PHOTO BY CHRIS TURPIN
Regular
readers may recall that a little while ago I decided to have a crack at recording a demo of fingerstyle acoustic guitar pieces I’d written, then ended up being talked into making a proper album. My mentor and producer in all this was the hugely talented Chris Turpin of the band Ida Mae, whose new album, ThunderAboveYou, is an impeccably performed and produced tourdeforce. So his studio was a more-thandecent place to record my own ramblings on six strings – but, just as importantly, like the proper producer he is, Chris persuaded me to take them seriously as art and bend all my efforts to making an honest-to-god decent record. When we’d first met up, Chris and I had talked about folk guitar records we both admired from the 60s and we developed a loose plan to try to capture some of the sound of that era on my album. To emulate many of the records of that time, we thought we’d try to capture the songs I’d written in one or two takes. We would aim for character, mood and feel, not glistening perfection.
Accordingly, when I arrived, Chris had set up a recording rig for acoustic guitar that reminded me of the goosenecked cluster of mics you’d see around aUS president in the 60s. He explained that he’d set up a mixture of original vintage mics and high-end modern replicas of rarer pieces. Arrayed before us, he explained, was a Beyerdynamic M 160, an RCA 77-DX, a vintage ElectroVoice 635A and a valve-powered Flea 47, which he called “an incredible U 47 clone”. The sound of these mics, he explained, would be sharply contrasting – some offering a relatively high-fidelity sound, others a more coloured voice that evoked vintage Dylan recordings and folky, smoky English acoustic albums from John Renbourn.