Saturday Transcription

A transcription of Miles' solo on Victor Feldman's Joshua from the record Seven Steps to Heaven with George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.

Living Room Recording Comparisons

Here's a snippet of a trio recording I did in my living in a really low tech way: one mic on me, one on the tenor (Ben) and two mics on the drums (Dylan).  No isolation, no baffles, no overdubs, no ulterior motives.  What?  You can record that way?

Anyhoo, I made 2 clips, each one comparing what I did to several tenor/bass/drums trio recordings that I like.  Bonus points if you can guess the other recordings.

Here's the first one:

And here's the second:

Did I mention that all of the mics were either modded or built by me?

Another tune

On the Sounds page is another tune I wrote  which was recorded at the same session as this one.

Lincecum No Hitter and Mic Samples

On the Sounds page is a tune I wrote which I recorded using my mics.  The k-47 on flute and tenor, the K-7 on bass and the two tube mics on drums.  Nothing was amplified and there was no isolation, just acoustic instruments and the room.  Ben Herod on sax and flute, Dylan Stokes on drums.

Oh Yeah, this too.

Alan Felix Video

Special thanks to John Mount for shooting some video at Pierce Winery of the Alan Felix Quartet.  Check it out at the video page.

Saturday Transcription(s)

One tune, three trumpet solos 

(only 2 today, the 3rd one is on its way).  

Here are two trumpet greats: Chet Baker and Donald Byrd (Kenny Dorham's solo to follow) playing over one of my favorite ballads, "My Ideal".  Chet's is from 1954's Chet Baker Sings featuring Russ Freeman, James Bond and Larence Marable.  The second version is from Donald Byrd's 1967 album Slow Drag, featuring Sonny Red, Cedar Walton, Walter Booker and Billy Higgins (highly recommended).  As an aside, anything with Cedar Walton and Billy Higgins together is worth buying.  If Sam Jones is also on it, triply so.

DIY Tube Microphone Part 3

Next is drilling the enclosure and wiring up the PSU boards.

On the left is the power switch, below that is an LED to indicate power.  On the right top is the 5 pin XLR which goes to the mic and below it is the 3 pin XLR output to the preamp.  On the far right you can see the audio transformer.  I scored a couple of vintage Jensens on Ebay.

I put a mic on each side of the box with a separate power switch and light for each mic.

Front of PSU

Back of PSU

I also had to make some tube mic cables.  Since tube mics require their own power supply, a regular 3 pin XLR won't cut it.  These require 5 pin.  I made them out of star quad cable.  See this post about making cables.

 How do they sound?   At first, they didn't work, but I had some conversations with the good folks at the Yahoo mic builders group, (especially Ricardo) and I was able to diagnose the problem and fix it.  It had to do with the wiring of the tubes in the microphone.

After I got them working, they sounded great except for  some minor hum or buzzing, which was really annoying.  I solved that problem by shortening all of the wiring in the PSU, keeping the audio cables well separated from the AC lines and some general clean up.  Result:  zero noise, pure tube goodness.

I am going to use these to record drums, hoping to get some vintage RVG drum sounds.  I will post something when I have it.

Update: see Sounds page.  The drums were recorded using these mics.