Wednesday - April 13th, 2022. The day started off at The Terrarium Recording Studio at 8am for a 9am recording day start recording Angie Erickson's 15-song piano album, “Clear Beyond.” The session was both a video and audio recording project. Tony Morrow of ToMorrow's Media was handling the videography, while Daring Sound handled the audio recording. Prior to my arrival, the studio had their piano tuner work to get the instrument to pitch in an efficient manner.
Going into the session I acquired a list of microphones that I felt would help best capture the realism out of the studio's Yamaha piano the best. For the brightness of attack, the studio's AKG C12 mic was used, while their Neumann U87 ai pair was at the end of the piano opposite of Angie for additional close capture and intimate stereo effects. Behind Angie I implemented a pair of the studio's Coles 4038 ribbon mics to help the listener best realize the depth of space from the low end from the piano. Finally, the overall picture of the room was spearheaded by my Telefunken ELA M 260 Tri-Mono System utilizing omnidirectional diaphragms on the amplifiers.
The Decca Tree mics were fed into the studio's API 212's for ease of gain staging - straightforward voicing and clean gain for the pencil mics. The Coles 4038's were fed into Great River preamps, which I highly recommend these for any ribbon mic for impedance matching and for supplying ample gain to ribbon mics in general. Finally, the studio's C12 and the U87 ai pair were fed into the studio's Neve VR48 console.
Upon Angie's arrival, we worked through mic placement, gobo placement to manage natural lighting for the video, and deciding upon which rug to use underneath the piano. Angie had brought her decorative rug in, but we ended up with the studio's rug for decorative purposes and to help control the low end a little bit.
From there, we began the recording sessions. All compositions were recorded into ProTools for ease of processing, mixing, and mastering. The idea was that Angie was to just be in the moment, play, and Tony would be free to do his thing - to record video of the music being performed. We would compile takes of the songs performed so that we can pull the best and stay true to Angie's composition and even allow for artistry to be there.
The 8-hour session went very smoothly, with us breaking for lunch at noon and Angie treating us to food, while August Ogren, the house engineer, provided coffee and tea. Following break, we continued on with recording and called the recording session done around 6pm. In that space recording flowed smoothly. In total, August Ogren and I guesstimated that about a half a million dollars worth of gear was used for that recording session. The total recording session was 8 hours long, with editing and mixing totaling about 96 hours. Work was taken care of the tracks to meet Angie Erickson's artistry, with her and I meeting for sessions to monitor through the work, and then a finalization monitoring session by myself was made at the Terrarium Recording Studio in both A and B studios. Jacques Wait, the Terrarium Recording Studio's mastering engineer, handled the final masters that are used for streaming at 44.1kHz/16-bits and in video at 48kHz/24-bits. The 96kHz/32-bit pre-master files are archived with Daring Sound on behalf on Angie Erickson. Special thanks to Jason Orris, August Ogren, Terrarium Recording Studio, and Jacques Wait for the ease of coordination with the booking and the moving parts of this project.
Angie Erickson's 2022 release of “Clear Beyond” in both audio and music videos can be found at https://angieericksonmusic.com .