I'll be in Joe's Studio Friday and Saturday for a "Recording Guitars and Vocals" class.

If you guys like something he's done, and want to know more about how he does it, post your questions here and I'll try to ask everything.

He worked with Chevelle on Hats off to the Bull, one of my favorite albums.

Be cool to know about producing in general.  They seem to wear all sorts of hats.  But how hands on is it actually when it comes to song selection, arrangement, etc?  Does he actually listen to say 30 demo songs from the band and "help" pick 15 for the album?

Ask him his favorite drum micing technique and favorite (go  to) compressor, outboard or plug.

Thanx!

I'll ask.

I may or may not get to ask this since he has a couple of days on drum miking, mixing, etc separate from the guitar and vocal days that I'll be involved in. I wish I had time to do the whole week, especially the mixing intensive days, but unfortunately I don't.

Joe does have some videos where he talks about the whole process including drums, and it's good, but I hope to get a lot more from these couple of days. I'm really looking forward to this. Joe is a funny guy too, with an irreverent sense of humor. My kind of guy. I did a class at his place a couple of years ago with Andrew Scheps, and it was a blast.

Joe has a shitload of credits. He was a Sound city guy, so he's seen it all.

I guess just general stuff like what frequencies he favors for various instruments and vocals. Ect

Will do.

I'll make notes about Pres, filters, etc.

I think I can safely say that he would say that he would use whatever works for the song. Joes studio is called JHOC- Joes house of compression, and he pretty much described it right. There are different comps Everywhere you look.

He did say that he'd never use outboard comps on electric guitar, he'd pretty much always use a pedal, except for room mic on guitars. He used an la3a on the room mic today. He was asked why, and he said he could have used anything, but it was right there and easy to hook up :)

The rest of the guys taking the class are doing a full week, so they were there and did drums for two days. Today we worked on getting a good electric guitar sound. We spent a LOT of time on phase.

We got the guitar sound with no other instruments being recorded except drums, so I asked if Joe typically gets a good guitar sound, and then fits his bass in around the guitar, and he pretty much does. He did say that he will always record the whole band as a reference first though,so I guess you can assume by that that he's kind of knows what he wants to hear from the reference tracks.

Tomorrow we do acoustic guitar, bass, and vocals.

Guitars were recorded through a neve side car, so he used all neve pres, and then straight into protools.

He set up was a small combo out in the studio next to a wizard cabinet. There were foam baffles between them, on each side, and out in front. On the combo. (An old fender) he used a Blue dynamic. He said they are cheap sleeper mics. I think he said the model was a 100, or 101.

He had a wizard head in the control room fed from a splitter that also fed the combo. On the way out of the wizard to the cabinet, he hit a rockcrusher and he used the line out from that also.

On the wizard cab, he had a 57 on one speaker, a 421 on and other, and a royer 122b on another. He initially started moving the 57 around until he had a pretty good sound, then started moving the 421 until it complimented well (after making sure phase worked with the 57). In the end we decided that. We liked the 421 sound best, and it would be the root to work from, and moved the 57 and 122b to compliment the 421.

Then we played with room mics, and the rock crusher.

In the end we doubled tracks for L and R, so each side had a combo of the mics above committed for each side, except that he did not commit the rooms.

Pardon my typos, this iPad ain't cooperating...

Thanx for the update

Cool. Thanks!