Recording the Music of Mike Conway and Adam Bianchi

Posted on 04/14/09 by   Ryan Andersen

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Three of my favorite people in my life packed together in a car to drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara for the One Night Music Valentine’s Day Launch Party on Saturday, February 14th, 2009.  Needless to say that when my brother tried to coax me to the park with him and my great friend Mike Ballan and my girlfriend Ildiko that evening for a glass of wine and a round of bocce ball, I couldn’t say no.  We walked to the park together laughing, smiling, and talking about the activities yet to transpire for the evening.  At the park we shared a toast and began a game.  It was amid this air of friendship that I interrupted them: “I have to get home to set up.”  It was time for business, not fun and games.

Setting up for a One Night Music session is not something to be taken lightly.  Sure there are easier sessions than others to produce.  A single singer songwriter is going to be easier to set up and record than a guitar, two vocals, a Wurlitzer, and a drum kit in my tiny bedroom studio.  The only predictable factor in this comparison, however, is the amount of time each will take to set up.  The latter will take longer, obviously. 

However, most of the other factors for each session are completely unique to the individual session.  Each session has its own character and intricacies that must be addressed anew, without precondition to how it should be approached. It’s in this mindset that I feel each One Night Music session will be produced with the integrity that each individual artist’s music deserves.

The Launch Party sessions of Mike Conway and Adam Bianchi were not going to be a walk in the park.  The production was heavy on my mind all day.  This wasn’t just a session; this was going to be our first live concert.  This meant no room for error.  Additionally, this would be the first One Night Music session filmed outside of the space of my bedroom recording studio.  This all mandated my full attention and utmost care to detail. 

The first step was to set up the space.  With the help of my good buddy Quentin Gee, we arranged the living room.  Couches were shifted and tables were turned.  Lights were set up and rugs slid around.  The heart of my recording system is my massive Macintosh G5 desktop computer – an ultra powerful, but clunky piece of equipment.  I moved my computer into the living room where the concert would take place.  After setting it up, I pulled out the microphones to set them up in a tentative arrangement, anticipating the evening’s sound check.  All of this happened hours before the actual performance. 

Mike Conway and Betsy Wise arrived.  I asked Mike to sit down, imagine the audience in front of him, and get to a comfortable place from which to perform.  Then I arranged the microphones around him.  This is the general procedure.  For my SM81 guitar microphone, I generally position it about a foot from the guitar and a bit below the guitar so that it needs to be angled up to point at the fret board.  I aim it at the fret board just to the right of the hole.   I find that having it further away from the guitar gets a crisper, more holistic sound and aiming it away from the hole ensures that the sound wont be muffled with unrealistic bass tones.  Aiming at the fret board also ensures that the mic will pick up some more of the percussive action of the guitar and the sliding of fingers. 

For the AKG C414 large diaphragm vocal microphone, I generally position it about 6 to 8 inches from the performer angled up to try to isolate the sound from the guitar.  It is inevitable that the guitar will bleed into the vocal mic and vis versa, but there are ways to minimize it.  The guitar mic is usually so directional that just pointing it at the guitar does the trick, but the vocal mic is more encompassing, so angling it up helps with isolation. 

Performing in the living room, I also wanted to be sure to capture the nice acoustics of the room, so I pulled both of the mics back a couple of inches further than I normally would. 

For Betsy, I borrowed Mike’s condenser microphone.  Though not in the same price range as the other two microphones, it is a great mic.  Microphones are funny in the sense that you really do not need to pay much for a good mic.  It’s only the crazy audiophiles that will even hear the difference in an SM57 condenser and a Neumann condenser (Neumann is considered to make some of the best mics around).  Additionally, with the low-fi craze these days, a cheaper mic is many times desirable.  Finally, in this circumstance, putting the cheaper mic on the cello is the smart idea because the mic will pick up the lush tone of the cello well and if there is any degradation of the sound, it will not be noticed by most listeners because it is not a sound that they are distinctly accustomed to.  Conversely, just about everybody listens to enough vocal and guitar music to be able to critique the audio recordings.  Working within my means, I used the cheaper condenser mic on Betsy’s cello.  I haven’t recorded cello before, so I largely just guessed were to mic it.  I angled it similarly to the guitar mic and aimed right at the sound hole.  With the cello, I do want to get the lower bass tones, so I intentionally aimed the mic right at the hole and put it pretty close. 

I then set Mike’s levels.  Since at One Night Music we record each session straight through without stopping, I have to set the levels according to the loudest point in the entire session.  So I always ask the artist to find that point and play it for me.  Usually they can pinpoint it right away.  From that point I set the levels.  Then, because most of the artists play louder when they actually perform, I drop the levels anywhere from 3 to 6 dB lower for cushion room.  It’s always better to be safe with levels.  If you clip, you can never fix it. 

After I did sound check for Mike and Betsy, I sound checked Adam.  The trick here would be to set things up in such a way that I could quickly change the set up from Mike to Adam during the live concert.  So, I took a quick gauge of Adam’s levels and made a few notes without actually moving the position of the mics.  I would just make small position adjustments to the mics on the fly without a sound check when it was his turn to perform after Mike.  This is risky because the slightest adjustments can make a big difference in sound. 

Eventually people arrived, conversations were had and glasses of wine were toasted before everybody sat down to hear some tunes.  There are always some nerves running when the session is about to start because a myriad of things could go wrong.  In this circumstance, the stakes were higher because it was a live concert.  I checked and double-checked everything and on my cue we started recording and filming.  The session began without a glitch.  At the transition from Mike to Adam, once again, it went very smoothly.  The recording in general went perfectly.  The hardest part actually was trying to keep people from stepping on the XLR cables as they walked the room.  XLR cables are fragile and should not be stepped on if it can be avoided.

After the two sessions were recorded, Meghan Lehman (of One Night Music fame for being our first session ever) and Mike Ballan (One Night Music’s Fourth Session) performed an off-the-microphone show for the audience, playing two songs each.  The evening was a resounding success!  A great celebration for the launch of One Night Music. 

Visit Mike Conway's session.

Visit Adam Bianchi's session.

This blog post was written by

Ryan Andersen