In the Studio
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Without giving away too many secrets, here are some of the techniques Lionel uses to record a BOP album. Firstly, people have often remarked on the great powerful guitar sound Pete gets. This is largely down to the B2. The B2, designed by Lionel Hicks, is a custom built, air tight box which is built applying the acoustic dimensions of a live area in a recording studio on a smaller scale.
One of the main features is that it is air-tight. This isolates the guitar sound. It is also a great source of soundproofing if noise is a factor. But most importantly,the sound-pressure level is very high inside the B2. Consequently, if you put a Marshall 4X12 speaker cabinet in B2 being fed by a valve amp cranked on 10, along with an SM57 microphone on the sweet spot of the speaker you get a killer sound!
Without giving away too many secrets, here are some of the techniques Lionel uses to record a BOP album: Firstly, people have often remarked on the great powerful guitar
sound Pete gets. This is largely down to the B2. The B2, designed by Lionel Hicks, is a custom built, air tight box which is built applying the acoustic dimensions of a live area in a recording studio on a smaller
scale.
This is largely down to the over-all sound-pressure level that is created in the box, and then fed down the microphone. All of the guitar parts are double-tracked and then hard-panned at the mix stage. The bass is direct-injected using a good valve compressor (nothing over the top on compression). This works very well as it allows Lionel to add more compression at the mix stage if needed. A lot of the drum sounds are triggered later using a library of custom drum sounds that are layered up. This gives great flexibility and power to the drum sound.
The vocals are recorded with a little compression to tape just to control the peaks. More compression is then added at the mix. As with the guitar, some of the vocal lines are also double-tracked. The first vocal line is panned straight up the center, and the second one, with little lower level, is panned at about two o'clock. These are just some of the techniques used to make a BOP album. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
We could go on all day but you know......
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