Hi, I’m Emre and today we’re recording Emily on the Arturia AudioFuse Studio.
We’re gonna record this in three parts. Emily would like to record acoustic
guitar first, then vocals and then piano.
The AudioFuse Studio has four mic pres
so that you can do pretty much anything you need, from basic drum kit recording to piano, guitars,
multiple singers, all kinds of things. If you wanted to add more inputs to this
device, it’s very easy. It’s got ADAT on the back so you can get any eight-channel ADAT compatible interface and plug that straight in and they’ll come
upon the AudioFuse Control Center.
I’m using an Austrian Audio OC818 today,
and possibly, later on, we’ll be using a C18 as well. I’ve chosen these as they have
very sensitive balanced and full-sounding dense mics, which I really like
on acoustic guitar and actually, on a lot of sources today I think we’re gonna use them on
vocal, piano, and the guitar. Because Emily’s playing very very quietly,
I’m gonna be quite close probably a little closer than I’d normally be
and pointing roughly at the 12th fret to kind of pick up a good
spread of the sound and be a little bit careful of booming, because of her being
very quiet, any kind of extra movement will be very exaggerated, so you often get big booms.
So I might even be angling it slightly away, just to dial
a bit of the null depending on what pattern I use on the microphone, I might
be switching to figure 8 possibly, or maybe even Omni, depending on how much
proximity effects I get – and we’ll take it from there.
A nice thing – even on the headphones – is you’ve got mono for the headphones,
which is very handy and on each instrument channel, you’ve got the phase invert and pad
and phantom power right at hand without going into menus which makes things
really quick and easy so it’s a very hands-on unit.
Emily, can you play a little bit? And let’s have a listen.
I’m just gonna ask my assistant Bryan to change this to a figure of 8 for the pattern,
so I have a listen and see how that works.
Bryan, could you turn it to a figure of 8 one second?
There’s just a couple of interesting things with the talkback, which is a latching or momentary latch
design according to how you push it. So if you push and hold, it’ll release when you
let go, and if you click it, it’ll just stay on, that’s nice
functionality for the studio. It seems boring, but actually – practically,
it’s really helpful.
-Okay, all done. -Okay, should we go for a take? -Yeah! Let’s do it.
This is a really good unit, really hands-on, these knobs are really really good quality.
For a start, I was quite – really impressed with those.
It’s quite a featured volume control here as well with a mono, mute, and dim functionality.
And dim just lowers the level of the speakers considerably, you often use it
when you’re talking to people in the studio or someone wants to talk to someone else.
Okay, we’ve got a guitar now. so we’re gonna go and do vocals.
It’s an Austrian audio OC818, again. It’s a very simple set up
but in cardioid, and I’ve got a reflection filter up to stop reflections from the room
coming in the rear of the mic for a pop showed up to minimize plosives and
that’s pretty much it, we’re ready to go.
A very handy feature is two independent
headphone mixes with outputs either on quarter-inch or 3.5-inch,
so either one can either have its own mix from Cue Mix 1, Cue Mix 2 or the main mix bus,
which is really handy, because within the app you can very quickly set
different mixes on Cue Mix 1 and 2 on these layers, which I really like.
This is very clear, there’s no real particular menu diving – it’s very straightforward.
You could have one set of cans for you in the studio listening to the mix,
and one set for a singer listening to Cue 1, or you could have you listen to headphones,
say a bass player with Cue 1 and drummer with Cue 2 and they have completely
different mixes, so that’s quite – that’s really good functionality in such a small unit.
Okay, we’re going to record vocals into the same channel we just did
on the AudioFuse Studio – and we’re pretty much ready to go, putting in Record!
Great, let’s just do a take and I’ll get a level and see how we do.
Great, thanks! Perfect! Sounds good.
It’s a totally solid vocal sound, it sounded good and the performance was great. I think we’re good to go on to record the piano.
Just to talk a bit more about the mic pres, it seems to be sort of fairly
clean in design, which is I think suitable if we’re going to heavily
process afterward and certainly you can use the included mic pres to shape
the sound immediately after recording. which I am actually doing here with
the Neve (1976) Pre on the guitar and the V76 Pre on the vocal.
So that’s quite a nice feature, which lets you choose afterward a bit more about the character.
This room isn’t particularly flattering, so I would minimizing how
much we have in the sound, we could do all kinds of ways with all kinds of
different mics. So it’s all kinds of coincident mic patterns, which people
lookup online. You just search coincident mic arrays and you’ll find
lots of information about that. We could do M/S recordings, we could do a recording
through the stereo mic, sometimes you can even put the mics closer to
the footboard underneath. It depends on the way the piano is built and this one is just –
I’m trying to get kind of focused, fairly neutral sound from it, so that’s
how, at the moment, it seems like it’s gonna work!
Just a bit of audio flummery, I move them a bit closer, trying to get a more
focused sound and I’m doing the kind of a fairly loose spaced pair
just to get a bit of stereo on this and see how that sounds, and I’ve actually got one mic
down the back as well, which can sometimes add a bit of depth to the sound.
If I invert the polarity a bit and mix it in a little bit sometimes works
sometimes doesn’t, and we’ll see how it sounds in the controller.
– Do you want more guitar? – Yeah, more guitar would be good. – There you go, no worries.
Yeah, that’s better.
You can listen to the Cue mix, either Cue mix from the main mix, which is very useful when you’re setting up
people’s headphones just to check they’re getting, what you’re hearing,
what you want to hear so that’s quite – it’s really good professional functionality there.
– Let’s do one, do you come in with the guitar? – Yeah!
Great! Let’s give you a counting beforehand here we go!
The AudioFuse Studio has a Bluetooth input, which means you can play anything
from any Bluetooth-enabled device directly into your DAW and directly into the AudioFuse.
You see it’s actually coming straight in, so I can even punch it in at the end of the track.
So I actually just recorded that as a track.
Here I think maybe it’s all right about there.
Recording the synth from my phone.
Okay, so one really useful function as well is inserts on each channel, which means you
can put your own compressors EQs or any processors in line of the recording, so again,
no latency, and you can integrate all your existing gear with the AudioFuse Studio.
That’s a really big bonus I think.
It also ships with a bunch of the
Arturia effects and these are a really good starting point, there are pres (Preamps),
some compressors and delays and filters. And I use all of them regularly on lots of stuff I do. They’re really good.
Reamping is taking my line-level signal
and changing the impedance, so it is at instrument level, which is a very
large and wide topic to talk about, which I won’t go into here, but it basically,
effectively will make your output of your DAW compatible with the guitar pedals and guitar amps.
So I am now sending a signal out from the vocal channel
out of the preamp output, the auxiliaries, with the preamp option
selected down here, and putting it into a really nice room guitar effects pedal.
which is quite Lo-Fi and controlled and I think it sounds really good on vocals.
So I’m going to record that in from the main vocal out of the guitar pedal back
into input 4, into the DAW.
And I’ve got a high level so you can hear it.
This is the guitar pedal here.
I have different effects here I could use if I wanted.
I think the Room is the one for this.
When it’s sat in there, it sounds pretty good.
This functionality is really useful, sometimes I can put any guitar pedal
or an amplifier or anything straight from the DAW into the mix without any
extra gear. And that’s really valuable because re-amps can be quite expensive
sometimes just by themselves. This also means you can just record DI bass with
DI guitar and then choose an amp afterward if you want. Or if a mix comes
with an amp, you’re already set up to go and re-record it through your own gear.
Just with the track I’ve been using on the guitar, I’ve used the Neve Pre with a
little bit of top-end and some low-end shaping and then into the FET-76 and then a
little bit of sort of rapid delay on that just to make it bounce along a little
bit more, and that’s using the tape echo on the vocal. I’ve used the V76 Pre for a
bit of tone shaping, no EQ or anything like that, I like the color of it.
And then a bit of the Neve top end and a little bit of low.
It’s quite powerful EQ, so I don’t really need to use too much of it.
And then into the STA level which is doing, you know –
something.
Not a huge amount, but some. Nice hold.
And that’s our re-amped reverb from the guitar pedal.
Then I’ve got a parallel on the vocal,
The FET-76 and a very fast setting and killing it quite hard.
Really slamming that and it’s a tiny bit of that and that just helps to put the vocal out
above everything else. I’ve used a bit of the Memory Man on the vocal, but very
very quiet just to add a bit of sense of depth and then both that, the guitar and
the plate and the piano are hitting the plate. I think just on the default
setting pretty much it’s great, I’ve just rolled it to the bottom off, I’ve added a bit of pre-delay.
The piano has all gone through the V76 for some tone shaping and then
back to the plate, but very little on that, and then I think I put the little
iPhone app through quite a long plate
to give it a bit more space, blend it in
with the vocal at the end.
It’s great that the Creative Suite has the plate reverb.
I think that’s what really helps to round off the effects bundle.
It’s very easy to use, everything’s right in front of you, there’s no searching around for stuff.
After initially configuring it, it’s very very great to use.
It feels solid and everything pretty much is there I think for you to do, you know, full productions I’d say.