When you start with a great solo, everything else falls into place. This week’s track is Jessie J’s - Mama Knows Best. First thing’s first…CHECK THIS OUT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y29eTcRFEl8
Mama Knows Best was arranged by Mickey Hamilton and arrangement edited by Tom Anderson. The arrangement was mostly based on the original with some ideas taken from the live version. We wanted to keep the song true to its big band form to see how well the voice could imitate this genre.
To our ears…the original is quite hot and crunchy. Very analog. So, we went overboard with tubes and analog sims this week. Everything was recorded through a Mojava MA-200 tube mic and a Reso 873 (1073 clone). We made liberal use of PSP’s VintageWarmer and McDSP’s Emerald Pack as well as SoundToys Decapitator. We also ran Avid Heat across the mix bus.
As jazzy a tune as this one was caused us to sort of let the syllables flow. The arrangement was provided sans syllables so as vocalists entered the booth they were simply asked to sing what felt natural. We used this mix recipe as a starting point for our sax/horn sections. A slapback delay with EchoBoy does wonders for saxes.
When recording jazz drums it’s typically good practice to use fewer mics than the modern treatment. Typically a recording engineer will place a mic in front of the kick drum and two overheads over the kit as a whole and call it a day, versus the typical mic on every tom, snare, etc in rock miking. How do you mimic that with a voice? Well…our idea was to run a drum room reverb (we’re really digging the ValhallaRoom plug) on an aux and compress and treat it like one would a room mic. We only supplemented with a kick sample on this one (true to the kick mic form), everything else is 100% live.
Overall this track became a simpler return to a more natural sound. Our voice count was much lower for this one :P. We hope you enjoy it!
Special Thanks:
David Longo (mixing, announcer) @sleddogstudios @longodj
Katie Riegal (solo) @kriegal
Nicole Milano (harmony, backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @nicolemariemil
Mickey Hamilton (arranger, bass, backgrounds) @sleddogstudios @MickeyBluEyes81
Josh Goodman (percussion, backgrounds) @JoshyPGMan
Tom Anderson (arrangement edit) @RandomNotesLLC.
Tat Tong (mastering) @t2tattong
