New York City, NY (January 20, 2016)—Grammy Award-winning producer/engineer Chuck Ainlay has been recording JD & The Straight Shot with music director/guitarist Marc Copely at Avatar Studios in New York City and at Sound Stage in Nashville.
JD & The Straight Shot’s founder and frontman is James Dolan, who has made a name for himself as a performer but nonetheless is better known as the head of several media and telecommunications organizations, including Cablevision, the New York Knicks and AMC Networks. “It’s a great little self-contained band,” comments Ainlay. “Marc is on guitar, as is Jim’s son, Aiden Dolan. Byron House is on the upright bass, and Erin Slaver is the classically trained fiddle player.”
Ainlay recalled, “For this session, Marc was playing a Gibson L5 with the CU-55 close to the F hole. This Gibson is a beautiful old guitar with flat vinyl strings, so it was kind of chunky sounding.” To mic the guitar, he pulled out a Sanken CU 55. “The mic is fairly crisp, but not unnaturally so,” he said. “It’s a DC biased condenser mic and I’ve been messing around with it for about a year and just fell in love with it. I’ve used it on a lot of different instruments.”
Ainlay’s choice for a second mic on Copely’s guitar was Sanken’s CO-100K omni-directional condenser microphone, with a 20 Hz to 100 kHz range. “The 100K really picks up the space and it sounds wonderful, like it does out in the room,” he said. “It’s so accurate and its off-axis response is as good as its on-axis response—just a really wonderful-sounding microphone. I used it at some distance from the guitar just to capture that space. Then I separate the two microphones in the mix to give the instruments some size and space in the stereo panning.”
The band’s song “Can’t Make Tears” is the theme song for AMC’s TV show Hell on Wheels and its music has been featured in films, including Hurricane Season.
Sanken
www.sankenstudio.com
