Did my first vocal recording with Studio One 2.0 this week. Setup was an AKG 414 microphone with a Vicoustic microphone isolator to PreSonus Studio Channel, then to a StudioLive 16.4.2 mixer and to Studio One via FireWire. I know the 414 isn’t normally used as a vocal mic, but I like its clarity and pureness of sound. It’s very unforgiving though, so I like to use it with a tube preamp to warm it up a little and smooth out any harshness. The Studio Channel works great for that – just roll up the tube driver to about halfway and it suddenly get a lot more rock & role.
The piece was a cover version of the Joy Division / New Order song In a Lonely Place that an Australian band asked me to sing on. I’ve got a fairly deep baritone voice that very much suits that kind of music, so I’ve been getting lots of requests like this recently. The band sent me the original multitracks as stems (since they hadn’t switched to Studio One when they recorded it – they have now), and I imported them into S1 2.0 and recorded the vocals. Even though it was still a fairly early beta version, it worked flawlessly throughout the session. Sounded great too, especially when I used one of the Plate presets we’ve been working on for the OpenAir reverb plugin.
Once I had enough takes that I was happy with, it was easy to export the stems using the Export Stems (what else?) feature in S1 – so much easier than the way we used to have to do it back in the old days! Then just dropped them into Dropbox and mailed the band. Hey presto, one collaboration with a band the other side of the world. Am looking forward to hearing what they do with it, but I think I might do a mix myself in S1. Looking forward to trying out the new comping feature which should be perfect for this.