First post for 2009, here are some video clips of exciting happenings at the recording studio that occurred in the last quarter of 2008. We spill the beans on gear and approach to the recording, equipment talk galore.

Trumpet Wah

Our first video features Wowee Anzanio, trumpet player of the band HIJA who’s music falls on the soul genre with a strong sense of funk. We’ve been recording HIJA’s debut CD since November 2008. We’re optimistic that their record will get picked up by a major label.

The track is called Nahulog and he wanted to run his trumpet through a guitar wah pedal. At first it kinda puzzled me that a trumpet player would want go through a guitar wah pedal, if my wah pedal history is correct, the wah wah was developed to help guitar players emulate the wah sound produced by trumpet players (using the mute). So I did a sample, re-amping (through a Radial JDX) his recorded trumpet solo out to the Crybaby Wah to the Fender Blues Junior – nice sound but it can start sounding like a guitar without much effort.

But I also learned that he wanted to control the wah pedal in real-time, while playing the trumpet. No sweat, I mounted a Shure Green Bullet dynamic mic (typically used with harmonicas) running it to the Wah Pedal then to the accordion input of the Ampeg J12R tube guitar amp. This way, Wowie played his trumpet to the green bullet mic and controlled the wah pedal in realtime. The amp was mic’d with a Royer 122 active ribbon and the room was mic’d with a Peluso 2247 tube condenser. The sound on the video is from the onboard mics of the Panasonic videocam.

Blues Harp Master

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Our second video features Ronnie Badilla, a master blues harp player laying down juke-ish harmonica licks for Dr. Crowley’s “Swallow My Pride” song.

We used the Shure Green Bullet plugged into the Ampeg Jet tube amp’s guitar input, treble rolled off, reverb off and bass dial at 11.

Ronnie is a fantastic blues harp player. I’ve always been interested in having him in the studio ever since I heard and saw him playing live. He’s got his own style, rhythmic and energetic blues harp licks, lighting fast to smooth and steady slow benders on diatonic blues harps.

We mic’d the amp with a Royer R122 ribbon mic and also adding a Peluso room mic just in case the tracks needs more ambient sounds. Ronnie’s harp ended up on 4 tracks in the upcoming Dr. Crowley debut CD – a rock n roll packed with blues, soul and a lot of raw power rock and rawl – coming in March 2009 under Rebolusyon Rekords.

We’re also excited that an international artist wrapped up his CD project for the Philippine market. Our lips are sealed and hands tied until he releases his CD. We respect the privacy and uphold the confidentiality of projects in our recording studio. In fact, we have implemented storage solutions from Glyph Technologies that enable clients to take home their sessions on Glyph discs, that way they are certain that NOBODY will have a chance to touch, see, peak or listen to their project. We rent out these disks and clear them out when the project is finished and session archives have been created.

The session info (videos, photos) we post to the public are with artists’ permission.