#Soundresearch No. 02 - One mic - Rudi Bučar & Hamo: “Še malo”How everything started…
- Gaber Radojevic
- May 14, 2024
- 2 min read
#Soundresearch No. 02 - One mic - Rudi Bučar & Hamo: “Še malo”
How everything started…
When around 36 years old, I experienced a huge musical creative crisis, possibly a midlife one. I got used to the luxury of using digital technology in the studio, from tuning to fixing the rhythm - until I lost balance. There was no creativeness or heart, just hertzes and beat detection.
I decided out of the blue to go to a seminar in France unknown to me called Mix with the Masters , mentored by Michael H. Brauer. It was a life changing experience. Brauer cleared my head and allowed music and heart to play in it.
Full of excitement and with a different view of the world, I went home and kept thinking about this experience (more about the seminar another time). I came to the conclusion that I needed to buy one microphone, forget everything I knew and start from the beginning. Not mine, but from the beginning of making recordings. This was how #Soundresearch was born. I ordered one AEA Ribbon Mics R84 microphone and even though the seller said I should buy two, so that I would at least make a stereo image, I listened to my instinct and did not deviate from my idea. At the same time there were thoughts in my head going: “you’re going to record on one microphone?”; “this is going to be horrible, a tragedy”; “how do you think you’ll do it, since you’re used to working with big mixers and lots of microphones?”; “you can’t do it like that, you’ll come out a fool!”; “one mic?! What will people think?”.
As you can see, this is not a tale of sound alone, but of struggling with yourself, your convictions and your expectations. How something should be and who you are supposed to be. To make one of the first recordings I invited two famous Slovenian musicians, Rudi Bučar and Hamo & Tribute 2 Love (actually, in hindsight, they really had balls to come to do something, that even I didn’t know what it was - thanks, guys!). When I set up the microphone, I suddenly wasn’t the one responsible for balance, but the responsibility of how it’s going to sound passed to the musicians. It’s just one mic and the sound will equal the way they’ll play.
I very quickly found out that training with just one microphone drives the musicians to a higher cooperation with the instrument, the space they’re in, the way they play and with themselves. After the recording, one of my friends said “you really can hear that you recorded it in just a room”. I thought the same and almost had a heart attack! But what time showed me, is that I started getting to know the space and the live sound of it, which is nowadays rarer and rarer to be found in recordings.
To be continued?
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