Tim Green & the Red Sparowes

EQ Magazine interviews engineer Tim Green on the Red Sparowes' latest:

Following is a short excerpt from EQ's interview of Tim Green from their February 2007 issue, in which they ask the popular independent engineer and proprietor of Louder Studios in San Francisco about the recording and mixing of the Red Sparowes' new album, Every Red Heart Shines Towards the Red Sun. The basic tracks and some of the overdubs for the album were recorded by Green in Prairie Sun's Studio C, with the rest of the overdubs and the mix done at Louder Studios. We will provide a link to full article in the near future.

EQ: Tim, in case you didn't notice, the drums sound huge.

Tim Green:I used the standby: [AKG] D112 for the kick, [Shure] SM57 on the top of the snare. I didn't even touch the bottom of the snare. If I have a lot of free tracks, I may use a two mic attack, top and bottom, for the snare; but if I know there's going to be a lot of overdubs, such as with this project, I'll ususally just mic the top head. Then, when it comes time to mix, I'll run a feed off the snare through this late `70s Ibanez UE400 for it's distortion, bring it back and mix underneath the snare for some saturation.
     Though I sometimes like to experiment by using various tube condensers on the toms, this record seemed to call for [Sennheiser] 421s and 441s. For the room, I ended up using two Neumann M582s. We did the basic tracking at Prairie Sun because they have a huge drum room. It's like a giant old barn! So we tried to take full advantage of the sound of the room. I didn't even end up using any overheads.

Pictured above: The drum set-up for the Red Sparowes session in Studio C.