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

Also, ambient mics sound really good with guitar, even in a dead room. Sometimes just having 10 or 12 feet of distance from the cabinet makes it sound a little more convincing, more familiar. When you're playing guitar, you're not normally listening to it with your head leaning up against the cabinet. If it's a distant mic on a guitar cabinet in a live room, I'll use a condenser mic, just because it picks up the sound quality of the room a little better. But if it's just a mic that's picking up a distant signal in a dead room, I'll normally use a dynamic mic. Sometimes I'll even just use the talkback mic that's set up for the guitarist.

And for acoustic guitars?

Normally I'll have a mic on the bass side and another on the treble, very close to the player's picking hand. Occasionally I'll have a stereo microphone out in front of the instrument, sort of from an audience perspective. The mics by the picking hand tend to sound more like the guitar does to the player, and the mic out front tends to sound more like it does in the audience. For more-detailed guitar passages, I'm more likely to favor the microphones close to the player's hand. The more strummy and noncritical the playing articulation is, the more likely I am to favor the mic out in front.

Generally I'll have the person play a bit and I'll move my head around until I find a spot that sounds good and stick the mic there. I often use either the Neumann SM2 or the AKG C24 stereo mics for that. For the close mics, I tend to use small-diaphragm condenser mics. The Schoeps M221 is a favorite for that. I also like a couple of Lomo microphones; Lomo was a Russian company that made interesting microphones in the '50s and '60s, and there's one called the 1918 that's particularly good for acoustic instruments.

How do you typically treat vocals?

If I'm in a situation, for example, where I have to do four vocalists in the last hour and a half of the session, then I'm just going to put up some sort of bog-standard vocalist microphone, like an AKG C12. I can just open the fader and it'll be okay. It may not be ideal, but it'll be okay.

Practical considerations weigh very heavily in a lot of my decisions. A lot of the bands I work with have extremely limited budgets; they're sort of spending their rent money to come and make a record at all. As a matter of simple human decency, I don't want to waste their time. I don't want to indulge myself in experimenting and trying to find some nerdy, perfect thing when the meat-and-potatoes thing is fine. [For a discussion of one such nerdy, perfect thing, see Albini's take on the Josephson C700A in the online bonus material at emusician.com.]

Does the approach ever differ from that?

Sure. For example, when I did the Stooges sessions [The Weirdness, Virgin, 2007]. The Stooges have always recorded with Iggy singing live along with the band, so that's the way we did the record. Iggy was set up in an isolation room, he had an [Shure] SM58 and a [Neumann] U48, and he could either go for the classy U48 sound or the onstage SM58 sound. He had a monitor playing his vocals back at him in the room. There were vocal speakers scattered around the rest of the band. So everyone could hear Iggy through the P.A., like always. That's not as common as overdubbing the vocals later, but I'm perfectly comfortable doing that if people want to do that.

Let's switch over to the mixing process. First, what do you use for monitoring playback?

I listen mostly on near-field monitors, and I've gravitated toward B&W near-fields. They're fantastic speakers. I can work on them all day and my ears never hurt, and that's not true of almost any other near-fields. My experience with monitors has been that after a very short amount of time, you get acclimated to whatever you're listening to. The choice of monitoring doesn't really matter in terms of whether you can make a good record with them. It matters much more whether or not they're going to be a nuisance. Like, if you turn them up to a comfortable listening level and you're clipping them, or if they have an irritating sound quality. Or if there's beaming in the high frequencies and where you move your head changes the sound quality a lot; that kind of stuff.

The choice of near-field monitors is mainly a matter of practicality. Genelec near-fields sound fantastic, for example; I enjoy listening to music on them, but they handle complex material very well. They tend not to make me think that there are problems that, intuitively, I think might be there. I'll listen to the Genelecs and think, “Oh that's fine,” and it sometimes makes me a bit lazy.

The B&Ws, on the other hand, are just nice, neutral, “nothing special” speakers. But they can handle whatever abuse I can throw at them. I can play them at any volume I can stand to listen to them, and the speakers are going to be fine. And they're not fatiguing at all, which is an enormous benefit.

For mixing in general, you like to combine signals and keep the overall track count low. Does that mean you can usually stick to 2-inch 16-track?

Yes. For most of the sessions I do, 16-track is an ideal format. It's the perfect balance between flexibility and sound quality. For really involved sessions with a lot of extra musicians and a lot of overdubs, no, but for a straightforward recording of just about any performance ensemble, you can probably do it on 16-track. And the sound quality is outstanding. Having said that, 24-track doesn't suck.