Phantom Power: Recording Marty Stuart’s Ghost Train

“In 2005, we realized we’d taken the state of the art of microphone electronics very near the leading edge,” says Villella. “It was the capsule that was holding us back from the next sonic breakthrough.” So Villella, Conley and other recording engineers, and a team of design engineers including an Australian rocket scientist spent five years working on the products that would become the 3 Zigma series microphones, which Conley would end up taking into Studio B for the Ghost Train sessions.

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“We put the [ADK 3 Zigma] C-12 on Marty’s D-45 – the Hank Sr., model – and he just looked up and said, ‘I think we just found our acoustic mic.’ It was that quick,” says Conley.

Conley says he and Stuart chose to record acoustic guitar in mono on Ghost Train. “What people listen for in their acoustic guitar, they never really hear it that way when it’s recorded,” says Conley. “One of the more interesting techniques is to get that microphone up where the player’s head is. Listening down toward the guitar – just like you’d hear your own guitar.”

“If you listen to ‘Hangman,’ there’s bleed all over that guitar mic,” says Conley. “It’s a good bleed in that you can hear his vocals and drum overheads. This stuff was tracked live in that room and there’s no separation. I put the mic on his acoustic almost pointing straight down to the floor to pick up the guitar and get the separation from his vocal.”

Conley worked with ADK’s custom shop for a vocal microphone that would perfectly capture Stuart’s voice. “We used the [ADK] Berlin 47 with a mod on it – we’re calling it ‘the Marty Stuart mod,’” says Conley. “The curve has a bump in the bottom end and a little bump in the top, so the mid is kinda scooped out and takes away a little bit of muddiness but yet gives you that nice, rich bottom like on Marty’s voice – but it still retains the air.”

Microphone designers and engineers face two big hurdles in modern microphone design. First, there’s the fact that vintage mics react differently in analog and digital recording settings. “A lot of those [vintage] mics were intentionally used on tape to enhance high end, and then we went to digital and it didn’t need that,” says Conley. “It’s not gonna make the bottom go big and won’t roll off the high end. We had to rethink our chain.”

Secondly, each piece of vintage gear is slightly different. “Everybody has their idea of what [a vintage] microphone should sound like, but every one of those things sounds different. There’s probably not two on the planet that sound the same,” Conley jokes about highly-prized vintage Neumanns. “Which one do you choose and how do you decide on the golden standard?”

Conley says the answer is in using technology to design microphones that get it somewhere in the middle. And test and tweak the design until it’s right. “[Villella] can do the right quality control on his products and try to replicate it with the technology that we have, but going back to what we know sounded good way back when,” says Conley.

And while quality control of that level comes with a relative price tag, using the mics doesn’t require an audio engineering degree. Conley says the beauty is in the simplicity of using ADK’s “tool-kit” system of interchangeable capsules. “I can say honestly this is the easiest system I ever got a great guitar sound with – just right out of the box,” he says.

Villella says that 3 Zigma’s small-cap mics can be used for the purest rendering while the large-caps (like the C-LOL-12 used on Stuart’s Martin) can produce dramatically different tone-colors. “Think of it as the difference between lighting an object with a white light or lighting an object with green, red, blue,” says Villella. “There’s a place for clear and there is a place for colorful. Microphones work in a very similar way.”

In the end, Conley, Stuart and the band’s preparation and hard work paid off. Ghost Train captures the vintage sounds of country’s yesteryear in a thoroughly modern way.

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