Live acoustic recording -- Carrie at the Friendly Store

CHiTT has been hard at work getting ready to release several upcoming projects, but in the meantime, we're posting an impromptu live recording from a sleepy bar in Centennial WY. Carrie is a powerful vocalist and songwriter whom we hope to work with in the future on a full studio album. Her song "Comin' Round" is just one example of her arresting abilities to translate emotion through song:

Recorded on-location with a goal toward simplicity, we set up with stereo AT2021s in the neck and bridge position, a SM57 just above the sound hole (primarily for live sound reinforcement purposes) and a SM58 on vocals, all multi-tracked to hard disk.

After reviewing the audio I determined that while the AT2021s sounded great on the rest of the songs, Carrie's playing style during this song didn't really agree with the mic placement. The SM57 was originally set up just as a mic for boosting the acoustic through the PA, but in this mix it became the primary mic, adding a low end presence and a more forgiving interpretation of the string-slap sound than the AT2021s. The AT2021s ended up in a wider stereo spread buried under the SM57 track, and I routed those condenser mics to a woodsy, long reverb, which was routed back to the mix in generous amounts. There's a fair amount of bleed from the bar crowd that gathered to chat, but it doesn't really detract from the recording, instead lending to a sense of authenticity.