tita hutchison

Oct

2016

Recording the Perfect Track w/Tim Pedersen

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of Tim Pedersen joining me on the Recording Ninja Workshop Live Broadcast. Tim has been one of my musical mentors since I moved to LA. Recently I had the opportunity to work with him on mixing and a little re-recording on an EP for another great friend of mine Tita Hutchison.

We covered a lot of great info about how we recorded the drums AFTER we had a mix finished. This video is a 10 minute excerpt from that broadcast.

Drums are usually the first instrument to be tracked…and usually quite quickly. Then all the other instruments get to take their time building their parts and sounds on top of the drum tracks.

Every once in a while that process gets flipped around and the drums go on last.

That’s exactly what happened for Tita Hutchison’s song “Frost” off of her debut EP “Hello Love“.

We were already deep in the mixing process when we decided that “Frost” needed drums. The song just didn’t feel quite finished and lacked some movement in it’s current arrangement. Since our mix was pretty much done it allowed up to really take some time designing a drum sound that would help move the song along.

Tim and I spent a total of about 12 days mixing (all in a row!) and took an entire day to track just drums. It was a really fantastic time. Tim had the idea of giving the drums an old school, vintage vibe. Which is exactly what the song needed.

After spending most of the day experimenting with sounds, mic placement, eq, and compression, we landed on something that we were really proud of. It’s a sound that we really felt fit the song and helped move it along.

Anyway enough of me talking about it. Enjoy this excerpt from our Recording Ninja Workshop Live Broadcast.

Happy recording!
Charlie

Enjoy some photos!

Dec

2014

Tita Hutchison Releases “Hello Love”

I was fortunate to work with one of my dearest friends, Tita Hutchison, on her debut EP “Hello Love”. Throughout the years we’ve worked on many different projects and shared the stage many, many times but this project is the most special to me and I was extremely honored when she asked me to mix “Hello Love”. What I didn’t know then was that it would be so much more than just mixing….

“Hello Love” Available On iTunes

I got to spend about a week and a half mixing, arranging, recording, and re-recording with another one of my best friends Tim Pedersen. We had a blast and did a LOT of experimenting. On two songs we tracked drums using a gorgeous ’67 Rogers drum kit with a 20″ kick, 12″ rack tom, 14″ floor tom, and a 14″ Yamaha Anton Fig snare. Tim let me experiment with some very unconventional micing techniques too. The goal was to capture a sound that fit the emotion of the song with tons of vibe.

Here’s one of the unique setups:

On the kick we used an SM57. There was no hole in the kick and the 57 gave us a nice punch. We used a pillow against the outside head to make the note nice and short. An Audio-Technica AT4080 ribbon mic as a mono overhead placed above the floor tom, a Shure S55 placed between the rack tom and hi-hat, facing the snare and angled slightly down, and an MXL Cube for a mono room mic. All I can say is WOW! What a cool sound. Tim didn’t use any crashes. He used two rides instead; a Paiste Formula 602 and a Paiste Dark Energy Mark I along with 15″ Paiste Formula 602 hi-hats.

We re-tracked Tita’s vocals on one song too. She is such a fantastic singer and super easy to work with in the studio. We used an Audio-Technica 4060 tube mic going into an Overstayer VCA compressor and GAP Pre73 DLX mic pre. It sounded simply amazing. Of course when you have a great singer recording is easy! 🙂

Tim and I took quite a few chances during the mixing process too. I prefer mixing mostly analog so we had a pretty old school process. We used our hands for automation, we panned things in ways that modern music wouldn’t allow, and we treated mixes likes takes. Doing multiple passes until we got a good one. The entire process was very musically satisfying. I’m very proud of our work and I hope you all enjoy it too.

Tita put a fantastic cast of characters together for “Hello Love”. Michael Thompson on Guitar, Leland Sklar on Bass, Tim Pedersen on Drums (and producing!), Christian Klokovits on Piano, Lao Tizer on Piano, Justin Apergis on Bass, Travis Newlon on Guitar, Tim Mcintyre on Drums, Sahara Thompson on additional backing vocals, Zach Thompson on percussion

I would like to say thank you to Tita and Tim for the opportunity to work with them on “Hello Love“. I’m really proud of this EP!

Charlie

More info about Tita and links to purchase “Hello Love”.

www.TitaHutchison.com
Tita’s Facebook page
“Hello Love” on CD Baby
“Hello Love” on iTunes

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