The Freedonian Municipal Band- EP Recording

In November, we began recording The Freedonian Municipal Band‘s EP – “The Freedonian Municipal EP.” The band came to us with the idea of recording an EP for release as a free download, which is always fun for fans.

The band is an 8-piece group, with a horn section, keys, drums, bass, guitar, a lead vocalist, plus the occasional guest singer.

They wanted everything tracked live- no overdubs. While this can sometimes be tough with a large band (for isolation purposes), having the benefit of multiple tracking rooms at Mystery Street made it breeze and practically everyone in the band had direct line of sight with everyone else. They could all hear each other through their headphone mixes.

We set up the the drummer, keyboard player, and bass player in Studio A. The keys and bass went direct, so the only sound source were the drums in A.

In Studio B, we had the horn section (two saxes and a French horn). Although we had each horn play into it’s own microphone (Sennheiser 421), we treated the horns as one sound source. In the mix we primarily uses the stereo pair of room mics (AKG 414s), while bringing in the individual mics for detail during solo/lead parts.

We put the vocalist, Brian Ganey, and his guitar in the isolation booth. His amp went into the bathroom next to the booth! While it wasn’t the most ideal place to put an amp, it really worked well! The reflections in the bathroom made for a unique tone on the guitar, plus a little of the amp bled into the vocal mic (Neumann U87), which added another nice dimension to the instrument. On one track, the guest vocalist, Keeley Bee, also sang from the booth while Ganey jammed on the guitar. This ended up being the one track that we did some overdubs with because adding the extra set of headphones into the small room made the click track bleed a little too much into the vocal track on this delicate song.  I think the track turned out absolutely great.

The final track on the EP “Twilight Zone” was done live in a single take. Clocking in at about 10 minutes long, it was really a treat to see the band pull it off. After we mixed the song, Ganey and I bounced the track back and forth between the studio and his home set up and did some fun production in the outro of the song.

All in all, we spent little over 6 hours recording this album and mixing time was about the same. In addition to recording and mixing, the EP was also mastered at Mystery Street by lead engineer, Joe Tessone.

 

 

The album is available for free download on at https://thefreedonianmunicipalband.bandcamp.com/album/the-freedonian-municipal-ep.

Check out The Freedonian Municipal Band on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/FreedonianMunicipalBand

Listen to the songs here: