SnowGhost Music

These United States were the first artists that did a show before doing anything in the studio. The show was on a Sunday night and the band had to be in Minneapolis by Tuesday evening. They had an eighteen hour drive ahead of them. Being that this was their first time in Montana, they didn’t know much about the scene and hadn’t planned for a full SnowGhost Session. We had a good breakfast at Mama Blanca’s in town and headed up to the studio to make some music. When they got to the studio, they realized that they may have made a mistake planning such a short session. In any event, we took an inventory of the guitars and discussed what we could get done in a few hours. Funny thing was that the time passed so quickly and before we knew it, Jesse and Tom had been in the studio all day and would have to drive through the night.

Jesse had four songs that he wanted to go through with Tom on pedal steel, but when he discovered my baritone acoustic guitar he and Tom thought that they might give the songs some rearranging. Because the baritone guitar was tuned a couple of keys lower than a regular guitar, they would have to work the tunes a bit. But the challenge it presented actually revived the tunes.

Jesse and Tom wanted to track the basics live because we were fairly short on time. So we tracked all of the songs in a couple of live type passes of the songs and picked the best. On all of the live passes, it was Jesse playing baritone guitar and singing, while Tom played electric guitar, piano, or pedal steel. Because we were short on time we stuck with a simple setup; Versatile mics like U87s, 451s, SM57s, 421s, and 414s through our SSL mic pres, EQs, and compressors.

They wanted everything live so there would be a certain living room swagger to it. In engineer speak, there was bleed in every mic. This seemed like Jesse’s intentional counter to the overproduction in modern recordings. He also wanted to keep the reverb fairly low in the mix to maintain the integrity of the small room recordings. I was all for it; it’s not that often that artists just want me to record them as is, without the studio trickery. For a day, we were transported to the porch of an Appalacian Mountain home, equipped with creaky rocking chairs and hound dogs running loose.

The first track that we tackled was “Pleasure and Pain”, a retrospective song about not getting screwed twice. Because of the nature of the song and the great imagery of the lyrics, I knew that we wanted to put the voice out front, full range and somewhat dry, with a touch of tape delay. He sang into our Neumann M150, known for it’s very thick and rich sound. This would smooth out the nasal character to his voice.

We selected a guitar with a mellow full-bodied nature, our Redgate nylon string. Although it can be a softer sounding guitar, it handled some heavier strumming with ease, giving a more edgy element to the choruses of the song. The guitar was kept totally dry, but lower in the mix, as there was some bleed into the vocal mic, contributing to the overall ambience of the guitar. I miked the guitar with a single 451, 3 inches off of the face of the guitar where the neck meets the body.

While Jesse lamented, Tom followed suit, filling in the space with meanderings on the Wurlitzer. Again we didn’t want to go too hi-fi, so we just placed an SM57 on one of the speakers.

For the percussion I set up the U87s as a spaced pair, about 20 feet apart. I had Jesse and Tom grab anything they could in one trip to the percussion treasure chest. They set all of the rattles, shakers, and cymbals on the floor, ready for the moment’s inspiration. Over multiple takes they moved around the room to change the placement of the sounds in the soundstage naturally. The only rule was that they maintain a 10 to 20ft distance from the mics, to keep the percussion back in the mix.

In “Then Says Cain”, Jesse wanted the edgy and dark quality of the song to shine through. He got his hands on the baritone acoustic because it sounded downright dirty. He had to play it on the light side, and I cranked up the gain, so that the low end would be coherent. It is strung so low that it has to be played lightly, or you end up with a thin sound sound because the strings overload.

We put Tom on electric guitar, his beautiful red hollow-body. As for an amp, he liked the swampiness that the Carr Slant V6 possessed. He came up with great melodic lines, on the bluesy side, and we tuned the amp with a touch of grit. The amp stayed in the isolation booth so that it wouldn’t interfere with the quiet vocals and guitar part. We put the standard SM57 slightly off of the center of the 15-inch speaker, and got a nice warm sound. To get at the pluckiness of his part, we put a 414 on the f-hole and blended it back in with the amp. Listen to some of the volume swells and you can hear where the mic on the guitar peeks through.

To finish it off we added some percussion, in the same vain of the first song. Jesse and Tom wanted to throw in some more traditional drums too: a floor tom, snare, hi-hat, and a crash. Because neither of them were real drummers, we figured that rather than trying to make the drum part into something it was not, we would preserve the sloppy quality, and drown it in reverb, then we added heavy compression with 1176s to make them pump.

I had a listen to “When You’re Traveling at the Speed of Light” before setting up and thought that it relayed a really expansive image. Jesse performed this one on the baritone, ebbing and flowing so well that the song would lend itself nicely to a minimal and ambient background. Tom read my mind and laid down some smooth Nashville pedal steel bends. It would also get a dose of the hypnotic through our EchoPlate.

I then suggested some grand piano with the pedal down to accompany the gorgeous pedal steel part that Tom had put down. Tom told me that he had been messing around with a melodic line on the piano and would like to try it out. I set up the pair of U87s inside the Steinway about 8 inches off of the strings, with stereo left covering the low, and stereo right on the mid to high. They were in the ORTF configuration where they are about 2 feet apart, 110 degrees away from each other. I also set up a spaced pair of 414s at about 10 ft from the piano to get the lush room sound. The result was beautiful tinkling of the keys that sustained for days.

“Diving Boards Pointing at the Sky” had a similar feel to “Traveling” and got the same treatment with Jesse performing vocals and guitar live, while Tom improvised on the pedal steel. The difference was that it needed a softer and more yearning sound. Jesse and I decided that this would be another job for the Redgate nylon string. Again the Redgate shined, having the subtlety of a rain drop during the verses, yet driving the choruses with its aggressive strumming characteristics. Because this song had some more room, I stereo-miked the guitar with two 451s, one at the butt of the guitar and the other at the neck, both at about 3-4 inches away.

We went with the same miking setup on the pedal steel, but decided to use the onboard tube reverb, as it had a different lushness from the plate reverb. It was much smaller sounding, with an exaggerated decay that worked nicely to compliment the dry vocals and nylon string guitar.

As I said before, Jesse and Tom wanted this to be a very down-home representation of their live show. So the mixing process was very simple with very little bus compression, using the Manley Vari-Mu with a soft attack and release. Other than that, what you hear is what you get with this session.