Recording at Cattail Music Studio

We record direct to a dedicated hard drive using a ProTools interface and software. On the road for the sessions with Sam Broussard in Lafayette, Louisiana, I flew down with a recording studio in a small gym bag: an M-Box interface, a separate hard drive, and my trusty laptop. (We’re Mac people. We don’t do Windows.)

Microphones

For Thunder’s Mouth, we settled on three microphones:

AudioTechnica 4051, a pencil condenser that is transparent and clean. We used it as the neck joint acoustic guitar mic. This is the mic I travel with when I do my own live sound.

AudioTechnica 4033, a big-bodied condenser that is well suited to vocals and the body of the acoustic and the gourd banjo.

Neumann TLM 104, a beautiful addition to the studio this is a warm and clear mic that can function almost anywhere: vocals, body mic for the guitars, feet....

Baffles

I built two light (and cheap) three-panel baffles to limit the sound of the room that was bouncing back into the mics, especially noticeable on the vocals.

One inch foam insulating panels with egg-shell foam rubber glued to it, hinged with a sufficient amount of duct tape worked just fine.

I attached D-rings to each panel so they could be hung. Eventually, I’ve promised myself to get some rip-stop nylon or something to make them a bit more permanent, but you know, it hasn’t happened yet.

I put hooks in the ceiling and created a standing vocal ‘booth’ by hanging them and could set them around an instrumental set up on the floor.