yet another project of mine: nICO+, a duo of Coco SaFir on vocals and piano, and me on acoustic bass guitar, synthesizers, beatz/loopz. Sometimes we switch and Coco does the beatz and me the piano.
Here are three tracks that were mixed using Ardour:
All of this was recorded live into a Allen&Heath Qu-16 digital console that stores separate tracks directly onto USB storage. These tracks were then imported into Ardour.
Apart from the old BlackEQ, I used lots of Windows VST Voxengo stuff: Voxformer (vocal channel/compressor), Elephant (multiband compressor), GlissEQ (dynamic EQ, a life-saver sometimes!), and SPAN as analyzer. The reverbs are from a Yamaha 01V96i console. Coco loves her vocal reverb from that console so much that I had a jolly good time getting the Allen&Heath Qu-16 to sound alike for the live setup.
We did the beats with a Nord Drum 1 synthesizer controlled via the Nord Beat iPad app. The loops were recorded in Ardour and then exported into a Boss RC-300 loop station. The latter also is our central MIDI clock that controls the tempo of FX, synthesizer and the Nord Beat. The synthesizer in that recording is an Oberheim Viscount OB-12, the piano is a Kawai MP6. Plus the EHX V256 vocoder.
Seems like a lot of work. I love the style, the singer’s voice, and ponging delay which usually irritates me but here just makes sense and glues everything together. I’d try different approach here and there - only minor details - and maybe brighten the vocal a tiny, tiny bit. Apart from that it’s easy for me to forget about thinking ‘What would I do better’ (:P) and just listen with sheer pleasure.
Thanks for your feedback, ototto. I will pay attention to the brightness in future mixes for that project. However, I must admit that I don’t overwhelminlgy like what the Rode M2 mics deliver in that frequency range. They’re still a lot better than the default SM58s, but I guess it’s time for an upgrade on vocal mics.
Stereo delays indeed can be nasty. I think it depends very much on the situation. If used in the right context, they can make things feel bigger. My intuition is that they don’t work well for things that are well not in time, be it in purpose or not. Apart from that, the arrangement leaves plenty of space in this case, so there’s no cluttering of stuff going on.
I’m not sure I would try to brighten the vocal as mentioned above, the breathy ‘live’ sound is very cool…but I feel like there is some unused space in the +5kHz region for…something. Something to team up with that lonely egg shaker!
Sounds really well done though, and I too mostly just spaced out listening to it.
There are of course more tracks that we recorded, but we decided not to present them. This was the first concert if that project. More to follow, at full length. Concerning the “5khz+ gap”, I guess things happen spontaneously. We do have pieces with a shaker or other stuff like that, but sometimes we also just don’t like it in that particular moment and then we don’t use those loops.
