On the advice from his engineer, producer and songwriter OliverLeiber (Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl, guitarist for RodStewart while on tour, The Corrs, Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, BBMak, Beth Hart, Jennifer Paige) recently purchased two Soundelux ELUX251 microphones prior to production on new band Antigone Rising.
“With Silvertide and now Antigone Rising, I’m making muchharder-sounding records than I’ve been known for in the past. Believeit or not, this has heightened my awareness of the sounds of theindividual components of the recording chain—all starting withthe mic,” said Leiber. “The very first day in the studio, we did avocal mic shootout with Cassidy, lead singer from Antigone. We put upan ELUX 251, a very good-condition vintage Telefunken ELAM 251 and aNeumann M 49 all using the same Neve 1081 input module. The thing aboutthe Soundelux was that is was just really natural and open. The Tele251 had this ‘spikey’ quality that worried me. I didn’t know if I’d cuta whole record with it. The Tele might have worked on some songs whereCassidy wasn’t belting out and not in her upper register, but I wasreally concerned on the rock songs where she is pushing and I knew thesound would be piercing with the Tele. The Soundelux had all the warmthand openness we wanted, but it didn’t have that spike and it wasn’tdull either. It has plenty of top end.
“When recording, I am looking for transparency and naturalness. If Iclose my eyes, I have to feel like that instrument or that singer is infront of me in as pure form as possible, and I’ve discovered the ELUX251 gives me just that,” Leiber continued. The ELUX 251 also was usedfor all of Chynna Phillips’ vocals and her background parts. “Onceagain, on these demos, it was smooth sailing with this mic. Evenstacking up loads of vocal backing tracks, I never had a stridencyproblem. It always sounded ‘right!'”
During tracking sessions with Antigone Rising, Leiber used one ofthe ELUX 251s for live lead vocals and the other for all of theacoustic guitar parts. “For acoustic guitar, we just set it up incardioid 10 to 14 inches in front of the sound hole and it wasunbelievably woody. You could hear the warmth and feel the flesh on thestrings—wow! Myself, my engineer and my Pro Tools operatorall immediately agreed: Now that sounds like a record!”
For more information about the mics, visit Soundelux’s distributor,Transamerica Audio Group, at www.transaudiogroup.com.
