Recording an Acoustic Album

This is a snapshot from a side project, which has been consistent for the past several months.  I’ve been recording a local Las Vegas band called Chug-A-Luv, while they’ve been recording an acoustic EP.  While that causes a relatively simple set up, their arrangement is what’s most interesting.  As far as instrumentation goes, there is one guitar, a tenor saxophone, two vocalists, various percussion instruments, and a djembe as their acoustic drum.  They record all original music that ranges from comedy to jazz-rock.

         
 The guitar was recorded with a Neumann U87, the saxophone with an AKG C-414, and the djembe, because of its design was set up with a 414 underneath the sound hole of the drum, one 414 overhead, and a SM57 on the skin of the drum.  That was the way we could most fully capture the full tone of that drum, and was one of the hardest parts of the mixing process as well.  Some difficulties were faced when recording vocal harmonies at the same time, as so comb filtering occurred because of the closeness of the vibrations.  The only way to resolve that was to re-record those particular vocals, which were effected. 

           
For processing on each track I generally added a compressor, an EQ, and a very cool tube warmer plug-in that I have.  Because the djembe consisted of three tracks, getting the balance between the attack on the skin of the drum, the bass from the sound hole, and the depth of it from the overhead.   With a couple nice plug-ins it was quite easy to get the vocals to punch clean through the mix. Then the difficulty is getting the bands natural dynamics to shine through the mix.