The artist I booked into the studio for my music production assignment was Katee Kross, Spotify link here:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0yefcJjUpwm2BOKPVCZpWZ
They have four albums up on Spotify, and sometimes perform with just Katee & Ross, and sometimes with a full backing band. Their genre of music is Americana/Country, and they have performed at numerous country music festivals and won awards for their music.
I was pleasantly surprised when they said they wanted to cover an ABBA song in the studio with me. I saw this as an opportunity to be creative in trying to blend their usual genre of Americana/Country music, with the one genre of music that balloons fear the most: Pop.
I sent them a questionnaire via Google Drive, and had them describe their instrumentation. The entire questionnaire was a bit long to include here, so I’ll summarize. Katee was playing acoustic rhythm guitar and singing lead, while Ross had an electric guitar part. I asked if they had wanted to record multiple vocal tracks, as in the original ABBA tune “Does Your Mother Know,” and they said no.
They sent me a video of them performing this cover, which looks like it was recorded on a cell phone:
https://www.facebook.com/100071642874757/videos/700292347654700
So I took a look at the video and thought:
The tempo is a little bit slower than the original, maybe 5 bpm. So in the studio I’ll ask them if they want to stick with that, or use the same tempo as ABBA.
This assignment for SAE requires more parts, so I’ll suggest that I perform drums & bass, and send two mixes back to the artists; one with my parts and one without.
The original doesn’t have acoustic guitar, but does have keyboard. They’re both playing the same part rhythmically, so perhaps it’s best to have the acoustic guitar replace the keyboard altogether. Which would then shift the genre of this tune closer to Americana from Pop, which may be a good thing.
The questionnaire also served as a place for me to give them information about the session; when to meet me, Covid-19 restrictions, equipment that would be available, what equipment they would need to provide, and SAE’s address.
Before the recording session, I printed off the song lyrics, the arrangement with each part’s measure count and when each instrument enters, and a lengthy set of notes from my critical listening of the ABBA song. Here are those notes:
“Bass & Synth sound panned center. Drums don’t sound very wide. Hi-hat sounds centered. It sounds like a lot of the stereo width is coming from guitar & keyboard. Hearing more of the main guitar riff on the right. Keyboard sounds very wide, like they recorded a piano with mid/side, but I’m not certain, and not finding any resources on it online. The overdubbed additional backing vocals are panned hard right.”
Noting the wide stereo width of the keyboard part, I decided to record the acoustic rhythm guitar with a stereo XY cardioid setup, one foot away from the 12th fret and pointing left & right. This is a technique I have used many times before and found it to have a great sound. I also set up a condenser mic about 1.5 meters away for more ambiance, though I didn’t anticipate actually using it (and didn’t). I planned to record this rhythm part first with a click track (and did).
The second part to record was the electric guitar, which was set up with an SM57 close to the cone, and a Rode NT-2 about 1.5 meters away for depth.
And last but not least came vocals, after a shootout between an SM58, AKGP420, and the Rode NT-2.
I recorded the drums and bass a week later, so this is out of chronological order, but while I’m talking about pre-production planning I’ll address it. I found this article on recording drums for ABBA:
In which the engineer Michael Tretow says (and I’m paraphrasing): Cymbals are trash. He then proceeds to say that he would put the overhead microphones underneath the cymbals to essentially avoid recording them. He also said he wouldn’t use a hihat mic. However, Does Your Mother Know doesn’t have any cymbals or toms; It’s just kick, hihat, and snare. So my plan was to keep the overheads up above in AB format, just to catch the hihat and some depth. I also listened to the track and found that the snare and kick are very punchy, so I put a mic’ed them both up front and back, which has worked for me in the past to get a punchy sound. Specifically, an SM57 on the front of the kick drum, pointing towards the beater, but off to the side like one would do (and I did do) on the top of the snare. I had seen this technique in some YouTube video years ago, and I don’t recall which one.
Playing the bass part myself, I was forced to work with what was available to me, which was my Yamaha 4-string and the Behringer BDI21, a tone-shaping DI with drive. I played the ABBA tune on Spotify repeatedly while setting the knobs until I found the closest match by ear.
Next-up, recording!
Paul Busch Audio Productions 