Monthly Archives: January 2014

We love when bands come through our doors, and we love when bands come from far away lands to record with us, so we were super excited getting to record and produce Korean metal band Erlang Kovata’s debut album.

It was an epic week long recording session. We started off the first night recording Mike on drums and he killed it. The guy has the chops of a drumline general. Double-kicks were blazing, and I think he went through the snare all the way back to Korea. I think we had something like 12 microphones on him, we used it all from Shure to AKG to Neumann to Rode.

Day two and three we dealt with editing drums and getting Malik to lay down his super deep bass. Literally, it was tuned lower than I knew a bass could go. We decided to go with recording it direct input through the Joe Meek VC1Q preamp channel strip and reamp it later.

Day four and Five brought us to J.P. on his axe and crazy pedal board rig. With the guitar, our initial thought was also to go direct input so we could edit and then apply effects, but we decided to get proper old school metal with it, so JP set up his insane pedalboard chain and went through the Marshal guitar stack. We miked it with a Shure Sm57 and a Sterling ST31 for maximum metal, and I was happy we did. After we were all done tracking the instruments it was time to record the musical screaming. Not only did the whole band lend their vocal talents to the production of this record, but they even let us (Roman and Jay) scream some backup vocals on the record, definitely a first for us! Our favorite vocal experience of the album was definitely the track ‘Troll’ which I can’t wait for you guys to hear, it’s good fun mythical metal.

The last few days of having the band in town were spent getting the mixes ready to a place where we could work even after they left. It was a great experience working with Erlang for that fateful week, and can’t wait to finish mixing this album for them!

One of the coolest things about being an NYC recording studio is that we get to work with some of the best and most international musicians and composers. In this case, we were very lucky to have our good friend and amazing composer (seriously, his music is outrageously beautiful and heavily performed) Roman Hurko in the recording studio.

We have done a lot of work for Roman over the years, mostly on his sheet music, engraving, transcribing, printing, but this time Roman came in with his wife Carmen to record a piece he had written as a birthday present for his mother.

The track was for piano, baritone, and alto. We miked up the piano using an AKG C414 and a Sterling ST31 and a pair of Rode NT1As and got a wonderful stereo image of Roman performing the piano accompaniment. Then once we had that nicely edited we recorded Roman and Carmen singing together, but in isolation (Roman was in the vocal booth, and Carmen was in the live room). We had them sing the baritone and alto lines about 8 times so we could layer them to form a section. Later in the week, we had a great session with them to finalize the mix and master of the track before Roman and Carmen sent it off to our video friends over at Black Dot Creative to make a really neat cosmic collage. We love getting to record classical music, and this was a wonderful song that we were glad to be a part!