A Recording & Mastering Studio in Baltimore
On all her previous records, Baltimore-based singer/songwriter ellen cherry’s principal instrument is guitar. And as the title implies, her new EP, Please Don’t Sell The Piano, represents a break from that tradition, as she explores black and white keys for the duration of the six songs. Having long since found a distinctive songwriting voice on her primary instrument, ellen cherry is taking a risk here, stepping out of her comfort zone.
I am not a crazy gear head. But don’t get me wrong. I love solid gear that will do what I want it to, but I don’t focus on the specs. It doesn’t matter if it’s tube or solid state. If it’s discrete or has IC chips. If it does what I want, when I want, and doesn’t flake out, then I am happy.
The Blue Mouse FET (large diaphragm condenser) does just that. It never gets in the way. It captures. And it captures accurately. Not to mention makes everything sound huge and amazing. And to be specific, I am talking about the early model that was black/gray that indicated it has the transformer inside. It really stands up to the Neumann FET 47. The FET 47 tends to be a tad unfocused in the lower-mids. I’ve used these two mics side by side and I generally grab the Mouse first. The bass is smooth and the upper-mid aggression is what you need to make instruments sit perfectly in your mixes. (more…)
Among Wolves have been working on their second album, and previewing songs from it in their rousing, raucous live show, for so long that I felt like I loved This Is A Wave Goodbye before ever hearing it. The Baltimore quartet is a rare breed, an old-fashioned rock band with multiple singers and songwriters whose different voices and visions fit together into a unit that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That unit has a tendency to get drunk and play sloppy renditions of their twangy roots rock compositions, but that’s just in keeping with the tradition passed on by the band’s influences, which loom over the album without swallowing it up.
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Between the title, one of the simplest and most universal phrases in the English language, and the cover art, a commonplace portrait of the planet Earth from outer space, Jason Urick’s latest album I Love You seems to be pursuing an aesthetic that’s as neutralized and devoid of detail or personality as possible. The only thing he could’ve done to make the exterior packaging of the album more generic would be to change his last name to Smith. But that’s not to say that I Love You suffers from a lack of ideas or creative expression. If anything, the album is a culmination of a running theme in Urick’s music, which often takes very specific source material, and stretches and manipulates the samples until they become abstract and ostensibly meaningless, sound for sound’s sake.
Although Urick, a longtime fixture of Baltimore underground music, recently located on Portland, Oregon, I Love You was partly recorded at Floristree, the Baltimore performance space he previously ran and lived in. Like the 2010 album Husbands and Urick’s other solo releases on Thrill Jockey Records since the breakup of his band Wzt Hearts, I Love You is a collection of a handful of lengthy tracks, mostly running from six to ten minutes, each with its own particular palette of sounds that slowly unfurl in subtle variations. It’s a headphone album in the classic sense, with the pure aural beauty of its best moments being derived primarily from the way the sounds drift from the left to right channel or vice versa.
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On a recent day in September, music fans everywhere reacted to the news that R.E.M. had decided to break up. However, the same day a much less famous band, but perhaps one that still had a bit more potential for future growth, also announced that it was calling it a day. The breakup of the wonderful, inventive Baltimore quartet Ponytail was not exactly a shock — in fact their split had been preceded by a lack of touring and lots of speculation about the band’s status — but it was still sad to hear. But the band left behind one last album, Do Whatever You Want All The Time, released earlier this year before calling it quits, and it’s a worthy addition to their legacy.
It’s time to showcase a condenser mic this month! And there’s nothing we like more than a versatile mic you can find for under $400.
I first got into recording doing a lot of solo and acoustic performers. I emailed one of my favorite songwriter/recordists at the time and asked him what mic he used to track his acoustic guitars. It just so happened the Audio-Technica 4033 was the mic he’d been using for years to record guitars and vocals. This being THE first studio mic for me, I put it in front of as many instruments as I could and received pretty incredible results. Audio-Technica even boasts that this was the mic to break the $1000-barrier in it’s class. (more…)
