Watch or listen to The Black Keys live session here
Hold on to your seat here come the Black Keys! With all the sessions Ray Guarna and I do in our studio, the goal is to bring you big time studio quality sound. Sometimes We get in a groove and reach for a certain microphone that we know works all the time. But when guys like the Black Keys come in- anything is game.
The two-man duo comprising the Black Keys is singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney. They definitely have an ear for what they want their signature sound to be. They asked me to get some grit on the vocal and get that squashed drum sound in the mix and helped me acomplish this in a few ways. For Dan's vocals I ran it not only through our trusty Grace mic pre, I also ran it back into an Avalon 737, hit it with the compession and gave it that overloaded sound. For the drums we used a room mic going thru another Avalon (squashed) and a grouping of the drum mics going into a vintage 1176 limiter (pegged the meter the whole time).
During sound check we taped a song and then the guys would come into the control room to listen. When the blend was right, I got the aproval and we went to air. Although I was aware of what I was doing, it kind of played with my mind. Usually, hearing distortion and the overloading of the gear makes me quickly back off the gains and try to fix something. The guys are also their own engineers so with their aproval I knew I was doing something right.
I made a note on our archive notes thinking how funny it will be when years from now somebody listens and wonders what was going on... I wrote, "Distortion Intentional."
Mario Diaz
KCRW Sound Engineer