Cool Nerds in F: Recording KJ The Cool Nerd

Introduction

If you're new to this website, hi there! Welcome to my website. I'm Jo, a live events technician specializing in sound reinforcement. I've had my hands in most facets of live production, including audio, video, lighting, rigging, logistics, leadership, and communications. I've also done quite a lot of work in studios with tracking and mixing a variety of audio projects, and have met so many amazing people through my career path. I love what I do and want to inspire others to do what they love as well.

Day 1: Drums, Bass, Keys

The first part of our first mixing session was recording drums and bass. I invited first-year Capital student Noah Pack to shadow and help with the process, who assisted greatly with drum setup once we decided on mics. The drummer for this session is Anthony Dake, who has been drumming for as long as he can remember. I’ve worked with Anthony on a few projects in the past, so I enjoyed getting to work with him again and see him perform his craft. KJ was on bass and they did the first layers of this recording together.

Drums, Bass

The Engineers

The Artist

For this tracking session I was able to bring in my good friend KJ Queener, who performs under the name KJ The Cool Nerd. An avid songwriter and producer, KJ is never short on lyrics, song concepts, and beats that transcend the confines of any specific genre.

After drums and bass were finished up we moved on to keys. KJ was also on keys for this, and requested that we bring in the Yahama DX-7 from the mixing suites for his sound. After configuring his patch we ended up with beautiful keyboard padding that adds a vintage feel to a modern pop song.

Along with myself, Alex Mobley is a tracking engineer for this project. Alex is a talented post-production engineer who gladly took charge of the artistic vision for the tracking project. During pre-production we decided that we would divide the work according to our own strengths, so Alex focused on recording, choosing mics/preamps, and communicating with the artist and performers to get the best recording possible. I focused primarily on mic setup and signal flow, as well as filming/editing the tracking process for the video portion of this project.

Keys

Aux Percussion

Since we had enough time left in our session, we had Anthony hop in the iso booth and do some Aux percussion. He used a cowbell and a tambourine, then on Day 4 I brought in an egg shaker that KJ went to town on.

Day 2: Guitar, Vocals

Guitar

The guitarist KJ brought in is Cole Osbourne. I have never worked with him so I wasn’t sure what to expect. After a quick meeting with KJ about song form, he went into the live room for some takes. Considering the small amount of time Cole had to practice the song, his solid technique certainly streamlined the process of guitar tracking. Within a few takes KJ and Alex were both pleased with the results. We only recorded a DI signal on Day 2 and decided to focus on vocals for the rest of the session and do reamping the next session.

Vocals

One thing I admire about KJ is his ability to know exactly what he wants out of a song. He went straight from the control room to the isolation booth and was ready to sing. After getting plenty of double takes he moved on to background vocals. This was an interesting process because Alex literally put the chorus on loop record and KJ recorded 30 takes of him doing various harmonies and adlibs. One thing I learned about KJ throughout this process is that he really loves vocal stacks.

Day 3: Guitar reamping

Because Alex was doing most of the tracking work I decided to take charge of reamping. I have reamped before during my Studio E Gear Shootout, so I was already familiar with the general signal flow that goes into reamping. In terms of miking the amp, I decided to try out some techniques I learned when I was tracking guitar with my friend (and artist for the Studio E gear shootout) Jack Babel.

Because the guitarist did not bring an amp and KJ did not have a preference, I went with just using the guitar amp that’s provided in Studio F. On the left cone I had the Shure SM7B (yes I know it’s a vocal mic) slightly off-axis from the cone to get more mid-range frequencies. On the right cone I did the Fredman technique using two Shure SM57s. A quick summary of the Fredman technique for close miking an amp is that one mic is directly on axis with the cone center, and the other is 55º off-axis from the cone center. This will capture the highs and mids of the guitar amp, which can be balanced to the mixers preference in post. The 55º angle is so the mics maintain phase cohesion. To create even more atmosphere for the guitar I decided to use the Royer R-121s in a Blumlein stereo position. The blumlein technique is essentially using two bidirectional mics placed 90º off axis of each other to capture the sound of the entire room. I placed the amp and the Royers on opposite sides of Studio F’s live room so the stereo pair captured almost entirely room tone.

During the reamping process we were running into the issue of feedback. Our DI signal was outputting to Stereo 1-2, which I initially used as the send to the Studio Aux. I did not realize at the time that because the mics which were armed for recording were also outputting to Stereo 1-2, which was routed to the amplifier, causing a feedback loop. Our solution to this was creating a separate send to a Phones out, and using the PT I/O settings to patch it to the appropriate studio aux. This solved our issue with feedback and we were able to successfully reamp the DI guitar signal. Once we successfully routed everything we decided to get 2 separate recordings for the guitar rhythm and lead: one clean and one distorted. The DI guitar signal on its own sounded pretty bad and I wanted to make sure we had a lot to work with in post. Adding the distorted signal certainly helped with this. We’re gonna have one hell of a guitar mixdown, but it’ll be worth it.

Day 4: Bass Reamping, Group Vocals

Because we only got a DI signal of bass on Day 1, I decided that I wanted to reamp the bass as well to add some crunch. Again, I really just wanted to have more to work with in post. You can only do so much to make an instrument sound good when you have one DI signal to work with. I just did a center close-miking technique on the Hartke in Studio F. One cone had an EV RE20, and the other cone had a Sennheiser MD421. We decided against adding a distorted bass track simply because it doesn’t fit the vibe of the tune.

KJ arranged a few people to come in for group vocals. One person was not available at the stated time, so she came in a little earlier so we could track her vocals. Ariyah Wallace, who performs under the name Riyah, is a talented classically-trained vocalist who practices her craft through writing beautiful RnB tunes. Even just by herself she added quite a lot of depth to the track with just a few harmonies.

Later in the night the rest of the group came in. It ended up being two vocalists, Micah Leisure and Gio Alomante, accompanied by KJ. It was fun watching everyone work together and film the process.

Reflection

In my time at Capital I have done many tracking sessions, but never of this size or sophistication. This project was certainly a good method of judging my own progress as an audio engineer. Because I devote most of my time to live engineering, I was worried that I would not be able to add much to the tracking or mixing process. A lot of knowledge goes into a successful tracking project: different mics and their purposes, stereo/mono miking techniques, how to choose the right preamp, setting levels, and overall signal flow of a full digital studio session with analog outboard gear. Not to mention the pre production process of getting an artist, understanding what they want out of their song, and setting dates that work for many musicians on vastly different schedules. During the tracking process, and especially when I was showing Noah (the first-year who shadowed us), I realized that I am much more competent in studio engineering than I give myself credit for.

In addition to tracking I took full responsibility of the video portion of this project. Video production is something that I simply personally enjoy doing, so I had a lot of fun getting tons of shots and B-roll to work with while Alex was tracking.