Our very own Ben blogs a little about what went into recording Laura Boyle for the Folkroom anthology..

A lot went on behind the scenes of Anthology One. When we first discussed the project: to get as many of our favourite acts from the past year at The Folkroom together on an album, four of the acts already had decent recordings they were able to provide for us, another four had recordings made throughout the preceding few months by me via ben’s room, whilst three more needed recording from scratch. All of this needed coordination, mastering and ordering in a very short space of time.

Whilst explaining how each track was recorded might be a relatively lengthy (and dull!) exercise, the purpose of this post is just to describe a typical recording session for the album, using Laura Boyle’s opening track as an example.

Laura didn’t have anything recorded properly that we could use, so she came over to record something a bit better. We started with a guide track, recorded with one mic three feet away, just so we had something to work to. The goal then was to replace everything on that guide track with a “better” version, then overdub anything else.

With that in mind, we started with the acoustic guitar, mic’d at the 12th fret with a large-diaphragm mic , and over the shoulder with a small-diaphragm version. Laura’s got a soft playing style that worked well with this arrangement. After moving the mics around a bit to get the best sound (always move the mics first, before hitting the EQ…), we recorded several takes of her playing along to the guide track. This was enough to provide a double tracked acoustic guitar part.

Next up, vocals. I have a few microphones, and it’s always good to try out as many as possible. Every voice is different, and some mics will over-emphasise the voice and make it ‘essy’ in places, or too nasal sounding. In the end, we settled on a C12 clone for Laura – it’s a very budget tube mic, with some upgraded components to make it a little more usable. This is tied with a reflection filter and ISA preamp – and the outcome isn’t too bad at all!

Next up, overdubs. The aim for this track was to not build it up too much, and at the same time try to avoid going down the Laura Marling route – banjo and more acoustic in a Mumford-y way would probably be too obvious. So, taking a dose of Joni and some ambient guitar, we’ve ended up with just two overdubs: fretless bass and delayed guitar. The bass is me, playing a (really rather spectacular) Squier fretless bass, DI’d with compression and chorus. The electric was me again with a strat, memory man, ’65 Princeton and the ubiquitous SM57 just towards the edge of the speaker cone. The trick as always is not to over-do it. Just because there’s mandolin and ukulele available, does the track warrant it? All the overdubs were played with Laura present – which was ideal because the timescales dictated we hadn’t really got time to email the track back and forth.

After all that, the rest was a matter of EQ (not very much), compression (just to bring the vocals up to the correct level), and reverb (the excellent SIR impulse reverb) with EMT 140 plate impulses.

I’ll start posting up a few more studio blogs like this is future, with an aim to show the inner workings behind some of the tracks and future recordings – also some exclusive videos as we’re recording in the studio, so you get an idea of what goes into making something as simple as an EP!