This past weekend we started working on “All American Girl,” another country song. This one is in the up-tempo “New Country” style. We recorded acoustic guitar and bass to drums written in Reason. This weekend we have a session for our band Atomic Brother, so we may not get to finish it this weekend, but we may have Toby play drums on it after we finish the Atomic Brother recording.
For “All American Girl” James played his Guild acoustic, and his 1950-something, reissue Fender Telecaster. The Guild was recorded with an SM57, and 2 octavas. We use the SM57 capture more bass from the guitar, and the octavas we have been using to get a nice stereo effect. They get a really nice sound, but don’t favor the bottom end. When we record the acoustic like this I usually mix the SM57 center, and the octavas hard left and right, this gets a terrific stereo spread, and then I add a touch of reverb from Emagic’s Space Designer. However, “new country” mixes have very little bottom in the acoustic so that there is room for the other instruments. So, I’ll probably follow suite when mixing, and use more octava thatn 57.
The bass I have been using for recording is my Pedulla Thunderbass. It has some serious bottom-end. It was a little to bottom-y for this song, so I recorded through my POD XT (for guitar) and my Bass Exciter. This really brought out the full range of the instrument nicely. We didn’t get any keepers with the Telecaster this time. We recorded a bunch of takes that we are not sure about, since the Tele will be playing around the vocals. Next the vocals.