Lucinda Williams - West

[kraigmason]

Has anyone else been listening to it?
Extremely smooth sounding.
(Some may argue too smooth).
Her voice has a nice little bite in it.
Maybe a tube mic...or maybe just the quality of her voice.
There are some really cool sounding clean guitars.
Sometimes there's a lead and it sounds like they turned the treble down quite abit.
Never too dull, but you can FEEL the lead.
I am enjoying it...Both the songs and the sound.
Anyone else?

K.

[Electro-Voice 664]

Yeah, my wife bought it. Easy on the ears. I like it, but I love Car Wheels.

[lukievan]

i like it a lot...great songs and cool production. different from the more straight roots vibe of previous albums but it holds up on it's own.
the vocals sound amazing - big and clear but with just the right amount of grit and bite. most of that is her incredible voice, but i'd love to know what the vocal chain was. nice guitar work from bill frisell and i'm a big fan of jenny scheinman, who did the string arrangements and played fiddle.

[rydaken]

I assisted Michael Dumas on this, over at Radio Recorders for like 3 months 2 years ago. One of the best times of my life. Lucinda was absolutely wonderful. We tried out several mics, including a Manley Gold Reference, a Neumann u67, but finally settled on the sm7. It was ran through a v72 pre into an adl1000. She was amazing to work with. I was really bummed to not see my name on there, oh well. Wasn't the first time, won't be the last.

[lukievan]

cool! thanks for the info, and nice work. sorry to hear that you did not get proper credit....
any insight into how the music was tracked? live rhyhthm section? tape? protools?

thanks....

[rydaken]

Michael runs a studio in LA called Radio Recorders. We used a Mix+ rig with RADAR as the front end into it. Just running out of RADAR tdif (digitally) into Pro Tools. Almost every song was done in full takes. Lucinda didn't like punching (including her vocals). That's not to say some comping wasn't done at the end of the night, though.

[percussion boy]

Thanks for the info.

The sm7 should be rereleased at a higher price, with a new name, by a boutique company, so we can be treated to endless ads about how it beat out 67s, 47s, 87s, and so on. Maybe they put a little blue light on the case and pretend it has a tube in it.

[rydaken]

Thanks for the info.

The sm7 should be rereleased at a higher price, with a new name, by a boutique company, so we can be treated to endless ads about how it beat out 67s, 47s, 87s, and so on. Maybe they put a little blue light on the case and pretend it has a tube in it.

Ain't that the truth. It's funny. The session we are doing today, I took down a u47 because it wasn't working in the track, the same way the sm7 is