As we continue to brush the dust from our song vault, we’re releasing another song from the live sessions recorded by Conduit. As with the song ‘Blinders’ released in a previous post, this song was on the album ‘Superior Olive’ (which, by the way, is still out there for purchase or your listening enjoyment). This was recorded a little different than our other live versions. That means we set up and play in a live format while using some studio tricks to gain separation in sound for a better recording with less bleed through. For this song we recorded live but heard the mix in headphones. Some of the songs we recorded had the amps in room but set up for separation. This time as we had no audience in, the amps were placed in separate rooms and the bass did not go in the PA system, only direct to the mixing board. The vocals were recorded in the same room but we used an old trick that I first heard about from The Grateful Dead’s shows with their ‘Wall Of Sound’ PA setup. The singer has two mics in front of them, stacked on top of each other. We used two identical mics. You reverse the phase on one of the mics going in to the mixing board. The vocalist only sings in to one of the microphones and the second mic is low enough that it doesn’t pick up the vocals. We’ve discussed phase cancellations in mics before (there is a video discussing this on our YouTube channel). Two mics out of phase will cancel each other out, in this case the drums are picked up by both mics so the in room drum sound is cancelled. Since the vocals only go in to one mic, they don’t experience the phase cancellation and will go cleanly in to the mixing board. I always wanted to try this and it’s a little tricky getting it right, but it worked out well in this case.
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