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Upstate Escape
On January 19th and 20th of 2008 the band Upstate Escape drove down from Ithaca to record a couple of tunes. I'm often asked the question of how long will it take to record a song, and I always have to answer: it depends. If you're cutting tracks live (all playing together), and not overdubbing, the process is usually much faster. Say you are a bluegrass band all standing around one mic, going for the best take, you may be able to record an album in a day. If the band is planning to overdub each part separately, you can imagine that the recording will take much longer. I was really excited to hear that Upstate Escape only wanted to record 2 songs that weekend (I've come to think that at Dryhill one song a day is a solid goal.) The band is a three piece with John Norwood playing guitar
and singing, Chris Bentley playing bass, and Ryan Silvernail playing drums. They recorded each song by overdubbing each part for a keeper. It began with Ryan playing drums, while John was in the listening room laying down a scratch guitar and vocal track. Ryan brought in a DW kit which we got set up and miced in about an hour and a half. We started with Beyerdynamic m160s for overheads, running into the Sytek.
The Kick sound was a bit too flabby for me, so we took the tent away, and stuck with the beta52 up close, running into the HHB Radius 40 pre, with just a bit of 250hz down on the eq. I also threw up the AEA R92 as a room mic.
After getting keeper drum tracks we moved Johns Vox AC30 into the live room, and miced it with a Shure SM57, the AEA R92, and the M149 as a room mic. I loved the sound that John was getting out of his amp, and having the 149 up gave us options with how closely we wanted to place the guitar in the mix.
