Grammy Winner Guzauski Talks Recording Gear for Daft Punk

Mixing

• Was not hard but a long process because did it all on an analog console, spent whole summer mixing,

His experience with Daft Punk recording “Random Access Memories”

He talks about how they wanted to go real natural on the acoustic recordings.  He wanted to avoid too much filtering and was wanting to get a warm sound with minimum EQ.  A 70s sound.  He tried to achieve the sound he wanted in the begining by using different mics and mic placements. He wanted try to get the recorded sound so it would sound real close to how it would sound when it was done without processing.

Grammy winner Mick mentioned how this project was one of the funnest he has done.  He felt like he had the Vintage Kings entire show room in the studio.  Sounds like a blast!

Grammy Winner Mick Guzauski’s tips for Home Studio Owners

• Have a few varied types of microphones
  • Some good small and large diphram condesers
  • Some dynamics
• Have some preamps
  • couple transformerless preamps with fast electronics for thing that you want to be real accurate
  • Some transformer preamps (fat in the low end)
• Most Important
  • Instruments are sounding good
  • Mics in good postition
    • Not picking up leakage from other mics
    • Not to short of distance from one mic to the other so there are no phase problems
    • Watch out for comb filter from phase problems
    • Use the cardioid pattern to help reduce phase problems

How he got Massive Low End but Clarity on the Rest of the Mix

• Make sure there isn’t any interference from other instruments going close to the fundamental of the low end
• Thin out alot of the other instruments
• Make sure everything is nicely in tune so there are no beat frequencies
• Carving out frequencies so there are not conflicts in one frequency range
  • gentle high pass filters on guitar an vocals to keep it out of the range of the bass and kick
• Make sure that some of the things that resonate like toms and stuff were edited and the ring was taken out.  This is one trick he uses on the toms in drum fills
  • The mics on the toms pick up a lot of ringing when the snare, kick and cymbals are hit.  This following procedure lowers the ringing down -10db throughout the song except when the toms are hit in the song or the drummer uses them in a fill.  Then they are at the full 0DB volume.
    1.  He would take his tom tracks and turn their audio clip gain down -10 db or so.   (Clip being the audio blob inside the track. Usually in DAWs, you can change the gain of the audio clip without chaining track volume level on the mixer. The tracks slider level on the mixer would still be at 0DB, but the audio clip (audio blob) itself would be -10DB).
    2. He now slices the audio clips (audio blob inside the track) around the tom fills. He raises those sliced fills back up to 0DB.   So let’s say there is a fill 1 measure long on measure 50. He slices the audio clip (audio blob) right before the fill (around the end of measure 49) and after the fill around measure 51 or 52.
    3. He now raises that sliced fill back up to 0DB.
    4. He then crossfades these fills so it doesn’t jump from -10DB to 0DB and vice versa.
  • He may use this technique on each individual tom hit or sometimes he may use it around the whole fill. It’s hard to tell for sure from this interview and he probably does both depending on how it sounds. If it was a fast fill, he may just slice around the whole fill instead of each tom hit.

• Didn’t go for a lot of volume and didn’t compress to much.
  • The peaks remained peaks not crunched down.
  • Gentle compression a couple DB 4 at most
  • Not extremely fast attack on compression so that it lets some transients through
• Good arrangements
• Mix to keep everything articulate

How does the Grammy winner know when the mix is done

• Listen to it a couple times without cringing

His Sercret Weapons

• Fab Filter Pro MB multiband compressor
• Valhalla Plate $50 from Valhalla DSP
  • never heard a assimilation as close to a plate as this
  • sounds so close to an emt 140

How does he share the mix with clients

• We Transfer
• Nicecast
• Skype

Mics and Preamps He uses for Vocals

• Listen to singer
• Pic a couple mics thinks would work well and try them
• Run through Neve class A preamp in the 1073
• GML preamp sometimes for crystal clearness
• Mics
  • Neumann U 67 and Neumann U 47
  • Sony c800G
  • AKG c12
• A Universal Audio LA 2A compressor in the chain.  I couldn’t find one to show but here is a Teletronix LA-2A