 2 and panning each at a low level to its opposite side of the mix panorama. This added more dimension to the guitars by creating a little spread and artificial room ambience.

Image 09: The Panning Profile shows the panned position of all elements in the mix.

Sketching out a panning-profile is incredibly useful when working on your mix. There are several reasons for this:

1. It’s a full overview of how all elements are panned in the mix - DAWs don’t show an overall picture of where your elements are placed, but a simple image like this shows it all.

2. It helps to avoid errors in the mix panorama - making the picture forces you to stop and think about your panning decisions, highlighting mistakes that may not be noticeable when you’re staring at the faders on your computer screen.

3. The Panning profile also considers frequency spread - it helps you to think about the pan positions of elements relative to their frequency and to avoid frequency masking. 

4. Transient and sustained sounds are differentiated - this enables you to confidently position transient sounds relative to sustained sounds.

Takeaways

This was a very enlightening and challenging experiment, and well worth the time I put in. I Here’s what I learned:

1. Putting more effort into the songwriting and production meant that I could be less reliant on the sonic character that the Red12 was imparting on the recordings. I’m entirely aware that this is a bit of an odd thing to say since the one-mic-song experiment focussed on using, well, one microphone.

2. The Red12 is imminently usable, portable, compact and easy to position, and it sounds great. And its killer price makes it accessible for even the most minuscule budget.

3. Microphone positioning is an exercise in patience, particularly when locating the mic to get an even balance on all of the drums and cymbals in a drum kit.

4. The Red12 (having an omni pickup pattern) sounded good on vocals and didn’t suffer from proximity effect. I feel much more inclined to use my other mic’s in omni mode for cleaner vocal recordings when needed.

5. You don’t need a locker full of microphones to record and mix a good song. Minimal gear is perfectly OK. What’s more important is having the necessary skills, and an excellent song to start with.

6. This process really helped me get familiar with the characteristics and limitations of this one microphone. This entire exercise is a perfect blueprint for getting an intimate relationship with any piece of gear you own.

7. Equalisation and compression in the mix were critical to bringing out the best of this microphone across the different instrument recordings. One reason for this is the sonic signature of the microphone that can get emphasised when duplicated across 30 tracks.

8. I’m going to use the ‘limitation leads to innovation’ approach again - I have a couple of cool ideas that I’m going to share with you in future posts.

Thanks for checking out my blog, and happy holidays.

Feel free to leave a comment a question.

All the best

Amos Clarke