Hey, I am Oz Craggs, this is my studio, Hidden Track Studios.
We're here today with Audient, showing their interface Sono
which is kind of predominantly designed for guitar recording,
but, we're gonna show you today how we can use it for recording vocals and bass and synths and all sorts.
We're here with a band called SKIES,
to let us... basically use their new single 'Born Yesterday' that has just come out.
And we're gonna be going through that song, showing what we can do with a Sono,
and how quickly we can get great sounds out of the box and strike while the iron's hot.
So, it's a really cool product and a cool song. So I hope you enjoy.
What we're gonna start with for this, is the clean guitars in the verse.
Just running through the actual preamp itself, using the torpedo cab.
On the record, we used a delay pedal as well.
So we're gonna put that in the front end of it just to add a bit of space and a bit of vibe in between it.
With everything I do, recording wise, it's critical for me that we're monitoring with zero latency.
Because, even with small buffers that slight bit of latency can be quite umm...
disconcerting for a guitarist or a singer.
so it's really great that the-
Sono's got feature on it where you can input directly from the from the source
rather than, kind of, running through using the monitor button on your DAW.
So that's what you're hearing from this guitar, it's basically going straight into this delay,
and then into the preamp,
and running through a cab emination as well.
So we've dialled in a tone that we're happy with,
we've gone through the kind of different cabs and specifically the mics.
I think for this I've settled upon a...
87 which is a large diaphragm condenser emulation on that.
there's different rooms available and as well you can dial in how much of the room you want
to hear with this control here the distance control, I've kind of set it
pretty close and just in this room here. We're going to record a couple of takes
on this, double track them, so will record them now.
Excellent, so as you can see on the screen now we've got two takes of that
that's ready to be mixed for me, I would usually pan these out to maybe 75%
either way the reason I don't go out all the ways
that will save the fully wide stuff for the chorus so the chorus has got more of an
impact thing just a little tip there that can sound really cool.
Awesome, sounds great to me let's move on!
Now we've captured the clean guitars for the verse
we're going to look at the chorus which is more of a driven tone
where the song steps up a gear one thing that's really cool about the
Sono is that you can in tandem with capturing the process sound like we did
in the verse with the cleans you can capture a clean D.I, an unprocessed D.I
so for those of you who like using amp sims and have your favourite amp sim presets
that you always use this is a great way of getting something that feels good
without having to run it through the CPU without having to monitor it through
your DAW and get the inherent latency associated with that.
The actual D.I itself really does affect the guitar tone and that is one thing
that Audient spent a long time with you're gonna be capturing something
that's arguably a lot better than just a bog-standard D.I input you get in a
normal interface this is basically been designed really specifically to capture
a fantastic sounding D.I.
Alongside the clean D.I as I said we're running through
the Two notes Software, I thought 'Studio A' sounded great for this not really using
much of the kind of ambient space around it but on this we've used a slightly
different cabinet we've gone for a Marshall 1960 style and a 57 which would
be kind of pretty similar to what I would capture with ultimately.
We've also got the power amp stage dimed up which is where we're gonna get a lot of that kind
of drive tone from I've also tweaked the EQ a little bit differently so I've
pulled the bass out a little bit, pushed a little bit of mids into it as well
just to kind of give it more of a forward tone, it's an exciting part of the song
want to get something that feels great for the player to kind of be
performing and be inspired by, capture it, feel good but know that we've got that
clean D.I safety net where we can kind of obsess over with
amp sims or re-amping which we'll touch upon later so let's go for a take on this.
So now we've got two performances which we'll usually pan out as I mentioned
earlier pretty wide for the choruses, but again we can kind of go a little
bit further so we've got these muted tracks here which are labeled D.Is
You can hear that I've thinned out the low-end, we wanted it I have that fender-y vibe
so I used the EQ to dial that tone in a little bit which is nice to be captured.
So what we can do now is show what could be done with that D.I so for
example running it through your favorite amp sim in this case we're using
Positive Grid so we can have a listen to that.
Sounding really good with the Positive Grid on there, another option that we've
got is it's got a built in high-quality re-amp output
With normal interfaces you'll have a line level output and have to actually get a
separate re-amp box to connect to it, this actually comes with a high
quality reamp built-in which we'll do now and show you how that sounds.
We've got a Friedman here and that's running through into the cab in there -
2x12 miked up with a SM57
and that mics coming back and going to input channel 1
set without the valve just so it's a nice clean transparent circuit
and then we're basically just going to record that back into our session.
Nice so we've basically got three flavours there from one performance we've
got the clean D.I which is now running Positive Grid, we've got the track that
ran through the Cab Emulation and this circuit here and we've also now got the
re-amp channel that's running as well. We've basically got three tracks per side
for the double track for this to pick from in the mix
let's get on to recording some bass.
The bass is kind of composite between a live bass and a
synth bass because we like the kind of solid low end from the synth but also
kind of the human feel was really nice to have in there as well especially in
the chorus where it gets a bit more picked and a bit more exciting.
Two notes has bass cabs in there as well as guitar cabs so this is a really cool feature
if you're a bass player you're covered basically how I'm capturing this
as well is the bass is going into my Dark Glass pedal which is going into the
same D.I input as we use to the guitars this time I flattened out the EQ and
then that's running through the 8x10 cab emulation, no power amp on that
the contour and the tone controls I've just kind of dialed a little bit to kind of
get a bit more fatness out of it and this vintage and modern contour is
really helpful and bass actually, you can kind of really feel out how much of the
mids and how much of the low end you want in your tone.
So we've got a tone that we're happy with the Dark Glass is providing a little bit of grit
and then the cab is just kind of giving it a kind of fatness in the bottom and
so what we're going to do is do a take through that first verse and chorus
the bass doesn't play in the pre-chorus on this song because in the
production again we just decided just to have synth bass there to give the chorus
a little bit more impact so let's get a take on that.
Now we've got the bass guitar down for that we're gonna go back over and lay
down the actual synth bass and then once we've done that we can get on to vocals.
We're using a hardware synth bass which is running into the line input on this
it's got a button on the back which puts the valve into the path of the line input as well
You can also use the cab emulation if you wanted to use the power amp
saturation or cab simulation or the room and kind of ambience effects of
that as well, we've chosen not to because it's just basically how we captured it
actually on the record itself so we're just kind of staying faithful to that
but the valve is just kind of helping to smooth it out and add some kind of
presence to it as well which is really nice.
okay are you ready?
Cool let's do some vocals.
So we're going to record a bit of vocals with Alie who's in the live room now
and the setup we're using is basically an Audio Technica in that room
it's coming in and going to mic preamp one and then that is
also going through using the monitor mix settings here feeding the
headphone output and going back through the wall box to Alie's headphones.
The mic preamps on Audient stuff are great they've got a very kind of clear open
sound to them, the great thing is with this as well you can put the valve to
that same stage as well so we'll probably do that to is capture maybe a
take with and take without to see which is gonna fit best in this mix.
So we'll get some takes and see how it sounds
So hopefully with this video you can see what's possible with the Sono
how versatile it can be especially for recording guitars but also for bass
synths and vocals, it's a really great unit for especially someone that's maybe
at home that wants to be able to just record quickly while they're inspired
and kind of not have to mess around too much.
It goes without saying that Audient stuff
is always built really well always sounds good, I use it pretty much
on every song I ever record, it's got something Audient, so it's really cool
for me to be able to kind of play with the new toys and get to show you what's possible.
I hope you enjoyed it!