2nd Report: Mandara - Rowain (2019)

by Attila Tapolczai

Howdy,

I'd like to tell you a little bit more about my second big recording job this year. This young Augsburger band, Mandara published their second album. This one is a bit calmer, less impulsive than their previous 'Impuls' (what a surprise) LP but the story of 'Rowain' is very interesting. Rowain is the name of a stone that comes from Scotland. The owner of the stone has a magical relationship with it and he lent it to Mandara who simply let themselves inspire by the beautiful stone, that's how the bulk of the songs for this album were born. Improvisation inspired by Rowain.
It was also invited for the recording where I took some photos:

As usual we recorded Mandara all together, no overdubbing was done. This method works well with these guys and especially with this music where the atmosphere and the live dynamics are essential for a good result.

As for the microphone techniques, I tried to capture the whole room sound with a main pair of ORTF mic setup and I used stereo spot mics for each instruments. In fact I tried to record the flute with an AB stereo pair in the front and an extra single mic from the back. Later in the mixing phase I realized that one front and one back mics are enough, the two omni mics in the front captured too much room sound which we had enough anyway. So that might be a good advice for everyone who records flute: You can get a beautiful sound if you use one mic in the front (but not too close to the mouthpiece unless you want a very airy sound) and one in the back from above (you can see it on the second picture). As you can see I tried to separate the flute mics from the handpan with a blanket and I'm amazed every time I do this how effective this can be. :-)
I recorded the hang with a simple AB omni stereo pair (Rode NT55), the guitar too with a stereo setup as well as the fiddle. But with the fiddle I actually prefer a different setup, I'll tell you about this in another article.
Anyway, we needed two days for the recording in this lovely room which we were lucky to have had at our disposal.
I won't talk about the mixing and the mastering process now but if you have any questions I'll gladly answer.

You can listen to the songs and can purchase Mandara's albums from their bandcamp site:


But it's woth to have a look at their new website too:

https://www.mandara.org

New Home Recording Report One - Finding Excuses.

by Attila Tapolczai

2019.

This year began for me with the plan that I would focus more on the communication with my clients.
I mean besides direct communication with clients I'm working with, also the distant communication with my other, past and future clients.

This blog should be a part of this plan.

Now it's July and I haven't written a single word yet.

I have a very good excuse though. I've been working on many different projects in this first half of the year. I've been recording, mixing, mastering and playing with different bands. Now I have some time to report you about these activities and to share with you some of my future plans.



 Angie Seamróg - Le Cairde - Traditional Folk Ballads

   The year has started with the recording of a new project with a singer who actually had long planned to make an own CD. She's Angie Seamróg who has a beautiful voice and a deep love for Irish and Gaelic Folk music. As it happened at that time I'd also been planning to make a record with her. We first met on one of our Irish folk gigs with my band in Augsburg where after a short conversation she sang a song with us on the stage. Since then we'd been to several Irish sessions and realized that our music just works together. At the end of 2018 after I finished a very important project, our 10th album with Attila & Friends, I had some more time to jump into another project. That's how I asked Angie if she would like to record an album using my audio engineering skills.

We found great musicians for this project. Actually Augsburg and the region has quite a blooming musical life. We asked Pia Greenaway, a professional and flute player and her whole band 'Mandara' to join. Thus we had an enthusiastic bodhrán player Andreas Koller and a good folk fiddler who's an old friend and music colleague of mine, Hauke Iven Marquard. We asked another good friend and longtime music partner, Johanna Regenbogen to join us. Then we won Martin Leopold, an Uileann pipe and flute player for the Le Cairde project. I played the acoustic guitar, the backing vocals and the bass myself and of course Angie was the lead singer. The concept of the album was clear for me from the beginning. I met Angie as someone who sings folk ballads so this album should be based on folk ballads. Angie found a name for the project: Le Cairde (among friends) - Traditional Folk Ballads.

We were then busy for the next few months with recording, mixing and mastering. We recorded most of the tracks with overdubbing as it would have been very difficult to effectively organize a few recording sessions with all these musicians who have several different jobs. And honestly, I like to work with overdub, that's how I recorded most of my albums since 1996. Anyway, the recording was fun, it was really easy to work with all these guys. We used different locations for mostly logistical reasons but this time I found it less of a challenge to blend the tracks together than I did for some previous albums. It seems I've learned in the last few years how to work effectively with different layers of reverb plugins (This might...must be a topic for a future blog. Some time...). I did the final steps at the end of March and the album was right in time finished for the album launch gig on the 6th of April. This gig was so successful that we had to repeat it about a month later. We're all looking forward to what the future of this project might be.
  I have very few and rather bad photos from the recording process which I would like to share with you now anyway. These were made in Neruda Kulturcafé, a holy place where art thrives in Augsburg.

That was one of the big projects for this year and the one we all could be proud of. For the official online release we still have to wait but I posted 2 songs on SoundCloud. Enjoy and see you next time (until I figure out my next excuse for not writing all this time)! ;-)

https://soundcloud.com/newhomerecording/health-to-the-company

https://soundcloud.com/newhomerecording/angie-seamrog-black-is-the-colour