Recording Harmonica

splits his signal at the
mic and sends half of it to a fast clean amp which is
miked, and gets a huge sound

You don't need additional hardware, duplicating the track and copying the region gives you the same option.

Now things to play with would be an Amp Simulator, Distortion, Reverb, Echo, panning and offseting regions, etc.

Hope that gets you in the right direction

--HangTime [Will Compute for Food] B-|>

If you are looking for that fat blues sound, then the amps are way to go. Many blues songs have been recorded using one of those harp mics (don't recall the model) plugged into something like a Fender Champ and mic'd. The sound is fairly distorted, and sort of mid rangey. Try the American crunch or something like that, which I think is supposed to emulate an old Fender amp. Don't clip the signal going into GB, though. That won't be the desired distortion.

On most of the classic harmonica recordings, that big, rich, fat sound came from an Astatic JT-30 crystal microphone plugged into a vacuum tube guitar amp. Unfortunately Astatic/CAD stopped making the JT-30 several years back. Sometimes you can find them on eBay as NOS (new old stock) going for outrageous bids ($300-$400). There are also used ones available on eBay. Hohner makes a clone of the Astatic JT-30 called the Blues Blaster 1490, but the crystal element in the Hohner is much smaller than the original Astatic and the sound is not quite the same. There are several other good harp mics made by Shaker, such as the Madcat, among others. Shure makes the 520DX Green Bullet. Audix makes the Fireball. Nady makes the VHM-7. AMT makes a condenser mic for harmonica, the HR2. I'd go with the Shure or one of the Shaker mics for blues harp. Don't forget that vacuum tube amp. Epiphone makes inexpensive vacuum tube guitar amps, check out their Valve Series or their Galaxie 10 & 25 amps. There are also the Pignose tube amps and the Fender Pro Junior. Any of these would help you to get that classic blues harp sound.

Good advice and info, John.

Alan,

So you're not after the Chicago Blues harmonica sound...

The fat sound you mentioned would definitely come from a vacuum tube (especially a push-pull configuration) guitar amp and speaker cone breakup (especially with an alnico magnet guitar speaker). However, the terms fat and clean are contradictory, exact opposites. Fat refers to harmonic distortion as in the Chicago Blues harp sound achieved with a crystal mic, vacuum tubes, and alnico magnet guitar speaker cone breakup. Clean is the exact opposite of distorted, fat, fuzzy, or overdriven sound. To achieve a clean harmonica sound, Fender vacuum tube guitar amps are famous for their clean sound. A condenser mic would give the best clean sound with the most detail, but may be hard to run through a guitar amp because condensers require phantom power. You could run a condenser mic into a PreSonus TUBEPre and the output of the TUBEPre into a guitar amp's input. The TUBEPre's drive control could be adjusted to give you any amount of fat up to and including overdrive. Any vacuum tube guitar amp and giutar speaker, though, is going to add some harmonic distortion. A transistor guitar amp would tend to be cleaner sounding. Or you could skip the guitar amp all together, and go from the TUBEPre to the line level audio in port on your Mac.

See

http://www.appliedmic.com

for AMT's HR1, HR2, & HR16 condenser mics for harmonica and use their "Mic/Instrument SEARCH" feature to find harmonica microphones on their website.

I couldn't find any references to a Sennheiser "451" microphone except for the recording of bass amp speaker cabs. Sounds to me like the "451" might be a bass/kick drum mic. Perhaps it is a discontinued microphone no longer made by Sennheiser. The only Sennheiser 451 I could find was the HDC451, a pair of noise cancelling headphones. Did you mean the Sennheiser MK421 II mic? It is an industry standard studio recording microphone. Though it is rather large and not handheld making it rather difficult to hold along with a harmonica.

I saw John Mayall on PBS last night playing his harmonica through a handheld Shure SM58 vocal mic.

Hey Alan,

I listened to the Howard Levy mp3 clips. The first thing that came to mind is that it is definitely not the Chicago Blues style of harmonica. The Levy clips have a nice "Prairie Home Companion" kind of feel to them. Another couple of pieces of music came to mind as well. Back in the 1970s Corky Siegel (Siegel-Schwall) performed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa. The names of the pieces are: Russo's "Street Music" and "Three Pieces for Blues Band and Symphony Orchestra" and Gershwin's "An American in Paris." The Levy clips sound much like the Siegel performances. The recordings may still be available as a Deutsche Grammophon re-release. It is some of the most intense harmonica playing I have ever heard. Corky Siegel is one of the masters! See http://www.chamberblues.com/discography.html for more info.

I also found the Sennheiser MD 441 U. It is a so-called supercardioid (or hypercardioid) dynamic microphone. It has five different bass roll-off settings. As for duplicating Levy's sound, you would need to duplicate Levy's equipment. Levy's harmonica sound could come from the way it is compressed, EQ'd, and reverberated, or it could be the acoustics of the room where his performances were recorded. His sound could also be the result of his playing style; how he draws and blows air through his harp among many other possible variables. You would just have to experiment until you get a reasonable facsimile.

Check out the Corky Siegel recording, and good luck with with your pursuit of that elusive Levy sound.

John

By offsetting regions, do you mean shifting a
duplicate region slightly, (a command G move)??

Yes. Turning off the Snap To Grid, and moving a duplicate region slightly can create a (fake) stereo sound and fatten it. --Hang

Alan,

You might try the $100 PreSonus TUBEPre to sweeten your tracks rather than using Amplitube. My reasoning is that if you want the sound of an analog tube why not use a real vacuum tube instead of a digital simulation of the real thing? The PreSonus is an award-winning tube preamp on which you can dial in any amount of tube drive sweetness you desire. Another way of fattening the sound is to double-track your recording. Play and record the part on one track, then play it back while overdubbing a second track by playing your harp part again, as if a unison duet, along with the first track. This would be like duplicating a region and then offsetting the timing slightly, much like the strings on a 12-string guitar in that you can never tune any two strings to the same exact pitch or timeline. Chorusing works similarly by splitting the signal, then delaying and slightly detuning the copy to get a bigger sound. The difference between the sound of a 6- and a 12- string guitar? The 12-string sounds bigger because the pitches are doubled in the upper register, and octaved in the lower register. Octave dividing is another effects trick used to sweeten a sound.

John