BILL HOLLAND: He stacked the deck. I swear to God they're not talking to me anymore. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Bill Holland.I'm here in the upper peninsula of Michigan, interviewing Jim Bellmore from Da Yoopers Studios. Jim has recorded not only his own band but a good amount of bands at the Marquette, Ishpeming, and the [INDISCERNIBLE] area. So without further ado, let's go talk to Jim about mastering, recording, and taking his band live.

So your vocals, once you've got your vocals ready and you've got all of your different lines, when you bring them into the mix, how are you mixing the various instruments? I mean where is everything placed in the mix?

JIM BELLMORE: Well, usually what I'll do is start off with the drums and then I'll get the bass at a good level with the drums, and I'll be trying to just set those levels so you're getting close to your ceiling or you're , you know, to where you're not peaking. Of course, you're going to be adding other instruments in, but you got to make sure once you get that mix done that your -- I was going to say saturating the tape, but even digitally this is important in terms of the bits that are being used. You want to make sure that you got a hot enough level, not to hot but then not too quiet either. Usually, you want to get fairly hot but you don't want -- you want to save some of that for the mastering. It's better to master with your levels down a little bit with the ma -- Anyway, but we'll get to that later maybe. We get the vocals done usually okay. I'll start off getting the drums basically set, adding the bass in there, so it measures with the kick, but so that's of course not too loud or too quiet. Make it one with the kick, grasshopper. Anyway --

BILL HOLLAND: [LAUGHING]

JIM BELLMORE: Okay, the rhythm guitars or guitar. Usually, I'll save whatever lead instruments, be it a piano solo or a guitar solo, I'll save that for last. In other words, I'll go from the drums, bass, rhythm instruments, be it guitar or accordion, etc., to the vocals now, and the important thing here is transparency with the vocals. If you listen to a lot of professional recordings throughout the decades, you will usually notice, let's just talk in general terms, rock and roll, blues kind of commercially -- commercial music. You know, most of the rock stuff you've heard, whatever, you'll find that the vocals are fairly transparent. In other words, there's not a ton of lows on the vocals. If you really listen, you'll hear that sometimes they'll scoop out certain frequencies because they want the vocals, they want to be able to turn them up so that they fit in there into the pocket and you can hear them, but so that the bass and the kick still really stand out. And if you've got a vocals that say by themselves sound really full, sometimes it's going to be -- it's going to sit way too on top of the music with all those lows on the vocals, and you want to try to end up with a transparent vocal that you can turn up so it's loud but so that it's still the bass and the kick and certain other instruments have that strength. You don't want the music to sound weak. Again, this depends on what genre or whatever you're trying to do but in general terms that's what we try to do. So I'll work real hard with that. Cutting certain frequencies and certain instruments like the kick drum, you want the kick drum, you don't want it to sound, unless you're doing maybe rap or hip hop, you don't want there to have too much lows on the kick. You want it to stand and be clean, so you'll be scooping certain frequencies there, be it the 250 or sometimes the 40, scoop those out by 3 to 6 dB, try that, you know, it depends on how it sounds naturally but typically something like that. Scoop some 250 out of the bass. Take a look at the guitars. You got the vocal in there now. Are the guitars not too loud but still somehow getting in the way of the vocal? Try cutting maybe some 1k on the guitar. See if that opens up the vocal. So after we get that done where we've got a nice transparent vocal, everything seems to be nice, then I'll look at the lead instruments, be it accordion or guitar or keyboard or whatever, and I'll get those set in there. And of course, you know, using somewhat of a stereo, you know, I'll have the drums more or less panned left to right, you know, the snare and the kick usually in the center, the toms of course panned appropriately. I use -- sometimes I'll do 66 left on the floor, 66 right on the high tom, the overhead mics will be panned completely. Take say the piano, put it to the left a little bit and maybe the guitar to the right. It just depends really on how many tracks you've got in there but create a little bit of a stereo mix to open things up a bit. I try not to go too nuts like The Beatles, you know, like George Martin did with The Beatles where you're at a bar, you're somewhere where they've got the speakers, you know, they've got the one way over here and one over here and you're hearing just Paul singing. You know what I mean?

BILL HOLLAND: Yeah.

JIM BELLMORE: Or some of those Beatle records. I mean I don't like dong that because of that kind of a situation, you know. You want -- I like everybody in the room no matter where you're sitting to basically be hearing the song the way it's supposed to be as opposed to be hearing, you know, just the guitars and the drums and then over here is the vocals, you know, so I try not to go too much on that but enough to open it up.