The upper photo, from the recording session, shows Jérémy (left), Mathieu (centre) and Solal, and their respective mic placements. I’ve also captured a still from a YouTube video which was one of Jérémy’s mix references, showing the Coles ribbon mic on lead guitar, apparently paired with a small‑diaphragm capacitor mic.
We try to improve a gypsy jazz mix, and discover that even the best references need to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Using reference tracks is a good thing. It helps to stop over‑familiarity and ear fatigue leading you down wrong paths, especially if you’re new to recording and mixing. But referencing also has its pitfalls, as this month’s Mix Rescue illustrates.
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Jérémy Dutheil is a fine accordion player who jointly leads an excellent gypsy jazz group with guitarist Solal Poux. His recording, made in a large living room, captured the group in trio mode with second guitarist Mathieu Chatelain. When the time came to mix, Jérémy had identified a couple of appropriate commercial tracks to use as references — but no matter what he did, his mixes refused to sound like them! Having posted several iterations of his own mix on the SOS Forum, he then sent the source tracks to me to see what a fresh pair of ears could contribute.
Live recording is normal in this genre, and it was a very refreshing change to work on a project containing only four mono audio tracks, none of them requiring any timing correction, tuning or other performance fixes. The accordion had been tracked using a pair of Prodipe STC‑3D large‑diaphragm capacitor mics, while each guitar had enjoyed the attentions of a Prodipe A1 pencil mic. Everything was in tune, nothing was clipping or noisy, and the playing was a treat.
However, it was also clear why Jérémy had had difficulty making these tracks sound like his references. One reason was that although the references were in the same genre, they featured different instrumentation and material. Low‑frequency content in Jérémy’s track was limited to whatever the accordion and guitars could generate, but both of his references had a double bass. And whereas both of his references were mid‑tempo affairs, the Charleston that was causing Jérémy problems was a fast dance tune played with more energy.
Mix Rescue: Gypsy Jazz
It also seemed likely that the reference tracks had been recorded differently. There was no room mic in Jérémy’s recording and his spot mics had been placed close to the instruments in a bid to achieve separation. This meant that the raw sound was dry, with the edgy quality you often get when affordable capacitor mics are positioned right up on a source; what natural reverb there was consisted of bright early reflections from the tiled floor.
By contrast, Jérémy’s reference for the guitar sound was a ‘live in the studio’ performance by the group Selmer #607. The YouTube video doesn’t reveal whether room mics were used, but a Coles 4038 ribbon mic is visible on the lead guitar, there are more soft furnishings in evidence, and possibly more distance between mics and instruments. As well as a more mellow and rounded tone, Jérémy’s references thus had a more open, spacious feel than his own raw tracks. He’d tried to add this back in at the mix using artificial reverb, but it hadn’t quite worked.
Taken on their own terms, though, there was a lot to like about the up‑front, dry quality of the raw tracks. Jérémy was clearly after a roomier sound, and I was keen to explore how this could be achieved, but it struck me as optional, and I wanted to deal first with any timbral issues that afflicted the basic recordings.
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It makes a nice change to work on a mix with only four tracks! The guitar solos have been duplicated on a second track immediately below, and the stereo track at the top is Jérémy’s mix for comparison purposes.
The close mic placement had delivered good levels of separation, but there was a price to pay for this. The guitar sound was a little fierce, with lots of energy in the upper midrange and an emphasis on transients, pick scrapes and the like. Jérémy’s accordion was clearly well maintained and tuned, but the treble‑side mic had picked up a distracting ‘ticking’ noise from the keys; and though the tone from the treble and bass mics was decent enough in isolation, it changed significantly when they were combined.
There are some situations where we’re habituated to think about phase issues: when multimiking a drum kit, for example, or combining a mic and DI on the same source. But they also arise when you’re miking both ends of an instrument such as an accordion or concertina. What you have might look like a spaced stereo pair, but in practice, both mics are acting as spot mics on their respective ends of the instrument, and both are picking up spill from the other end. You’re very unlikely to want to pan these mics fully left and right at the mix, so it’s worth experimenting with polarity and time adjustment to get them to combine sweetly. In this case, I ended up reversing the polarity of the bass‑side mic and advancing it by about 1.5ms (which, not coincidentally, is about the time it takes sound to travel from one end of the instrument to the other).
Gypsy Jazz At The Magnet In Broadstairs Kent Sunday 19th September
I adjusted the relative polarity and timing of the two accordion mics to try to make them work as well as possible together in mono.
This produced a raw accordion tone that sounded pretty good to my ears, although it was a bit more strident than the accordion in Jérémy’s reference track. The tone also varied through the recording, as it will when you close‑mic an instrument that doesn’t stay still. Several bands of dynamic EQ spread across the midrange seemed to help somewhat, and I ran the treble‑side track through iZotope’s RX De‑click to tame the ticking from the keys.
Whereas the treble‑side mic was clean and the playing on that side more or less continuous, the bass‑side mic had picked up more spill from the guitars, and there were relatively long stretches where the left hand was idle. Since the spill didn’t sound all that great, I used the basic Pro Tools Expander/Gate plug‑in to drop the level in these rests, with a side‑chain filter set to focus on the low midrange. The accordion is not an instrument that produces endless overtones, and I decided that everything above 6kHz or so on the bass side was spill, so I cut it out with a low‑pass filter. Finally, having bussed both accordion tracks to a stereo aux channel, I experimented with some gentle dynamic control, eventually finding Sound Radix’s Drum Leveler more ‘invisible’ than an orthodox compressor.
The first half of the Charleston consisted mainly of an accordion solo, with Mathieu and Solal playing impressively tight rhythm guitar. In the second half, the accordion switched to rhythmic comping while Solal took over lead duties, before both combined to restate the main theme at the end. As long as the guitars were playing chords, spill was not really an issue, and my main concern was to soften the spiky sound a little. I used separate instances of Oeksound’s excellent Soothe plug‑in to tame the abrasive upper midrange on both instrument, and on Solal’s guitar I added a de‑esser targeting the 5‑8kHz range to take the edge off the transients.
The lead guitar was more of a challenge. No matter how hard the player digs in, it’s always a struggle to bring single‑note lines on a steel‑strung acoustic to the front of the mix. Spill from the other instruments was much more obvious on this part, and the combination of hard picking and close miking made the solo guitar particularly spiky. Up to a point, this isn’t a bad thing, but when gypsy jazz guitarists I’ve recorded have talked about the importance of ‘manouche bite’, they usually seem to be referring to the 2‑3 kHz area rather than 5kHz and above.
The guitar solo was the element that required the most extensive processing. Oeksound’s Spiff helped to tame the aggressive note attacks — it may look as though this setting is applying a high shelving EQ boost, but in fact it’s telling Spiff to apply more processing in that region.
I decided fairly early on that I would need to treat the solo section differently from Solal’s rhythm part, so I cut it out and duplicated it on a second track. It took quite a bit of experimentation to achieve the right balance of tonal warming‑up, transient softening, dynamic levelling and spill reduction. Oeksound’s rather unsung Spiff transient‑shaper plug‑in did a lot of the heavy lifting, with another instance of Drum Leveler tackling the dynamic control and spill reduction, and some dynamic EQ toning things down from 5kHz upwards. During the accordion solo sections, it seemed natural to have the rhythm guitars hard-panned, but I positioned this lead part more centrally: not so much as to create a jarring jump at the transition, but enough to make clear that it was now the boss.
Sound Radix’s Drum Leveler is a very effective plug‑in for controlling the dynamics of any percussive source, including solo lines on acoustic guitar.
By this stage, I had dealt with most of the issues that had been bothering me about the individual sources, but I hadn’t made any radical changes to their sound, and I certainly
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