Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Jesse Cannonball Statman - lofi Experiment

SpeakerSonic Studio

Jesse Cannonball Statman is a quirky, non-traditional, singer/songwriter with a unique set up. His guitar is… different. His songs are different too. He is, IMO, the perfect subject for this experiment.

I've been kicking around this idea of using the mic input on my crappy old hand held tape recorder as a vocal mic. It has an interesting tape saturation/distortion sound. I was hoping to plug into the mic input, but I couldn't find the one particular cable I needed. DAG! So I just taped the tape recorder to a mic stand and used the internal mic. It has less frequency range than plugging a decent mic into the unit, but the principles are the same. The input is overdriven, it hits the tape heads and produces a broken up, compressed, colorful lofi sound.

On the guitar I used a junky old webcor mic into a mediocre ART Tube MP. I cranked the Input and the +20db switch to get a crunchy sound there as well. That was sent DI thru the Trident console.

For Jesse's guitar, he uses a nameless broken open hollowed out "semi acoustic" guitar in which he places a drum mic for live amplification. To his mic, I added EQ and Distortion and sent it into my old handmade Tube amp (made from a 1940's radio). I added two room mics, one in front of Jesse  and one high up in the room for ambience and to pick up some nuances that you just can't get with close mics from a guy like Jess Cannonball Statman. He moves incessantly. 

I have this old tape delay I thought might be right for a few songs so we added that into Jesse's vocal chain with an on/off foot switch. What a wonderful tool in this world of tape and saturation and warmth. It ended up adding a tinge of noise to the input, but this is lofi, so who cares. It also added a world of good to the songs!

For the mix, I spread the Room mics out far Left and Right, to get a nice stereo image of the room and so I could also avoid using many effects in post. Jesse asked for a bit of reverb on his guitar so I put a "Warm Plate" in the bus and we sprinkled in a small amount. The guitar tone is a blend of the miked up amplifier and the preamped mic placed in front of his actual instrument. It gets a lot of meat from the amp, and gets the quick paced strum patterns of Jesse's "semi acoustic" sound. The Vocal has a pinch of delay and EQ in post. Just classic room sound and tape delay when pressed. I think it sounds crazy good. Its probably not as far out as I'd like to go… eventually. But with what I have kicking around here, I'm very happy with the outcome. I'm anxious for others to hear it to see what you think. Here's one of the songs.

Tiger by Jesse Cannonball Statman

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