Tag Archives: Avril Whelehan

Avril Whelehan EP released

Delighted to announce that Avril’s debut EP is up on soundcloud, you can check it out here:

Recorded in Bay, and mixed by myself in Saggart. It was a real pleasure to work with Avril on her music, we put a lot of effort into developing them and adding colour and movement where we could, without being “producery”. My mate Paul Lally played drums on some songs also, so thanks Avril for showing faith in us and letting is tear into it!

Do go have a listen, it’s a thing of beauty with a lot of ideas packed into the 14 or so minutes…

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Mastering Avril Whelehan

Last week I was in with the incredibly talented [and incredibly sound] Fergal Davis, a mastering engineer based in Dublin. It is fascinating to watch him at work, I’ve known him for nearly 15 years now(!) and he really is at the top of his game. The techniques he uses are fascinating, particularly the Mid-Side splitting of the mix for varying compression and EQ tasks on the Centre and Edges of the mix respectively.

Fergal was also showing me a very cool dynamic EQ that he uses in a very surgical manner for taming spikes in narrow frequency bands – the Brainworx bx_DynEQ. Definitely on the shopping list.

Of course, the only thing that matters is the finished product and I am really pleased with what we have come away with. I’ll post some snippets this week if I get a chance.

Here is the link to his site:
http://fergaldavismastering.com

And his Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/FergalDavisMastering

Next up: Recording acoustic guitars with Barry from Darken The Distance this week, then mixing some more Fiach tracks. More on those later.

Avril Whelehan acoustic loveliness

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Had Avril down this week, a chance for me to capture her sound as accurately as I can – we both like Laura Marling’s folky old-school sound on “Maid by Maid” from “I Speak Because I Can” – it’s super dry, sounded silky smooth like it might have ben recorded with a ribbon mic so I fired up one of my Oktavas to see what it would be like. After some work finding the right pre (SPL sounded nicest) we settled on a combination of it and the DPA for a more modern, “that’s what it sounds like” vibe. I fired up my usual NT5/414 MS combo as a just-in-case, but don’t think we’ll need em.

That was a much nerdier post than I had planned sorry about that.

Anyway – a few (very few) photos.