Electric Engineering | Steve Albini

Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rich Wells

STEVE ALBINI'S NO-NONSENSE APPROACH TO RECORDING

BONUS MATERIAL
Additional Interview With Albini
Photo Gallery With Albini

I tend to use microphones as they were made and choose them accordingly. I'll put a microphone up, and if I like it I'll leave it, and if not I'll put something else up. Occasionally I'll think, “I like that, but there's a little low-frequency rumble in there that's not going to be helpful,” so I'll roll that off. Most of the time, though, I'm using things flat, no EQ. In a typical tracking session, I'll probably end up brightening the top mics on toms to get a little more attack out of the toms, probably brighten up the top mic on the snare drum.

Almost any microphone you put on the snare drum is going to sound thick and meaty when it's right up next to the snare drum, but it may not give you enough of the impression of crispness. So I would expect to have to use an equalizer to brighten the snare drum, to brighten the top mics on the toms. But that would be about it.

Also, most of the time, the drummer's in the room by himself — I'd say 80, 90 percent of the time. But it's not as if the drums are recorded and mixed on their own and then the band is added later. My normal working method is to have the whole band play, and then from the first playback, you have about 80 to 90 percent of the record. That way, you can tell very quickly if there's a problem, and if there is a problem, you can stop and fix it before you continue.

What do you use for the stereo-mic setup on the drums?

For the stereo mics, I use Blumlein or M-S setups for a lot of stuff, especially in front of the drum kit.

And the choice between the two is dictated by what factor?

Whenever I'm bored with one, I'll throw the other one up. I don't make a real distinction between them. Blumlein stereo is slightly hollow in the middle, so if I feel like the majority of the drum sound is going to be coming from the stereo microphones, I'll probably use M-S rather than Blumlein. Whereas if I feel like the stereo mic is going to be mainly an addition to the close-mic sound, then I'm more likely to use Blumlein. But that's a real subtlety.

Do you run into phase issues from using so many mics on a drum kit?

It's not really that much of a problem. If it starts to sound weird, I'll just move a mic. I'm not afraid of getting out of the chair and moving a mic. It can be more of a pain with more mics, but that would never prevent me from doing something that I thought was the right thing to do.

What's your method for recording bass?

I tend to treat the bass guitar sound as it comes off the amplifier as “the sound.” I often use two different mics on the speaker; one will be a microphone that has a more generous low end, and the other will have more-detailed high end [see Fig. 2]. I'll balance those microphones in the control room to get what sounds like the most accurate picture of the bass sound.

Most of the time, the microphone that favors the low frequencies has a couple dB of compression on it. There's a compressor that I really like on bass guitar, a UREI LA-22. It's a dual-detector compressor — it has a peak detector and an RMS detector — and you can pan between the two to get the most flattering attack sound. I use that a lot on bass guitar, generally only taking a couple dB off, and generally only on the low-frequency microphone.

The reason for that is because in a lot of cases, bass players nowadays have distortion that they fire in now and again. That tends to not have much of an effect on the low frequencies, and in fact distortion often flattens the low-frequency information out. But it can give you a really big spike in the high frequencies and change the texture of the bass. I don't usually compress the brighter of the two microphones so that the effect of the distortion is more evident. It's a way of mimicking the way the bass sounds live, where clicking on a distortion pedal not only changes the sound quality but actually gets louder. Also, pick attacks sometimes trip compressors and make them start sounding odd, so it sounds more natural not to use compression for the microphone that favors high frequencies.

How about guitar amps?

It depends on the setup of the band. If it's a multiple guitarist scenario, I'll try to find out if there's one guitar that's more critical than the other, and I may keep them separate. I don't have any qualms about combining them together, though. If it's a band with one guitar player, sometimes it sounds better if you keep the mics separated and use them as a pseudo-stereo image. If the guitar player has a complex setup with multiple amplifiers, I'll try to keep those amplifiers discrete.

Normally for guitar amps, I just listen to the speakers to see which ones sound best, and pick a mic or two that sound flattering for the speakers. I've noticed that for close-miking, other people generally put the mics closer to speakers than I do. A lot of people take the mic and smash it up next to the grille; I've just had better results with microphones a little bit farther away — say, 8 or 10 inches away from the speaker cone. I'll usually position it on-axis, square in the middle of the speaker [see Fig. 3].

I use ribbon microphones on guitars a lot; in particular, I really like the RCA 74. I've been using that a lot in the past couple years. It's got kind of a slight crispiness to the high end, which I think is due to the fact that it was originally intended to be an announcer's mic. It was basically the budget version of the 44 or 77, which are the big announcer's and vocalist's mics. The 74 is a dinky desktop version, and they might have engineered a peak in the response for articulation's sake. It sounds fantastic on guitar cabinets; I use that mic all the time. I also use the STC [or Coles] 4038. That's also a fantastic microphone [see Fig. 4].