My dear friend, George Hrab, called me to book a quick session to record a song called, “Far.” This was an expanded version of a jingle that he had been asked to write for the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. We banged the whole thing out in a few hours and he subsequently made a video of the tune which you can find either on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF2HG1PVZok

or on Blip.TV at:
http://blip.tv/file/1768264

Belated special thanks to a few people on the show:

Donna Mugavero of Sheerbrick Studio (a.k.a. Ms. Information) for designing the Sessions With Slau banner and for insisting that the site be neat and clean. You can find her on Twitter at @MsInformation or check out her blog

David Jackson of Cooler Websites for helping me put together the podcast through his Podcast Fast Pass program which allows me to concentrate on just creating the content and slowly get my feet wet with the whole WordPress and RSS universe.

Tony Corso for his voice-over on the podcast intro. We recorded a bunch of stuff so I’m sure you’ll hear more of him in the future.

Audrey Farolino (my lovely wife) for doing the “Sessions With Slau.com” tag at the end. She insisted that I let her do another take but, I swear, her first take was perfect.

Thanks so much for the comments and e-mails. You can always reach me at:
slau { at } sessionswithslau { dot } com
and you can often find me tweeting by following
@slaubesharp

http://www.sessionswithslau.com

Watch the George Hrab Video “Far”

I was looking around for a new vocal microphone for myself. Of course, anything I’d buy for my own purposes would undoubtedly benefit my clients as an extra option when recording them. I always wondered whether it would be worth a $10,000 investment to find a used Neumann U 47 or something in that class of mics. Would it be impressive? Without question, it most certainly would be. Would it sound better than what I already had at my disposal? Hmm… I guess you’ll have to listen to the episode to get an idea.

I booked some time at Legacy Recording (which has since closed its 37th Street location). We recorded 7 mics into a Pro Tools HD system through a Millennia Media HV3D. The tracks were unlabeled and I had the engineer make a list of the tracks and their respective mics on a piece of paper. I didn’t know the results of the shootout until having heard the tracks at the end of the session.

Back at BeSharp, I added a few mics to the shootout using the same accompaniment track and recorded the additional mics through an Hv3D. So, the second round of mics weren’t recorded in the same room (actually, a bigger room than at Legacy) but it was all done in relatively close proximity in cardioid mode on all mics.

The lineup:

Neumann U 47

Neumann U 87

http://www.neumann.com

Sony C-800G

http://www.sony.com

AKG C-12VR

http://www.akg.com

Rode Classic II

http://www.rodemicrophones.com

Audio-technica AT 4047

http://www.audio-technica.com

Mojave Audio MA-200

http://www.mojaveaudio.com

Rode K2

http://www.rodemicrophones.com

Apex Electronics 460

http://www.apexelectronics.com

Studio Projects T3

http://www.studioprojects.com

Cascade Microphones Elroy

http://www.cascademicrophones.com

Yeah, it’s a little “apples & oranges” but I was just curious how a $1,000 mic would stack up against something ten times the price. Very interesting…

Hey, believe it or not, I’m finally on Twitter. If you’d like to follow me, search for

slaubesharp

I promise I won’t tweet too much — just studio and audio-releated stuff.