Mr. Judson has had an interesting and unique career recording bands in Australia. He got his start with his own band, Belles Will Ring, where as he puts it, "I took control of how we sounded and did all of our recordings. That's how I learned to record." Other bands in Australia, such as Cloud Control, heard the Belles Will Ring recordings, and started asking him to record them, and Liam ended up recording their breakthrough LP, Bliss Release. Unlike most busy, working engineers, Mr. Judson rarely works in a traditional studio. Instead he specializes in remote recording, and takes his mobile rig to wherever the band wants to set up and record. "I've worked in the odd studio here and there," he says, "but it's not my thing, and most bands seem to really enjoy being in a place where the hours are kind of loose and everyone's cooking food. It's often in beautiful, remote countryside locations, and people can go for walks. If it's close to the beach, they can go for a surf in the morning before we start recording. I like my own gear, I like my mics, and I know exactly what they do. With the way I record in different locations or different country houses, you never quite know what you're going to get until you're there. It's always the luck of the draw, but you always just make it work and that's part of the fun of it."
In the case of Hope Downs, the band had a very nice friend with a beautiful house in the forested hinterlands of Bellingen in northern New South Wales. After two days of preproduction in the band's Melbourne rehearsal space, they all headed north. Liam had listened to the band's previous EPs and was excited to work on the record, especially after he heard the new demos. "The EPs had a great vibe and atmosphere that had grown on me, but when I heard the new songs I thought this was going to be a fun project; capturing the vibe and atmosphere of those first EPs and adding in these really catchy pop songs."
Liam describes the setting as an elevated wooden room; somewhere between a cabin and a treehouse. I asked him for more details on his recording rig: "My mobile rig varies in size depending on the project, but in the case of the RBCF album, I knew that lots of mic preamps were required as I knew we'd be tracking live. I ended up bringing along pretty much every mic pre I've got. On top of that, are some 500-series boxes filled with compressors and EQs and a few pieces of rack gear. I use a PC with an RME Fireface 802, and record to Reaper as my main DAW. I really like Reaper because it's really stable, solid and efficient. It just runs well. On drums, I used a five-mic setup, which is my go-to. A Beez Neez James (in an Arabella body) tube large diaphragm condenser mic is a mono overhead. An Audix OM7 on snare top, Blue/EV Cardinal on snare bottom, Heil PR30 on floor tom, and a Heil PR40 is on kick. All these went through my old Spectra Sonics 110A preamps, except the overhead which was an Electrodyne 501 500-series pre.
I purchased the 110s mainly due to my fascination of the album 3rd/Sister Lovers by Big Star, which was recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis in 1974. The sound of this album, along with the other Big Star records, has intrigued and maybe haunted me for nearly 20 years, the bass amp was mic'd with a Beyer M160 into an EMI preamp and compressed through an IGS Audio TUBECORE, and taken direct through a Universal Audio SOLO 610."
Liam's EMI preamps have some back story: "It's an interesting one. It's a portable 4-channel microphone mixer from the late '60s / early '70s called an EMI OBA-1. It was made in Homebush here in Sydney – actually, I know the building it was made in, as I drive past it all the time. It was a four mic input unit that summed to a mono output, made for outside broadcast tasks for the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]. When I got it, it was all original and in very good condition. I used it for a short while as a mono preamp (or sometimes actually did some blending of several mics to it's mono output). The issue is that it lacked headroom on loud sources – like electric guitar – as it had no input pad. It crunched real bad in a nasty way. I used it a bit on vocals and acoustic guitar, though I also wasn't completely mad about the signal-to-noise on the output, and, truth be told, it had a bit of an odd tone. But hey, it looked cool! I decided to get it looked at by Rob Squire in Adelaide, a wonderful technician who runs Pro Harmonic https://www.proharmonic.com. He modified it for direct outs for all four channels, whilst adding switches for pad, phase reversal, and 48v phantom on all channels. By bypassing the original summing transformer and coming out of Rob's output cards, all my issues had gone away. The unit changed from being a curio into the most-used and dependable piece of gear in my collection. It's clean, big sounding and works on everything. On RBCF, I used it for all electric guitars as well as drums at the Melbourne sessions where we cut 'Bellerine'."
Electric guitar amps were mic'd with either an AEA R92 ribbon mic, a Shure SM57, or sometimes a cheap Chinese ribbon mic that I love. All went through the EMI preamp and compressed with a bunch of different things depending on the tune, but often a Buzz Audio DBC-20. The vocal mic varied depending on the tune and who was singing, but more often than not I used the Beez Neez mic. The preamp was usually the Electrodyne, but sometimes the Spectra Sonics. I always compress vocals whilst tracking – sometimes lightly, sometimes really hard if I think the effect of it is going to pull something cool out of the performer. I often use a Pete's Place Audio BAC-500 compressor, which is my favorite vocal compressor, though I do change it up from time to time."
Liam tracked the band live, including the bass amp, and that is pretty much what you hear on the album, including some bass bleed into the overheads. "It's such a joy to track a band that can play well," he remarked. "The only band member that we re-cut all his parts for is guitarist Fran Keaney, who plays acoustic guitar while the other two guitarists play electric." Fran had previously always just pulled a direct for the acoustic and Liam did this as well, remarking that, "It sounded okay; not great but it worked." Then they decided to overdub the acoustic with the Bees Knees mic and there was no turning back. "It just sounded so glorious. It made me really appreciate what he brought to the band, which is a real glue between the two electrics – this rock-solid acoustic down the middle. The beautiful close mic with all the zing and none of the plastic-y DI sound. It was still good to track him live with the DI, because the other guys feed off his energy, but then we'd replace it and there was no more shitty DI sound anymore."
The band tracked without headphones except for the drummer, Marcel Tussie, and Fran on the acoustic. Liam has a six-channel ART Head Amp 6 headphone amp he relies on for cue mixes that allows for "more me" or even individual mixes fed from his RME interface. Monitoring was done on Focal CMS6s and KRK VHT 6s, with Liam set up on a large table in the same room as the band. The owners of the tree house were out of town for two weeks, and nice enough to let the band stay there for that time, but unfortunately, as Liam explains: "We didn't quite finish the record in that time, so I ended up driving down to Melbourne (I'm from Sydney) and completing the album in their office / rehearsal space above a shop on one of the busiest streets in Melbourne. It was nowhere near as acoustically sweet as the treehouse, but nevertheless we re-cut an entire song and finished all the others and it ended up sounding great."
Mixing with Doug Boehm
