I now have an assistant who works with me in the studio on Thursdays. (Actually, I have had an assistant since November, but I haven’t blogged in months, so it feels like new news in mid-December.)

Rocky Favia, Jr. is my assistant. He is learning all about recording and mixing. We have worked together on projects in the past and we are releasing a CD on December 25 under the name “If We”. The CD is called “One”, and I am pretty excited about it.

Today we spent the first part of our day mixing a version of Silent Night that was recorded a couple of years ago by Graham Cochrane. It is an interesting recording. He had a plan of only using 8 channels and essentially making a “live” recording in a living room.

There are only 3 channels of drums (kick and two overheads). There is a bass going direct, an electric guitar with the amp run into a separate room and captured with an SM57, 2 channels for acoustic guitar (1 going direct and 1 large diaphragm condenser), and an SM57 for lead vocals.

Because of the way that the song was recorded, there was a lot of drum bleed in the acoustic guitar microphone and vocal microphone. That made the acoustic microphone almost unusable for me while I was mixing. I did weave it in and out as much as possible to help fatten the acoustic guitar (the direct input just doesn’t sound great -but what do you do?).

The lead vocals ended up being re-recorded at a later date since there was so much drum bleed. Other parts were added to the song, as well.

Overall, it is a pretty cool song and I think it turned out to be a pretty decent mix.

To keep with the spirit of the recording, I decided to use all stock Pro Tools plug-ins. There was one exception… I used my new GuitarRig plug-in on the bass because I wanted to see what kind of sound I could get. I was happy with the end result.

Here is the song.

After finishing the mix for Silent Night, we finished a new song that Rocky was working on. Hopefully we can get a demo put together for that in two weeks when we meet together again. We’re taking next Thursday off for Christmas.

Merry Christmas!