The Allen Family Band - Demo Recording

This was an interesting project as this oldtime bluegrass band from New Mexico is lead by a grammy award winning fiddle player, and is accompanied by his four kids. All of which were all under 17, which I found incredible as they played with such confidence and experience. They recorded 4 oldtime tracks in there own hillbilly style. The band played to all together in a live atmosphere much like a transatlantic type session. The Vocals were even record live, but then would get Roby (the vocalist, 17) to over dub and redo lines that were pitchy or not in time. Acoustic guitar, Bass guitar, Mandolin, Banjo were all performed live and then went on to multi track Fiddle. I used a:

Rode NT3 - Acoustic Guitar
NT3000 - Vocals
Sans Amp D.I - Bass
NT5 - Banjo, Fiddle

What I liked about this recording was that we recorded it in the afternoon, went for Dinner, then returned to mix in the evening. So the turn over was very quick. I used a high pass filter on most instruments to remove room hum and rumble from other instruments. It was a pleasure recording this family because their family band goes back to the 1850's. Problems I faced during recoding was the amount of bleed from the other instruments in the vocal microphone. This happened because the band wanted to be close to each other, as they would be in there natural playing environment. I could have prevented this by using a more directional microphone like a hyper cardioid 416, Instead of a large diaphragm cardioid condenser.