[Nate Najar]

so i decided to make a live record with my trio. the venue is the
downstairs cabaret room of a theatre here in tampa bay. trio is me on
classical guitar, john lamb (from the ellington orchestra) on bass and
chuck redd (charlie byrd trio) on drums. It's a small room- at
capacity it's about 130 seats. decent sounding room too. bass player
and i usually have small amps for our instruments, although the hall
insists on running a feed from my amp to the pa system- i think it
messes up the dynamics but i'm the only one who complains.

so i brought a bevy of mics and my laptop pro tools rig. ran my mics
down the snake into their pm5d at foh and took lightpipe out to my
laptop. not much really- pair of schoeps cmc641 on drums, and a
cheap kel audio condenser on the bass drum. dpa imk4061 on bass and
inside my guitar. that's it.

my room sucks and i hate my monitors. actually the room isn't THAT
bad but it isn't a great one- directly behind the mix position i have
2 big bookcases filled with books and sheet music- so i imagine that
acts as a bit of diffusion. no real bass trapping. i'm moving soon
and when i do i'll properly treat the new room.

i used to have genelec 8020's (the itty bitty ones) and i loved them.
everything i mixed on them sounded like i intended everywhere else i
listened to it. I wanted something bigger and didn't have the scratch
for the bigger gennie's so i bought dynaudio bm5a's. big mistake.
EVERYTHING sounds great on them and i can't get a mix to translate to
save my life. of course the room is probably more at fault. but in
the room's defense, it was identical when i had better luck with the
genelecs. so anyway i've mixed 2 records (this one's the third) on
the dynaudios and they don't suck but they were a lot of work and i
pretty much gave up and said "good enough" (my records, not paying
clients!).

so as far as monitors go i've decided to buy a set of genelec 8030's.
but then i start reading about focal solo6. so if i can come up with
the extra money i'm probably going to call fletcher and try out the
focals. Then i think, i'm almost done with this record- it'll be
probably a year before i work on another so why get new monitors AFTER
i'm done with this? crazy. but i really don't like these. What else
should I try out? a lot of guys talk about the adam a7's and they're
in the price range. I'm not looking for good, sounding, I'm looking
for natural and smooth.

ok so the soundclips:

http://homepage.mac.com/natenajar the files are uploading as i write
this so if you get there too fast they might not be there yet. let me
know anything you might hear that you think i ought to somehow
improve. there's no eq on anything except some bass roll off on the
guitar (hey the mic is INSIDE the guitar!). some compression on the
guitar and also on the 2mix. thankfully i got mostly acoustic sound
in the mics but you can hear a little amp bleed- it's not too bad
though. i recommend "taking a chance on love" "prelude #2" or
"favela" for starters.

by the way i've been mixing on this euphonix mcmix which is their new
control surface and it's a little buggy but the firmware update seemed
to help a lot. it's very nice to mix with and feels very good. i'm
just doing fader moves, pans and auxes but I like it so far. frontier
design tranzport sits right next to it for transport controls/scrub
wheel. it's a comfortable setup that doesn't take too much space.

Nate