No safe bets video

Here’s a new live video of a track from my fourth album “The Call” that will be out on the 2nd of December and is already up on iTunes and Amazon for pre-order. To read more about the song you can check the actual blog post on “No Safe Bets” HERE.

People have been interested on how I record my songs, so I thought I’ll walk you through how I recorded the sound for this video. I will do a more detailed blog post on my studio process in the near future. So let me get bit geeky techie here for a little bit 😉

The vocal on this track is recorded with my trusty live microphone Shure Beta 57. I know it would be tempting to go for the large diaphragm condenser mic here, but if your room is not acoustically pleasing or has some background noise (I live in the middle of Dublin city centre, so I have always some noise) the dynamic microphone will pick your vocal nicely but ignore most of the background noise. On my albums I have used the AKG Perception 220 on vocals, which is a fantastic microphone and from what I tried, the best within and a quite bit above its price range, but I am actually currently looking into purchasing a Shure sm7 for the same benefits of great vocal quality and isolation of the background noise and room acoustics.

As to the guitar (I could talk about this subject for days 😀 ) I took two signals. I used the AKG Perception 220 for the guitar not in my usual choice, which is in and around the 12th fret and where the neck meets the body, but this time I placed it near the bridge. I also took a direct line from the L.R. Baggs Element pickup which is an under saddle pickup. These can be bit harsh on the high frequencies, so I have a blend of pretty close 50/50 between the mic and the pickup, but I cut the high end on the pickup (around and above 5kHz) and use the microphone for that, and as the AKG picks up a lot of that city rumble, I usually cut the bottom end from the microphone around 100hz and compensate with the pickup, which by the way has a lovely bottom end 😉
I find this give’s me a nice balanced signal that also reproduces my Journey Instruments OF420 very realistically.

OK, so that’s the geeky bit done with. At the end of the day this all comes down to the music, so I hope you enjoy the video, the song and as always share it with the world 🙂

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get three of his free songs go HERE and click Download