Sweetwater Internship Post 5 - 3/22/2021

Having worked through my entire weekend and still working every day this week, I'm feeling a bit exhausted right now, but still energetic and excited to be a part of the studio team. Over the weekend, we had two clients to record; one on Saturday and one on Sunday. The client we had on Saturday was a group of two people who are local to Fort Wayne. They wanted to record an original song they had written, but neither of them knew how to read music, listen and stay in time with one another, or play with a click. For this reason, the tracking session became more difficult than it usually is with clients who have more experience.

As the session went on, the studio team had to do our best to convey some tips and advice for these inexperienced musicians in order to get the most out of their time in the studio. Most of the help we had to give was in regard to staying together in tempo, and fixing some discrepancies with time signatures. It was a good exercise and learning experience for me, because most of the people I've worked with in the past are seasoned and practiced musicians. Having to look at a group in a new way to make it easier to assist them opened my eyes a bit. Later that night, I got in contact with a man named Jimmy who was running sound for the Sweetwater All-Stars (the band Chuck Surack is a part of), and he took me under his wing for the night so I could get a bit more live experience while I'm here. He wasn't required to do that for me. He did it out of kindness and higher education and for that I thank him and very much appreciate him.

Sunday, we had a band come in composed of mostly Sweetwater employees. They were sort-of similar to the band Chicago. They did several covers of popular tunes and classics. During the session, almost everyone was in the live room. In order for the entire band to see each other for cues and to play together easier, Dave who was the session engineer deemed it necessary to set up two gobos in between each microphone in the live room, in order to get as much isolation as possible while still allowing the musicians to see one another. As the session went on, I witnessed the vocalist's microphone (the Manley Reference Gold) start to become distorted and gross when the singer got very loud. At the time, everyone thought it was the microphone that was the issue, but upon later exploration, it is believed that the gain on the preamp was simply too high.

To finish off today's blog post, I'll share a little bit more about some of the special microphones that Sweetwater Studios has in their mic vault. In a past blog post, I talked about a microphone in the vault which has "Made For Sweetwater" engraved on it, and a serial number of "0000". Today, I discovered that there is more where that came from! Not only does the studio have the Lauten Audio ST-221, they also have a Lauten Audio FC-357 and Horizon, both with "0000" serial numbers!

An even cooler part about the Horizon is that the last zero in the serial number was mis-printed a bit too far away from the rest of the zeroes, making it even more of a collector's item and a special one-of-a-kind microphone. As I continue my internship, I'll continue talking about the gear and knowledge that I get to experience and share it all here! Thank you for reading!