Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! - Live #1 Iron Country Sisters

2020-04-19T01:49:00.000-07:00

Kekkonen elää! is back after a long break and this time we'll be streaming our sessions live!

Yes, we are aware that in this time streaming is the new black, so it isn't a terribly original idea, but nonetheless we wanted to give our dear clients an opportunity to stream small scale live sessions with a great sound. Each session will have a little special feature and we'll do a recording setup overview in the blog and our Instagram (@studiokekkonen - be sure to follow us!).

The sessions will be streamed for free on the Studio Kekkonen YouTube channel (please click the little subscribe button!), but there are ways you can help each artists and we'll make sure you'll be aware of how you can do that.

Our first session is with Iron Country Sisters! Formed in 2014, Iron Country Sisters is a trio of three sisters Paula, Silja and Julia Rautamaa, who released their debut album "The Blue Hidden In" (out on Soit Se Silti) in 2019. Recorded partially at Studio Kekkonen, the album was produced by the latest addition to the Kekkonen team Eero Nurmela, alongside the sisters themselves. The record received good reviews in the Finnish music press. You can support the band by buying a physical copy of the album here.

Follow Iron Country Sisters on their social media platforms:

https://www.facebook.com/ironcountrysisters

https://www.instagram.com/ironcountrysisters

Oh, and finally, welcome to the team, Eero!

The session will stream live right here:

Kekkonen elää! #9 Vesterinen yhtyeineen - "Valot eteiseen" live at Studio Kekkonen

2015-04-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

Kekkonen elää! is back with a brand new live session! Now it's time for Vesterinen yhtyeineen to present a ballad from their new album Onnellinen mies, which is going to be released in may!

Thanks again to our backers at Soundtools and the video guys at Luomustudio.

Kekkonen elää! #9

Vesterinen yhtyeineen: Valot eteiseen

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.vesterinenyhtyeineen.fi
www.facebook.com/VesterinenYhtyeineen

Written and performed by Vesterinen yhtyeineen

Mikko Enqvist - Guitar
Teemu Jokinen - Drums, backing vocals
Petri Kivimäki - Acoustic guitar
Markus Piha - Bass
Janne Riionheimo - Keys, backing vocals
Tero Vesterinen - Vocals

Recorded by Julius Mauranen & Mikko Raita
Assistant engineering by Arttu Aalto & Janne Riionheimo
Mixed by Janne Riionheimo

Video by Luomustudio
In association with Soundtools

About the song and the session

Vesterinen yhtyeineen was recording their fourth album during the Kekkonen elää! live session and the song “Valot eteiseen” was going to be performed for the album a few months after the session so the band had a great opportunity to demo the song in the studio environment. As the keyboard player of the band, I (Janne) was also playing with the band, so the recording was mainly carried out by Juppu and Mikko. However, as I recorded, mixed and produced (together with our drummer Teemu) band’s new album, it was natural for me to mix the song also for this Kekkonen elää! session.

The band had played the song only a few times before the session so this was the first version of the song. The arrangement of the song changed slightly after the session (and due to the session!) but the music, lyrics and basic tranquil mood remained the same. There is no drums in the final album version and also another acoustic guitar is added to the arrangement. The icing of the cake in the album version is an epic flugelhorn solo in the end of the song played by Martti Vesala, but let’s now talk about this session.

About the recording

We did the session again at our lounge and our aim was to capture an intimate and delicate band performance regardless of the leakage between the instruments. The song was built upon Pate’s acoustic guitar picking that was picked up by our wonderful Neumann KM88i through a Knif Audio V804 pre. Although the drums weren’t very loud, Pate’s picking was quite quiet, so we recorded also the DI from the acoustic guitar. The DI signal from the acoustic guitar is a combination of a condenser mic inside the body and a saddle Piezo pickup, but we had to make rather piezo-heavy balance of the two because there was a quiet but audible distortion in the condenser.

Tero’s main vocal was recorded with our Neumann U48 (through the Knif Audio V804 pre) and for drummer Teemu’s backing vocals we used the Shure SM7. Janne sang to the very cool and exotic Audio-Technica 5040.

Lead guitarist Mikko “Jönkka” Enqvist played a Gibson 335 through the Vox AC30, that we placed into the office and recorded with two mics: Shure 57 and Audio-Technica 4081 ribbon. There were two Neumann CMV 563’s as overheads, Shure 57 on snare, Sennheiser MD441 on hihat and AKG D112 and Audio-Technica 4050ST on kick drum. Two AKG C414 XLS’s was used for the room.

Make played his bass through Electro-harmonix Bass MicroSynth with a mild volume pedal effect, after which the signal was captured with his SansAmp Bass Driver DI. Janne had NI’s B3 emulation on his laptop and played it with the AKAI MPK mini mk2, which is actually a pretty nice mini keyboard with 25 synth-action keys and a 4-way thumbstick that Janne used for the Leslie speed control. The keyboard has also a sustain pedal input and a USB-B port instead of a mini-USB like in its predecessor.

All the tracks, except KM88i and U48, went through our MS Audiotron desk without any extra processing.

The band rehearsed the song few times and after the headphone balance was ok for all, they were ready for the take. The song was played three or four times but as usual the best take was the first one!

About the mix

It took about seven months until I opened the session for mixing and at first the arrangement sounded ”wrong” for me because I had become so familiar with the album version, which has also been a part of band’s set list. However, the mood and Tero’s vocals are so fantastic in this live take, that it makes this recording comparable to the album version (or even better!!!).

At first the mixing of Valot eteiseen was quite easy. The rough mix without any processing except some low-mid cut and high boost on the master sounded pretty nice so all I have to do was to try to polish it. First I inserted a Slate Virtual Mixing channel to all tracks (except busses) and a Virtual Mixing Bus to the master bus. Our default for the plugin is Brit 4K emulation with 6dB drive which I also used for the mix. I tried to mix some time with Brit N, but it was so fat that I switched back to the default.

I started mixing with the vocals and as Tero with U48 is a familiar couple for me, I used my default setup for them. That is a AVID EqIII for cutting resonances (nothing radical this time because Tero was singing so smoothly), 1178 for compression (our LA2 is under maintenance), Waves API 550B for boosting high end, three Waves C1’s for compressing some specific frequency bands (180Hz, 3kHz and 3,8kHz) and a Massey S-limiter.

The acoustic guitar track was a combination of KM88i and the DI signal. I cut some highs and lows from the KM88i because the drum leakage was quite dominant. Some lower mids were cut from the DI and the combination were compressed with dbx 160 the needle hardly moving.

At this point it was obvious that the drums leakage to acoustic guitar’s KM88i and to the lead vocal’s U48 and the vocal leakage to the KM88i would affect to the overall sound. Even though I compressed the mids and highs from the vocal and acoustic guitar tracks with Waves C6’s that were sidechained from snare and Hh (it actually worked well!), the drum ambience was characterized by the leakage. But hey, this is a live recording!

Some bass was added to the kick drum and low-mids were cut with AVID EqIII. In snare I cutted ringing on 150Hz with AVID EqIII and cutted attack with the SPL Transient designer plug-in. I used Waves DeEsser both on snare and on OH:s to get as soft sound as I could, because the character of drumset high-end was determined by other mics! The set was finally slightly compressed with our Gyraf G10 Vari-Mu.

Bass had a 2dB low boost with Waves API 550B and mild compression with dbx160. I used also a Sound Toys Decapitator to warm it a little bit. Jönkka’s guitar didn’t have any processing, just the right balance between the two mics, which was actually adjusted while recording.

BV:s were slightly compressed with Waves Rcompressors (no eq this time) and the keys were warmed up with Decapitator and some mud was cut with AVID EqIII.

And how about the reberb? Oh, yes there is a little on the vocals. Some plate from ReVibe that was also used as a demo verb while recording.

On the master I had the demo AVID EqIII from the rough mix activated all the time as well as our normal chain that was Audiotron desk stereo channel with master EQ (few dBs at high-end) -> G-SSL -> Otari MTR-12 1/4” tape machine. I added some more high-end to the the demo master eq and also with the Waves API550B. I used our Rantanen LA4 as a parallel compressor with all the tracks through it.

After all I didn’t use the room mics at all. The mix was quite sensitive due to leakage. I couldn’t add high-end to the vocals or acoustic guitar without adding ambience to the drums and I couldn’t raise the volume of acoustic guitar without adding ambience to the drums and to the vocals or without adding a distortion from the DI-track. But what the heck, once in a while it’s beneficial to have limitations!

Kekkonen elää! #8 Juurakko - "Eipä Kasva Kaikki Laulut" live at Studio Kekkonen

2014-11-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

This time we are proud to present Juurakko, five incredibly talented musicians mixing finnish folk and blues with a skiffle instrumentation twist. They recently released their debut album “Lauluja Kuistilta” on the Inkoon Musiikki label, including this song, “Eipä Kasva Kaikki laulut” (translated “O Roots, Where Groweth Ye?”).

Kekkonen elää! #8
Juurakko: Eipä kasva kaikki laulut

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.facebook.com/studiokekkonen

juurakkoband.blogspot.fi
www.facebook.com/juurakkoband

Performed by Juurakko
Written by Minsku Tammela, lyrics trad, arranged by Juurakko
Kaisa Saarikorpi - Vocal, suitcase kick drum, Moomin mug
Eija Kankaanranta - Concert kantele
Minsku Tammela - Vocal, flower pot
Anna Wiksten - Vocal, karttu
Laura Kaartinen - Vocal, pump organ

Recorded by Mikko Raita & Julius Mauranen
Assistant engineers Arttu Aalto & Janne Riionheimo
Mixed by Mikko Raita

Video by Luomustudio
In association with Soundtools

About the recording by Mikko

Once again we opted to set up this live session to our studio lounge instead of the dedicated tracking room, because of the better space offered for the camera guys to work in. This means shuffling around a table and a few sofas but on the plus side the lounge does look nice as well!

The recording was a challenge. We recorded Juurakko’s album (including this song) at Kekkonen, but for the album we recorded instruments and vocals separately. This was partially for sound quality issues and partially to let the band focus on their individual performances better. So a real live recording was uncharted territory, also because the band’s collection of instruments is not of the tried-and-tested variety, and most of them keep swapping instruments from song to song.

Juurakko uses an instrument amplifier for the concert kantele when performing live but here we decided to start completely acoustic and see how it would work. After some discussion with the band we also decided to do this one without headphones, instead setting up 2 Genelec 1030 studio monitors as sidefills for the band if needed.

During soundcheck, it became obvious that the kantele was not audible enough for the whole band so we employed the monitors, giving the band a hint of the kantele. The instrument in question has a built-in stereo microphone system which we could utilize here with no risk of feedback in the monitoring, and it came in handy come mix time as well.

We picked up the kantele with 2 Audio-Technica 4050 microphones, but it soon became obvious that the mix would need a good amount of the BSS DI’d stereo line signal, as the kantele player Eija Kankaanranta was playing a special effects-y cloth-muted pattern on the high register, which is acoustically very quiet and the neighboring pump organ especially was bleeding a lot into the kantele mics. Nevertheless, we set up the mics as close as possible using a bidirectional polar pattern so we could get the real miked attack tone at least. The line signal would also end up handy for low end extension, as like in many Juurakko songs, the kantele is doubling as the bassline here as well.

Next in line (literally) we had Laura Kaartinen with the pump organ and vocal. For the pump organ we opted for two trusty Shure SM57’s directly above the sound holes which worked quite nicely. For Laura’s voice, we had found during the album recordings that our tube Neumann CMV 563’s worked well on her so it was an easy choice.

Anna Wiksten was playing the “karttu” which is basically a dented piece of wood originally used for doing laundry (or something along those lines). In Juurakko, Anna uses it both as a kind of Quiro as well as just clapping it like in this song. We picked up the attack of the karttu slap with a Audio-Technica 4081 ribbon mic which gave us perfect separation with it’s bidirectional polar pattern. For Anna’s voice we used the Audio-Technica 5040 high-end condenser mic for the first time and it did not dissappoint, in fact it could have been a good complement to her voice on the album as well.

Next to Anna we had Minsku playing a flower pot filled with small sleek stones with a nice “big maracas” type sound. We picked it up with a small-diaphragm vintage Neumann KM88 condenser, which also picked up Minsku’s handclaps nicely. Minsku’s voice got our 2nd Neumann CMV 563 which we used extensively on her vocals on the album as well.

Last but not least we had Kaisa Saarikorpi, clapping hands for the beginning of the song and playing an Arabia-made Moomin-themed coffee mug with a pencil later on (the Moomin characters are an essential part of the sound!). Both were picked up nicely by a second Audio-Technica 4081 ribbon. Kaisa also had a suitcase “drum” which she played with a kick drum pedal, which we captured with a AKG D112 kick drum mic. For the vocals, Kaisa got our crown jewel Neumann U48 tube condenser, used on most of her leads on the album as well.

To top things off we had two room mic pairs: An Audio-Techica 4050ST Mid-Side stereo mic close to the band at knee level, and a pair of AKG C 414 XLS’s in a wide omni AB setting further back.

The recording went smoothly after setting up, with the band doing a few takes searching for the perfect feel and soon nailing it. The Luomustudio crew recorded every take collecting extra shots to be used as they only used 2 cameras.

The mixdown, still by Mikko

Mixing down “Eipä kasva kaikki laulut” was a relatively straightforward process. I had to spend some time sculpting the kantele tone and balances to cope with the amount of pump organ and percussion bleed in the mics but other than that it was smooth sailing. To start, I employed a similar mix template explained in previous blogs with a “colouring” analog/digital master section as well as a collection of my most used effects plugins in a readymade virtual “rack”, but with the addition of some additional “desk sound” from the Slate VCC in the master and individual channels as well as Slate VTM “tape” on the master.

For the kantele, I just employed a hefty low end EQ boost to the DI signal to get the bass line really happening, and also added some high mids to both the DI and mic signals for presence on the high muted pattern which Eija plays for most of the song.

The pump organ got a similar treatment, a bit more bass and high mids, effectively scooping the mids slightly.

For the karttu, I ended up processing slightly more, trying to get a bit more “wood tone” out of the instrument. I compressed it somewhat heavily with the Massey CT5 and also limited the transient with a Waves L1 to try to even out the sharp attacks to be able to raise the volume a bit. I also boosted low mids, especially around the wood block’s own resonant note to bring it through the mix.

For the flower pot I just added some top end, but it was fairly present in the overall bleed so there was not much I could do to sculpt it anyway, luckily it sounded good in the room.

The Moomin coffee mug just needed some lows rolled off, it too was fairly present in the vocal mics and ambiences.

Kaisa’s kick drum was another difficult beast. “Au naturel” it sounded somewhat dull and mid-rangey. That’s obviously to be expected, the resonant “heads” on it are significantly thicker and more rigid than on a real kick drum. It does sound good in the room but the low end extension was not quite there for how nice everything else was sounding close miked, so I decided to trigger a hint of a sampled real kick drum (played quietly with lots of low end bloom) underneath it which did the trick quite nicely. For triggering I used Massey’s DRT and Toontrack’s Superior Drummer.

Both room mics were used with quite liberal midrange EQ cuts, I also used a bit of Waves S1 widening on the M/S pair.

For vocals, I did a similar treatment than on the album. Depending on the singer, a bit of de-essing and dynamic EQ:ing with the HOFA IQ-EQ was used, as well as mild individual compression with the Massey CT5 and group compression with the Softube Summit Audio TLA100 as well as further IQ-EQ on the group. The vocals were the only tracks getting artifical reverb, employing a mixture of my real EMT 140 Plate, Softube’s TSAR-1, Avid ReVibe and ValhallaDSP’s ValhallaVintageVerb. I decided here to keep the “room feel” of the picture so the reverb was mostly used subtly, just for a hint of sweetening.

To top things off I automated the vocals a bit section by section, enhancing the (always shifting) lead vocals and we could call it a mix! The whole mix was moderately limited with a Massey L2007 limiter as there was no separate mastering involved.

Setting up: Mikko adjusting Laura's vocal mic

Laura and Anna

57's

Laura helping with mic repositioning

Soundcheck is ready!

Arttu, Janne and Julius in the control room

Anna, Kaisa, Minsku & Luomustudio's Joonas and Sam listening

Preparing the intro materials

Shooting the intro

Channel list

Pictures by Luomustudio & Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #7 Delay Trees - "Perfect heartache" live at Studio Kekkonen

2014-10-10T01:22:00.000-07:00

Kekkonen elää! is back with a brand new live session with one of our all-time favourite groups, Delay Trees to celebrate the release of their latest record Readymade in Germany. Thanks again to our backers at Soundtools and the video guys at Luomustudio.

Kekkonen elää! #7

Delay Trees: Perfect heartache

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.delaytrees.com

Performed by Delay Trees
Written by Rami Vierula and Delay Trees
Rami Vierula Vocals, guitar
Lauri Järvinen Guitar
Sami Korhonen Bass
Onni Oikari Drums, backing vocals

Recorded by Julius Mauranen & Mikko Raita
Assistant engineer Arttu Aalto
Mixed by Julius Mauranen

Video by Luomustudio
In association with Soundtools

ABOUT THE SESSION

The thing I (Julius) love about working with great bands like Delay Trees is that when they show up, they bring their own special energy and quirky personality as well as their unique sound. I've worked with Delay Trees a lot, starting way back in 2009 when I mixed one track on their debut EP Soft Construction, I produced, recorded and mixed their eponymous first album and have worked on every Delay Trees release since, including Doze, Before I go go EP and their latest album Readymade, which was released early this year in Finland and today, 10.10.2014 in Germany by Soliti. Having said that, working with Delay Trees is always a great pleasure.

The song Perfect heartache was the first single of the new album and after some contemplating in prior to the session we ended up picking it for the live session. It's one of my favourite tracks off the new album and it was very nice working on it again (and also getting to record it the way I like). The band played four takes (plus one false start due to ProTools weirdness) and the keeper was take number two.

ABOUT THE RECORDING

We decided to record this session in our lounge, as we did with the earlier ones this year. Rami expressed a strong wish to be in the same room with the rest of the band - despite the obvious leakage from Onni's drums (and believe me, that was a LOT of leakage!) and having worked with them before, I knew this to be the most comfortable setting for Rami and the band, so that's what we went for.

To fight leakage I chose to record Rami's vocals with the Shure SM7 (through the Knif Audio V804 pre), but even then there was a lot of drums in the vocal mic. Rami's vocal style is very soft and I don't think anybody has played as loud as Onni in our lounge before, so that's a tough combination! As the lounge is not a dedicated recording space the acoustics weren't designed for medium loud drums. However, the leakage was the only real issue I had with the drum sound.

Also due to the leakage, we put Rami's guitar amps into our live room, Lauri's guitar amp into the office and Sami's bass cabinet in Mikko's control room. The cable run to Mikko's control room was 25-30 metres, so it's a blessing that Sami didn't have a combo and we could run it as a speaker level signal! Rami's guitar cable was long too, but thanks to the George L cables our great assistant Arttu soldered some weeks before there was no significant signal loss.

We picked up the drums with AKG D112 and Audio-Technica 4050 on kick, Shure SM57 on top and bottom snare, AKG C414 XLS's on toms (yes, with the -20dB pad on...), Neumann CMV 563's (into Knif V804) as overheads and Audio-Technica 4050's for the room. Onni's backing vocal mic was Sennheiser MD441.

Rami's guitar setup was a Roland Jazz Chorus in stereo for the classic, jangly sound and our Creamsound CS-1/6 for a fatter overdrive for the chorus. The Jazz Chorus was mic'd with two Audio-Technica 4081 ribbon mics and the Creamsound with an AxeTrak isolation cabinet (into GAP-73 pre), partly to prevent leakage, partly because we ran out of mic stands! This time around, Rami played his Fender Mustang instead of the loyal Rickenbacker. Lauri's guitar was picked up with the classic SM57 into a GAP-73 pre. Sami's bass cabinet was mic'd with a Sennheiser MD421. Most tracks went through the pres and fat Lundahl transformers of our MS Audiotron desk with no EQ and no compression at the recording stage.

ABOUT THE MIX

The mix of Perfect heartache was fun, but required quite a bit of work - again due to the leakage, the main issue being the drums leaking into the vocal mic.

The first thing I did was lower all the bits where Rami wasn't singing by about 30dB with clip gain and filter out as much of the top and bottom end that I could comfortably do. This already helped a lot, but the snare was still pretty loud and sounded a little messy bleeding into the vocal mic. Also, as the dream-poppy quality of Delay Trees and the vocal on this particular song demands a healthy dose of Roland Space Echo (featured in the intro of the video too!) and Knif Audio K.Verb (i.e. tape delay and spring reverb), the snare leaking into the vocal mic wasn't a great thing. So I ended up setting up two compressors - one regular, one multiband with a sidechain feed from the snare, ducking the vocal mic briefly by about 6dB every time Onni hit the snare (a very nice snare by the way). In solo, the vocal sounded pretty obviously processed, but with the music it worked like a charm! Onni's backing vocal got a similar treatment.

I also duplicated the vocal track with all its processing for a send for the Space Echo and edited that track even more drastically to get rid of any non-vocal signal in the effects send.

There was other sidechaining going on as well as to make the vocal stand out a little more. I compressed both the reverb return and the 2-bus master a little with a sidechain feed from the vocal. The former was to have the reverb signal duck a little when Rami sings for more intelligibility, but without losing the nice tail of the spring reverb. The latter is a somwhat special technique where the vocal ducks the whole mix, but so that it's also within the mix... It's more simple than it sounds and the bottom line is that it actually works. There was more master processing going on, notably our desk's stereo channel going into the Gyraf G-SSL compressor. This time around I ended up using the Slate Virtual Tape Machine with very mild settings instead of our Otari, simply because the Otari's settings were set to such hot levels that it messed up the cymbal sound, making the hihat in the chorus too washy.

Other than that the mix was very pleasant and fun to mix! I used our lovely MXR Dual Limiter on the drum bus. It's a very strange compressor in terms of design (it uses the unusual pulse width modulation-topology), but sounds punchy and open with practically any settings. There was a dbx 160X on the kick and snare too and a Rantanen LA-4 as a "send parallel" compressor for all instruments in the mix, but not the vocal. The other processing for the drums was pretty basic EQ, Waves API for boosting. The bass had a little compression (Softube FET), a little extra distortion (Soundtoys Decapitator) and a small amount of subharmonic action from the dbx 120XP. Sami played his vintage Fender Jazz bass and the sound was great to begin with. Both guitars sounded great to begin with and aside from a touch of Softube FET and some EQ, it was mostly about getting the automation right. There was also a Slate VCC Channel on all audio tracks of the mix for some softening niceness.

Rami, SM-7

Onni and Julius miking the drums

Julius, Sami & the Jazz bass and Arttu

Lauri with pedals...

The Audio-Technica 50th anniversary 4050!

Gazing at the shoes

Kekkonen elää! #6 Sakilaiset - "Poppia" live at Studio Kekkonen

2014-04-30T03:41:00.002-07:00

To celebrate the First of May (not by coincidence this time), our sixth Kekkonen elää! session is here! Brought to you by Soundtools and Luomustudio. This time something completely different!

Kekkonen elää! #6

Sakilaiset: Poppia

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.facebook.com/sakilaiset

Performed and written by Sakilaiset

Recorded by Mikko Raita & Julius Mauranen
Mixed by Janne Riionheimo
Video by Luomustudio
In association with Soundtools

ABOUT THE BAND AND THE SESSION

Sakilaiset was founded in 2002 and early on played and sang songs in Helsinki slang. After that the repertoire of the band has broadened, ranging from 150 year-old couplets to new “rautalanka”. The band is a combination of “rillumarei” music, a schlager orchestra (up to 12 musicians on the stage) and a folk band with a crude flavour. Some related artists might be M.A. Numminen from Finland and Max Raabe from Germany as well as Tuomari Nurmio and for the next album also Nick Cave. As a band member and the engineer of the band, I (Janne) will write something about the song and the live session.

As a band, we rehearse, perform and release music quite randomly, but we are now recording our third album at Studio Kekkonen. The song “Poppia” is one of the new tracks. The song is actually 5 years old, it started out from lead singer Olvi’s lyrics for which guitar player Pate made a tune, which was then finalized together in one jamming session. It became a strange combination of modern couplet, humppa and a pop-jingle. Slightly annoying like every pop-song!

We had booked studio Kekkonen a few weeks before this live session for the recording of five songs, but unfortunately our drummer Joni had an other gig so he couldn’t play at the session. We considered different options and ended up with a peculiar one: let’s hire our friend Jönkka to play banjo instead of having a drummer! So when we got to the studio we arranged Poppia for acoustic guitar, banjo, double bass and keys. After a few takes Jönkka found Juppu’s Yamaha RX-7, a drum machine from 80’s, and got an idea of adding some tom fills to the song. The song was already recorded without a click so we overdubbed the fills real time with the clumsy buttons. When it was time to perform “Poppia” for the Kekkonen elää! live video our drummer was again unavailable, so we programmed the drum track with the RX-7.

ABOUT THE RECORDING

For the live video recording we wanted a cozy and intimate setup in the lounge where everybody could hear each other without headphones. However, we needed to hear the drum machine track and the organ so headphone monitoring was still necessary. Although the playing balance was pretty good, we considered different options for the positioning of the instruments in order to minimize leakage. Beforehand we were thinking that the banjo would be problematic, but fortunately the tone of Jönkka’s instrument is not very loud. Actually the most problematic instrument was the kazoo!

The mic setup was as follows: An Audio-Technica AT4080 on Jönkka’s banjo, an AKG 414 XLS on Pate’s acoustic guitar and a Neumann U48 on Antti’s double bass. Antti and Pate had also electric “piezos” in their instruments, which were recorded just in case. Pate was also singing to an AKG 414 XLS while playing so we used figure-of-eight pickup patterns both on his guitar and vocal mics. Antti’s backing vocals were picked up with a Shure SM7B and Janne sang and kazoo’d into an Audio-Technica AT4047. We used two tracks for Janne’s Wurlitzer: DI and an amp, which was placed in Janne’s office and picked up with a SM57. Janne also used one of the studio’s weird organs, which was pitched realtime up by 30 cents in ProTools. Olvi was singing into a Audio-Technica AT5040 which was recorded though our Knif Audio V804 mic preamp. Another Knif channel was used for the banjo. The other channels went through our customized MS Audiotron Multimix desk (R.I.P Matti Sarapaltio 23.4.2014).

The song was played five times and the arrangement changed slightly in each take. Pate found a different more open position in his guitar at the last take and Jönkka changed his banjo lines also slightly.

Olvi, Juppu, Pate and Antti behind the Shure SM7B.

Pate with two AKG 414 XLSs.

Jönkka in front of AT4080.

Janne in front of AT4047.

Jönkka, Janne, AT5040, 2xAT4081, AT4080 and the RX7 on the floor

ABOUT THE MIX

The guideline for mixing Sakilaiset has previously been to “sound old”. Our previous release was a recording of J. Alfred Tanner’s couplets from early 1900’s so it wasn’t necessary to sound modern in any way, so the album didn’t have much high or low end and the sound was quite lo-fi. Our next album will be a collection of our own songs so the esthetics might change a little, but it will not probably sound too hifi. That was also the guideline for the video mix, which will be added to our album later on, with possibly some overdubs.

Although we didn’t have real drums I had a kind of a normal setup for the RX7. The distinctive tom fills were compressed with a RComp and equalized with a Digi EQ III (450 Hz cut and boost in the low and high ends). RX7 claps transients were slightly smoothened by a transient designer and mildly compressed with a DBX 160 (needle hardly moving). The bass drum had a low cut filter to get rid of the overwhelming sub bass and the shaker and the snare had a mild top boost. Our Stocktronics plate was used as a reverb as well as a room IR for the toms, and I also added parallel compression to the RX7 track with our Knif Audio Vari-mu compressor.

Bass channel (combination of DI and U48 tracks) had Digi EQ III, RComp, C1 and URS emulation of Neve to boost the pluck at 1,3 kHz. The banjo was compressed with a second channel of our 1178. No EQ was used. Acoustic guitar was mildly compressed with a LA4 and the top end as well as mid-range at 1,5 kHz was boosted with Waves API 550. Some distortion was added to the Wurlitzer with a Softube FET compressor and some mud at 350Hz was cut with a Digi EQ III, and some presence was added with URS Neve emulation. The organ had the before-mentioned +30 cent pitch, a chorus, Digi EQ III and Soundtoys Microshift to make it stereo. Kazoo was compressed mildly with a Digirack Compressor that was already on the track.

Olvi’s vocals had a little bit more processing. First there was a 3,5dB cut at 260Hz as well as very narrow and deep notch at 2,65 kHz to cut the unpleasant mouth or throat resonance peak. Then it was compressed with LA2 and 1178 and the high end was boosted with our new Waves API 550 plugin which was purchased just for that purpose. Before we had a Focusrite’s Liquid mix which has pretty good emulations of API and NEVE EQs, but we are about to upgrade our computer and update our OS (now 10.6.8) and unfortunately our Liquid mix won’t be supported anymore. In the end the vocal track was de-essed with a RDeEsser. The lyrics in the chorus have lot of p's and somehow some of the p's didn't have so much energy and sounded more like k's in the mix, which changed the meaning of the lyrics (for instance shoppia sounded like shokkia and koppia sounded like kokkia) so I had to reinforce them by replacing them by double p's from the word poppia.

I used our Slate digital virtual channel and mix bus in vocal tracks as well as some other tracks. I have often used Waves C1 with side chain in split mode on Olvi’s vocals to control the 2,5-3 kHz harshness especially when he is singing loud, but now I didn’t have to use it. Was it the AT5040 microphone or was it the feng shui in Olvi’s throat? I think it's the combination of different factors but alternative microphones are always worth trying - especially eccentric designs with four rectangular capsules!

Backing vocals were sent to a stereo bus which had Digi Comp, Digi EQ and a Massey tape head plugin in its inserts.

Master chain was our MS Audiotron desk stereo channel with master EQ -> G-SSL -> Otari MTR-12 1/4” tape machine.

The ambience was recorded with a pair of AT4081 ribbon mics in Blumlein setup. The not so optimal balance in the ambience track made the effective use of the track difficult so I played also with few IR samples to get a suitably balanced muddle for the mix.

These days I do studio work quite infrequently and for me this was the first time when I mixed with our new FAR active studio monitors so I felt little uncertain about the mix at the start, but after a few versions I was happy - so here it is, the song of the first of may 2014. Sakilaiset and Poppia!

Our new FAR monitors are being installed.

Kekkonen elää! #5 Nuria - "The great escape" live at Studio Kekkonen

2014-02-13T22:16:00.001-08:00

To celebrate Valentine's day (or perhaps by coincidence), our fifth Kekkonen elää! session is here! Brought to you by Soundtools and Luomustudio.

Kekkonen elää! #5

Nuria: The great escape

Our guest this time around Nuria may not be a household name (yet!), but the trio only released their debut album "Winter's end" on Rockadillo / Zen Master Records in late 2013. The recordings began already back in 2007 and after a somewhat extended period of waiting for the right moment to finish it, Mikko entered the picture, mixed the album and helped the band shop for a label, which resulted in Nuria and Rockadillo finding each other!

It's a great track and we're proud to present it! Enjoy!

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.nuria.fi

Performed by Nuria
Written by Nuria

Recorded by Mikko Raita & Julius Mauranen
Mixed by Mikko Raita
Video by Luomustudio
In association with Soundtools

ABOUT THE RECORDING

This was the first time we've recorded drums in the lounge and although the drummer Pekka Saarikorpi's dynamics on "The great escape" are on the soft end of the scale, it's not the most straightforward setup to have next to a finger-picked acoustic guitar and vocals (Markus Kahila) and a cello (Tuukka Helminen), so there was an element of challenge! (We kinda like that, though.)

The drums setup was the following: AKG D112 and C414 XLS on the bass drum, C  414 on the top and a Sennheiser MD421 on the bottom of the (very large) low tom. We had an Audio-Technica   AT4047 on the Djembe / "snare drum”.   Another 4047 was on the top, and a Sennheiser MD441 on the bottom on the mounted hand Cajon (the inverted pyramid-like wooden thing!). Our Neumann   CMV 563’s were as overheads and were recorded through a Knif V804 preamp   and into ProTools through RME ADI-8 DS converters. The other drum channels went through the customised MS Audiotron Multimix desk.

On the acoustic guitar we first tried the Neumann U48 in figure eight, but the leakage from the drums was overbearing. We ended up using a an Audio-Technica ATM350cw clip-on mic attached to the body with some gaffer tape (the mic is inteded to clip onto a tom, sax, violin or similar, but it worked like a charm!) and as a safety we recorded the piezo DI from the guitar. The AT was recorded through a Knif V804 as well. The song usually features a delay pedal on the guitar, but we opted to use a delay plug-in in the monitoring instead, to have better control over the delay.  

On the cello we ended up setting up both an Audio-Techica AT4081 and our trusty U48 in figure of eight (freed from acoustic guitar duty) as alternatives, as well as 2 DI lines, pre effects and post Tuukka’s Line6 POD used for octave and delay effects. The mics were positioned with the null facing towards the drumkit to minimise leakage.

Markus' vocals were recorded with the trusty Shure SM7B through the remaining Knif channel.

There was a pair of ambience mics too, surprisingly very useable and useful Behringer ECM-8000 omni mics (their only real downside is the noise floor, but it rarely becomes a problem when there's a drumkit around).

The hand cajon setup.

Cello - AT 4081, Neumann U48 and two DI feeds.

Markus, ATM350 and the elegant gaffer tape solution.

As you can see the ambience mics in the back point upwards. Just to leave a little mystique.

The drums setup.

ABOUT THE MIXING OF "The great escape" (from Mikko)

In the beginning, "The great escape" looked like quite a difficult mix to pull off due to the fact that the drumset was right beside the cello and especially the softly picked acoustic guitar - but that was to be expected when we decided to do it as a true one room live take.

  To begin with, I again imported in my trusty master section and effects, opting for summing amp crucnh via my Vintagedesign SU1 summing unit, as well as enabling Pro Tools’ own HEAT processing on a moderate bright setting.   I started with the easy part, mixing the drums. Pekka’s drumset sounded beatiful in the room and very little needed to be done to the tracks except for balances and basic EQ. I started off by adding some parallel compression via my trusty Knif Vari-Mu as well as a tiny hint of parallel bite from a EMI TG12143 plugin limiter. Then I proceeded to slightly tidy up the low end and midrange on the tracks. The bass drum was very resonant so I cut a little 90Hz out of it, as well as clearing some low mids from the second bass drum setup as a low tom. For the snare drum- like djembe I ended up boosting the lows to have some more body and adding a hint of my beloved EMT 140 plate. The overheads got a tiny midrange dip and some high end boost from the Softube Trident A-range. The only thing that needed more processing was the small and relatively quiet hand Cajon played in the verses. I ended up muting the track completely in the loud sections and added a liberal low end boost to the bottom mic to make it sound slightly larger. It also got some EMT Plate. I added a modicum of the omni ambiences flat to the mix and the drum sound was done - keep in mind, that we did have quite a bit of drum ambience in the other mics as well!  

The cello sounded very good but it indeed contained quite a bit of drum spill, though not bad sounding due to the quality mics used in figure of eight. We were undecided between the ribbon and the U48 during recording and ended up keeping both which was just as well, as I ended up using both mics muting them in sections. I found that the AT ribbon had slightly less bleed so I used it in the loud intro and verses where Tuukka was playing a bass line in combination of some line sound. But in the bowed chorus I found the U48 to have a more pleasing top end so I switched over to that. Tuukka also had some effects on in the song. In the intro and first verse I used the post FX line where he had a +1/-1 octaver sound, but in the later stages where he used just a delay I switched to the clean DI and recreated the delay as a stereo version.   The cello received moderate EQ and some group compression via a Softube Summit TLA-100A plugin. I also added some plate and Reverb One to the cello for a similar sound as what I used on the album version of the song. The delay used was a Soundtoys Echoboy, automated to be used only in the parts Tuukka had his own delay on.  

The acoustic guitar sound was very quiet and even though we managed to capture quite a bit of it due to the drastic taped-on goosenec hypercardioid, I ended up using roughly 50% line signal in the loud parts, but automated the mic up in the intro and choruses when leakage permitted. It was also EQ:d and compressed liberally with a Massey CT5 and Softube Summit TLA-100A. For the song’s signature delay I again used an Echoboy.

 The vocal was relatively bleed-free and sounded very nice already. I used some Waves RDeEsser as well as mild EQing and HOFA IQ-EQ dynamic EQing to clear it up a little as well as compressing it with a Softube FET compressor. I added some EMT plate and Softube’s TSAR-1 for reverb, as well as quite a bit of Echoboy delay fed into the TSAR, automated from section to section.

  After a bit of volume rides I sent a reference mix to the band. They were very pleased and in the end I only went back to do a very minor recall, taking just a hint of the vocal delay off in the choruses and lowering the djembe “snare drum” a bit. The whole mix took surprisingly little time in the end, not so difficult after all!

Kekkonen elää! #4 Joakim Berghäll & Aki Rissanen - "Bamboozle!" live at Studio Kekkonen

2014-01-17T00:48:00.000-08:00

New year, new Kekkonen elää! session! Happy 2014 to everybody from us at Studio Kekkonen and our associates Soundtools and Luomustudio.

Kekkonen elää! #4

Joakim Berghäll & Aki Rissanen: Bamboozle!

This time we're proud to present you another jazz duet session, this time the fantastic saxophonist Joakim Berghäll and someone you know from our previous session, great pianist and keyboardist Aki Rissanen! The duet was - conveniently for all! - recorded on the same day as the Verneri Pohjola & Aki Rissanen session.

The duo collaborated on Joakim's Dialogues I album (released in september last year, it's first in a series of duet albums) on the track "Bamboozle!" which they also perform here, although with a slightly different choice of instruments: Joakim plays baritone sax instead of the alto. Also, on the album Aki plays grand piano.

Enjoy!

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.joakimberghall.com
www.akirissanen.com

Performed by Joakim Berghäll & Aki Rissanen
Written by Joakim Berghäll

Recorded by Mikko Raita & Julius Mauranen
Mixed by Mikko Raita
Video by Luomustudio
In association with Soundtools

ABOUT THE RECORDING

The performance was pretty relaxed, Joakim & Aki laid down a couple of takes and chose their favourite. As this was a duet with only a single instrument each and no multitasking, it was a focused and concise session.

The setup was very similar to Verneri's & Aki's session (watch and read more about it here), as a matter of fact the piano setup was identical: A-B pair of Neumann CMV-563's in the back, a pair of AT4081 ribbon mics in the front side aiming at the hammers and a pair of workhorse SM-57's very close to the body of the piano in the back. Neumanns and AT's went through Knif Audio V804 mic preamps of which we have two at the studio.

Joakim's baritone sax was miked with our vintage crown jewel Neumann U48 just above the bell and a supplementary side mic (Audio-Technica 4047) to pick up some more body.

There were a pair of ambience mics: AKG C414 XLS behind Joakim and Line Audio CM3's facing away from the piano (see pictures!).

ABOUT THE MIXING OF "BAMBOOZLE!" (by Mikko)

  The mix here is quite similar to the one we already documented earlier about mixing “Hyperballad”, recorded the same day and with the same piano recording, and again with wonderful world class musicians just doing their thing.

  I actually started the mix by importing some mixer settings from the “Hyperballad” session, though obviously it had to be tweaked to work here where the whole arrangement is just the piano and sax. I kept the same master section (Vintagedesign SU-1, McDsp AC-1, Waves SSL, parallel DUY DaD Tape & L2007) as well as moderate HEAT processing.  

For the piano, I had to tone tone down the large low end boost I had created for the prepared low end on Hyperballad for a more natural upright sound, though in the end Aki ended up requesting slightly more low end hype - their album version was recorded with a quality grand piano after all!   To sweeten things I again used a hint of my EMT 140 Plate and Valhalladsp’s ValhallaVintageVerb, as well as some room mics. Here I ended up favoring the 414’s behind the sax despite having the more piano-centric Line Audios available as well - the 414's just had a nice combined room tone.   Due to the full acoustic nature of this track I ended up dropping the KNIF Vari-Mu parallel compression I had on the piano in the previous mix, though I did keep slight group compression on it from the Masssey CT5.  

For Joakim's baritone, I ended up using both mics with the low side mic -10db, from which I also cut some low mids to make it less boomy. I then grouped these and added very mild compression with both the Massey CT5 (actually added already during recording) and a Softube TLA-100A, as well as just tiny midrange dips in the 750 and 1900 Hz ranges. To “top” things off I added a few dBs at 10k on the Softube Trident A-Range.

  For spatial effects I again used the prerecorded Stocktronics plate but also added some EMT 140 Plate as well as Softube TSAR & ValhallaVintageVerb, both at a darkish setting and hovering around the 2,5-3s range. I also used the “1970s” color preset on the Valhalla.  

From there, it was just a matter of balancing the 2 instruments with very small rides, mostly to get the end of the piano solo and the transition to the sax solo to really gel. I wish all mixes were this simple and enjoyable!

Merry Christmas! Hyvää Joulua!

2013-12-19T00:01:00.001-08:00

With this video from Janne's band Sakilaiset Studio Kekkonen (with Soundtools and Luomustudio) would like to wish everyone a happy and peaceful Christmas!

Tämän Sakilaisten videon myötä Studio Kekkonen kumppaneineen haluaa toivottaa kaikille hyvää ja rauhallista joulua!

Kekkonen elää! #3 Verneri Pohjola & Aki Rissanen - "Hyperballad" live at Studio Kekkonen

2013-11-22T01:08:00.000-08:00

We (Studio Kekkonen with our associates Soundtools and Luomustudio) are proud and excited to present you the beginning of "Season 2" of our live series Kekkonen Elää!

Kekkonen elää! #3

Verneri Pohjola & Aki Rissanen: Hyperballad

Extraordinary Finnish trumpet player Verneri Pohjola and equally extraordinary pianist and keyboardist Aki Rissanen are no strangers at our studio: Mikko has worked with both on numerous occasions, with Verneri starting way back in 2005 with the second Quintessence album "5 AM" and since then on a fairly regular basis. Curiously enough, Julius recorded Verneri even further back in 1993 in one of his earliest studio experiences, though the recording (un)fortunately doesn't exist any longer!
Verneri Pohjola's latest album "Ancient History", featuring Aki Rissanen as pianist was recorded and mixed by Mikko and released in 2012 on the ACT label.

The track the duo chose to perform is Björk's "Hyperballad" which is also featured on the aforementioned album.

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.verneripohjola.com
www.akirissanen.com
Performed by Verneri Pohjola & Aki Rissanen
Written by Björk, Nellee Hooper & Marius De Vries

Recorded by Mikko Raita & Julius Mauranen
Mixed by Mikko Raita
Video by www.luomustudio.fi
In association with www.soundtools.fi

ABOUT THE RECORDING

As jazz musicians generally feel most comfortable playing in the same space and leakage was not an overwhelming issue with trumpet and piano, we decided to record in the lounge. It's naturally quite a live-souding space so we damped the room with heavy curtains and a rug from our live room. After the initial setup of the room was done, it was time for some miking (and DI'ing!). Mikko - who was first-in-command of the session - presented what he had in mind for the recording and we set it up all together. Once everything was up and running, Verneri and Aki laid down three takes and picked the last one to be the keeper. Sounds easy, eh!

Verneri's trumpet was picked up with an Audio-Technica AT4081 ribbon mic (through our MS Audiotron desk) which he uses both live and in the studio and - conveniently for us - brought along his own. There was a looper pedal involved in the equation with a send from the control room that took a little while to set up, but during the keeper take it was not used. The performance is obviously largely improvised so there's always a chance that things can (and will!) change. It's an organic process by nature and the technology is there to make it happen, not dictate the rules. So no looper this time, folks!

Our Yamaha U3 upright piano was miked with three stereo pairs: Vintage Neumann CMV-563's in an AB formation in the back, a pair of the very same AT4081's as with the trumpet (provided by Soundtools) in front of the hammers to pick up the attack of it and a pair of the humble-yet-legendary Shure SM57's (AB as well) right in the back of the piano to pick up some body (this actually works like a charm). The Neumanns and Audio-Technicas had Knif Audio V804's for preamps and the 57's had Rantanen SSL clone pres.

There were two pairs of ambience mics: a main pair of AKG C414's (in omni) plus an extra pair (convenient little Line Audio CM3's) behind the piano, facing away from it to pick up some room ambience as the main ambience pair was a bit trumpet heavy.

Aside from the piano, Aki had a Micromoog for bass sounds that's been slightly modified to increase the filter range to the same as the Minimoog. The bottom end is indeed impressive. He also had a Native Instruments Kore 2 software with the controller as a platform for soft synths: the Reaktor GoBox drum machine with effects that he tweaks during the performance and Steampipe 2 with a layer of the FM8 synth. The synth is played with the tiny Akai LPK-25, which fits absolutely anywhere!

Verneri triggered sounds from his laptop using Ableton Live with the Push controller - the thing with all the nice blinking lights that's actually a pretty powerful music-making tool! Verneri got this from Soundtools a few days prior to the session to get used to it.

To pick up the electronic elements we had a pile of DI's (BSS and BBE's we got from Soundtools).

ABOUT THE MIX (from Mikko)

Mixing of Aki’s and Verneri’s duo performance was quite a straightforward affair.

I opened the tracks of the session up into my “mixer” which is in fact a ProTools template that incorporates a hybrid in-the-box/analog master section as well as a collection of my most used effects as a ready-to-go virtual rack. It also has interfacing for my analog equipment.

The sound of the master section is quite important for me to get things to gel and make it “like a record” - I have a few different setups I pick depending on the project but here I went for the Vintagedesign SU1 Neve- style summing amp pushed quite hard, in addition to some additional mix buss push from a McDsp Analog Channel 1.

The whole mix buss was compressed gently vith a Waves SSL “quad” compressor which I have found quite faithful to the original. I used some additional “analog modeling” in the form of DUY’s DaD Tape, mixed just slightly in via parallel routing (it is a quite drastic effect if not done like this).

I also added Avid’s own HEAT processing to the inputs of all audio tracks, with moderate/bright settings. I then finalized the master section with a Massey L2007 lookahead limiter with a conservative setting to apply mild limiting/normalization as this track was not going to be mastered separately.

For piano, I ended up using a mix of all of the mics, with the CMV/ribbon combo most prominent and a hint of the dynamic body mics and the “piano ambience”. I applied slight group compression via a Massey CT5 and used HOFA’s IQ-EQ V3 dynamic EQ to soften up the midrange. I also ended up with a quite liberal 6db or so EQ boost with Avid’s own EQ in the low end to emphasize the prepared piano bass sounds - here I needed to jump a few hoops to make the low end slightly more “grand piano-like” but the end result worked nicely.

I also added some parallel compression from my beautiful Knif Audio Vari-Mu compressor (Serial number #002!), as well as reverb from my beloved EMT 140 plate reverb as well as Valhalladsp’s ValhallaVintageVerb.

Aki’s Micromoog bass synth went almost unprocessed, save just a hint of added high mid Avid EQ.

For Aki’s laptop, I ended automating some low and high EQ bands as well as using a bit of Waves’ C4 multiband compression, as all of Aki’s virtual instruments were premixed to 2 channels and I wanted to emphasize certain elements at key spots, otherwise it was left untreated with just some volume automation.

For Verneri’s trumpet I used slightly more processing even though his source sound in combination with the AT ribbon mic is already very, very good. I added just a tiny bit of saturation and crunch via Soundtoys’ Devil-Loc Deluxe, and again used Massey’s CT5 for slight leveling as well as a mild HOFA IQ-EQ V3 dynamic midrange cut, topping it off with some high end boost from Softube’s Trident A-range EQ as well as some more high end and mid tidying via Avid’s own EQ.

For reverbs and delays, I had a prerecorded track from control room 2’s (Juppu’s and Janne’s) Stocktronic plate, but I used that just a bit because it was obviously pre-mix processing - due to my mix compression it ended up as a nice touch where it gets comparatively more loud when Verneri plays louder. But for the majority of spatial effects I again went for a combination of the EMT 140 plate as well as the ValhallaVintageVerb, adding a custom-made TL Space “stereo spring reverb” impulse I often use (Especially if control room 2’s Knif "K.Verb" Spring Reverb is not readily available which was the case here), topping it off with a hint of tape-like delay from Sountoys’ Echoboy.

After a few hours of mixing, and some passess of volume automation (also via my trusty ICON D-Command) I sent a version to Verneri and Aki who suggested a few minor balance tweaks to Aki’s laptop track, and after seeing the edited video we adjusted a few more balances but all in all, it was a quite swift mix despite some of the “tricks” employed.

www.studiokekkonen.com
www.facebook.com/studiokekkonen
www.twitter.com/studiokekkonen

Hello blog, sorry I've been away.

2013-11-16T10:16:00.000-08:00

Well well well... It seems like a year goes by VERY fast and - shamefully - I've not managed to write a single post into this blog in 2013. Sorry about that, dear readers.

Fortunately, that's changing now, as I type!

It's been a busy 12 months (obviously) and a lot of great music has been made at the studio helped by the bunch of us. There's been some new winds blowing, but the core of our operation remains very close to what it's always been: produce, mix and record music to the best standards of artistic and technical quality!

More about that later, for there will be a time for an epic end-of-year-post, but it's not quite yet (the year ends in 45 days, let's see when we get closer to that!).

Now, we've got news for you:

Our Kekkonen elää! Live at Studio Kekkonen series is continuing!

We recently did not one, not two, but three sessions for your enjoyment and sooner rather than later there will be even more of them!

What we learned from the first two (Matti Johannes Koivu and Suvi Isotalo) is that it's a good idea to keep the production as simple as possible so this time we teamed up with Luomustudio (who are experts in keeping things simple and elegant) as well as our friends and neighbours Soundtools, both of whom are very excited to be part of this!

The first session will be online soon, stay tuned by following us on social media!

www.facebook.com/studiokekkonen
www.twitter.com/studiokekkonen

Julius

Studio Kekkonen five... no, SIX years this month!

2012-11-29T03:34:00.000-08:00

Well, well, what have we here? A finished blog post to celebrate our five-year journey THAT I FORGOT TO PUBLISH!

Yes, I am retarded, thanks for asking.

So here it is, our 5th anniversary blog, scheduled to have been published 16.11.2011. but worth a read anytime! For example now - to celebrate our sixth anniversary! A year goes by quickly these days...

This month we have a reason to celebrate! Studio Kekkonen in its current location in Vallila was officially opened in 2006 - five years (edit: SIX years) ago!

In the grander scheme of things, five years isn't actually such a long time when compared to studios like Finnvox (since 1965) or Abbey Road (since the dawn of time, more precisely 1931). However, five years is nonetheless a milestone and in today's turbulent state of the music industry, we're fortunate enough to celebrate it - during the time at least three big studios in Finland have closed before reaching the mark. And what the heck, it's also a great excuse to have a party! (Shocking pictures will appear in this blog and on our Facebook Page!)

During the past five years we've recorded and mixed dozens and dozens of albums, singles, EP's and whatnot. Our goal since the very beginning was to run a studio where the first and foremost goal is to deliver excellent work. We've worked hard to keep that high standard and raise the bar constantly as we go. Initially we invested an awful lot of time, money, effort and good will of close friends into building the studio itself into what it is - a place where technical excellence meets a vibe and mood that make artists feel comfortable. Since then we've invested even more time, effort and money to constantly expand our collection of gear and further sharpen our skills and widen our horizons. A recording studio is an ever-evolving creature that's never truly finished. It's always in motion. (That also means it's always pretty heavy on the wallet, but let's not go there!)

It's been a great five years. We've had the continuing privilege to work with some of the brightest, most talented and influential artists and musicians of our time. There have been countless priceless, inspired, breathtaking moments within these walls. Stuff I used to dream of as a kid. Things I will never forget, however demented I may become. I may only speak for myself but Mikko and Janne would agree.

And speaking of Mikko and Janne, it's been a true privilege to work with and around them for the past five years, and I'm equally looking forward to following years. I could not imagine better studio partners (especially now that even Mikko makes tasty coffee!). I love you guys. <snif> <Cue: "We are the world">

Of course it's not all gone like in the movies. It's an unforgiving line of work to be in and running a studio in the 21st century isn't the easiest of tasks and as said above, the fact that we're still here is worth a little celebration. It's been a combination of hard work, stubborn determination, good relationships with our clients, colleagues and friends, moral support from our families and of course - sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time in the right circumstances.

But to elaborate more on the subject of what makes it hard to run a studio these days, I give you a short(ish) view on the state of things in our world:

The past five years (and much longer of course, but we zoom in to the last half a decade now) have marked a big change in the music and recording industry: record sales have dropped from poor to alarming to near-catastophic, digital sales has picked up too slowly, low-revenue streaming services have made something of a breakthrough to further ridicule professional music-makers, recording budgets have diminished - as has the number of major label projects each year. Many fine small record labels have called it quits, fallen into catatonia or have been swallowed by the majors, which are currently in the process of becoming a trio.

The structure of the business has changed. The focus is not on the music or the record, but on things like merchandise, publishing, product placement, marketing, shareholders' interests, etc. Naturally, those are not new things and have been on the agenda for long, but the emphasis seems to have shifted to that direction quite a bit too much.

At the same time, more music is being made available than ever before. While the business side of music shrinks and changes shape and artists (and everybody else for that matter) look for new ways to make it possible to do music for a living, the actual need to communicate with the world through the means of recorded music has not disappeared anywhere. Nor has the will to listen to music (or "consume" it, as number-crunchers like to call it, that's a rubbish word).

Also, the miniaturisation and even further decreased cost of recording equipment has really brought recording tools of seemingly acceptable quality to the masses. The latest addition being Garageband for iPad and iPhone - a production studio available in your pocket immediately for 4€. That's really somehting that was beyond imagination in 2006 (not to mention 2001). That's real democratisation. Equal opportunities. Whether it's a good or bad thing in terms of music is a subject that's out of the scope of this blog, but the discussion goes on wild in all sorts of other places. But the truth is that bedrooms, rehearsal spaces and all sorts of smelly cellars have filled with Chinese-made recording equipment that allows recording at semi-acceptable quality (very much acceptable in the right hands!).

Audio software and hardware developers are catering for the home studio users to sell huge quantities of less-than-ideal products. It's more about how the GUI of a plug-in looks like than what the audio sounds like. Impression is everything. Quality, reliability and musicality of gear is secondary to cost and instant availability of a huge number of ready-made solutions ("Just add water!") and cheap shortcuts to somebody else's ideas.

All of the aforementioned things have affected the recording business directly. Many artists have given up, many studios have closed down, many engineers and producers have moved to healthier sectors of the business or changed careers completely. Competition has become tougher, average prices per studio day has been pushed down as hobbyists and semi-pros compete of the same clients who have less and less money to spend. Time spent in professional recording studios has decreased and more emphasis has been given to post-processing and production work (in the aforementioned grotty cellars).

Am I painting a grim picture of the state of our industry or what?

Honestly, all of the above may sound like moaning, but it's really not meant as that. On the contrary, I'm actually quite content with the way things are. The fact that a lot of music is made and an increasing amount of it independently produced is not at all a bad thing for us. It has its good and bad sides, just like the old model of the majors producing and funding records in their own ways.

I'm happy we've made it this far, it's sure been one hell of a ride. Also, it looks very much like we're not going anywhere for the time being. I'm sure there will be demand in the future for a bunch of guys doing a great job recording, producing and mixing music. As far as we know, music's not going anywhere and as long as there is any point in putting it in recorded form, there is a good chance that someone will want to work on it with another one who shares a passion for it. A person with a work ethic, professional pride, ambition, musical sense, a whole lot of creative madness, common sense, great ears and lots of experience. A person a lot like us.

Business models change, client bases change, styles and fashions and economics and hairstyles and tools change, as do a lot of other things, but the essence of music and the love for it are not likely to change.

And if it will, I reckon it'll take a lot longer than another five years.

Happy (sixth) birthday, Studio Kekkonen!

Julius

Kekkonen Elää! #2 Suvi Isotalo Live at Studio Kekkonen

2012-09-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

We're proud to present you:

Kekkonen Elää! Live at Studio Kekkonen #2

Due to unforeseen circumstances we couldn't "quite" keep the pace we originally intended with the sessions (one roughly every two-three months), but we nevertheless are definitely going to do more sessions - hopefully a bit more frequently! We have some goodies planned for this fall - more about it a little later. Meanwhile, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter (we're @studiokekkonen and I'm @juliusmauranen).

So to the session! This time around we had the amazing Suvi Isotalo and her band (the great Timo Kämäräinen and Olli Krogerus) do not one, but two songs! What a great bonus! Suvi obviously has been mentioned here before as I (Julius) wrote a lengthy post about the making of Suvi's second album "P.S. Maj'lle" that was released last fall on the Sound Of Finland label. For those not familiar with Suvi's work, we strongly recommend you pick up the album from the above link (and don't forget her first album "Jollet Rakasta" as well). A new album is in planning stage and it will surely be a great one, too.

The two songs Suvi recorded with us are a previously unreleased track called "Vapaa" (that includes the angelic voices of Olli and Timo too!) and "Vastarakastuneet", a piano & vocal track which was released on the latest album and here recorded for your enjoyment.

So, sit back, turn up the volume and enjoy:

Kekkonen Elää! Live at Studio Kekkonen

SUVI ISOTALO: VAPAA

SUVI ISOTALO: VASTARAKASTUNEET

Credits:

Piano & Vocals: Suvi Isotalo
Guitar & background vocals ("Vapaa"): Timo Kämäräinen
Drums & backround vocals ("Vapaa"): Olli Krogerus

Music & lyrics: Suvi Isotalo

Arrangement: Suvi Isotalo, Timo Kämäräinen, Olli Krogerus

Recorded live in Studio Kekkonen by Julius Mauranen, Mikko Raita and Janne Riionheimo
Mixed by Julius Mauranen
Directed and edited by Olli-Pekka Komonen
Suvi Isotalo appears courtesy of Sound Of Finland

THANKS

A big special thank you to Suvi, Timo and Olli!
Thanks to Elisa Visapää for piano tuning
Thanks Aapo / Sound Of Finland

ABOUT THE SESSION

As studio sessions are supposed to, this too was a thoroughly enjoyable session. We had a good time with Suvi, Timo and Olli - as always - and though a live session like this is always something of an undertaking to set up and run, things went smoothly - partly cause all three of us (Mikko, Janne and myself) were there and partly cause we were one session wiser than the first time!

We recorded "Vapaa" first. It took five takes to complete, including rehearsal runs for sound check and headphone monitoring. Aside the great vocal delivery, we felt Timo's two guitar solos were nothing short of stunning. Afterwards, Suvi recorded "Vastarakastuneet" on her own, in just one take. The intensity and fragility of the song was immediately there and it was quite clear there would not be another take. It was one of those takes and we were lucky to have it on camera too.

While setting up we had the chance to enjoy a little chat, a little afternoon brandy and I had the chance to Hipstamaticize (is that a word?) that:

Timo and Mikko.

We used our U48 for Suvi's vocals. Great sound!

Janne tried his wings as an assistant cameraman.

How many engineers do you need to mike a drum kit?

I think we deserved that drink!

Olli, a UFO and an out-of-proportion Avantone MixCube.

Timo told us all about his pedalboard/rack setup.

While I was sweating at the board, the lads took it easy.

ABOUT THE RECORDING (non recording nerds beware!)

The session started a day before with the usual cleaning operation - the studio is quite confined and we have a bad tendecy of piling stuff up in the lounge, where this session happened. The reason why we decided to record (partially) in the lounge is simply that our piano happens to be there and at about 230 kg it's 'a bit' of a drag to move! The piano by the way was upgraded during the Olavi Uusivirta album sessions last year to Janne's very nice Yamaha U3 upright - a huge step up from the old stinker... I mean my dear old Hellas we had before...

Olli's drum kit was set up in the live room but as there are large windows between the rooms, Olli could see Suvi from behind his kit and vice versa. That makes playing together a little easier and definitely more enjoyable. We could place Timo in the lounge with Suvi and his amp in Mikko's control room. This way we had great separation, but everybody was comfortable. Bingo!

The upright piano was miked with a pair of (cardioid or perhaps sub-cardioid) AKG C414's in a loose ORTF-type stereo setup from behind the piano. We piled some quilts and foam baffles on the floor to kill excess floor reflections, like this:

As you can see, the mics were a bit close to control spill and room sound (the lounge is quite "live"). The preamp we used was a vintage Telefunken V72, compressed gently with the original Knif Audio Vari-Mu (my favourite compressor in the world for piano).

For Suvi's vocals we used our vintage Neumann U48 into a Knif 804 Pre. The mic was set as cardioid, which picks up a little more spill than figure eight placed with the null point towards the piano, but the lounge is rather reverberant so the back lobe picked too much room (also, proximity effect is more pronounced with a figure eight).

Timo's vocals were picked up with a Shure SM7B - one of my favourite dynamic mics - into the Knif 804 and his guitar amp (Vox AC15) either with an MD421 or a SM57 - can't recall right now. Timo's sound is so amazing that generally speaking putting any decent, working mic in front of the amp and the result is great! There was a DI signal as well for the octave-divided bass notes.

The drum kit was miked with an AKG D112 and DIY Subkick on the kick, SM57 top (with my DIY hi-hat spill guard "Moltonkirves") and bottom of the snare, Line Audio CM3's on the toms and for overheads we used vintage Neumann CMV-563's with recently reskinned and stereo matched M7 capsules (which sound amazing, BTW - reskinning was done by Thiersch Elektroakustik in Germany). The ambience mics were a pair of 'affordable' (=dirt cheap) Thomann ribbon mics, the RB-100's (highly recommended "my-first-ribbon"-mic!). They were placed behind the kit with nulls pointing at the sound source. The reason is that we placed Olli and his drums so close to the window in order for him to see, so there was little space in front of the kit. They worked like a charm behind the kit too (though they didn't make it to the final mix). There was no need for a hihat mic so we didn't put one. The less, the merrier. Olli's vocals were miked with a SM58.

All drums and guitar mics went through the MS Audiotron Multimix with possibly a little EQ and no compression during tracking, save Timo's sub-octave bass track that was squeezed a little with a Rantanen 1178 clone to even it out a little.

ABOUT THE MIX

As it goes with live sessions, the sound should be (and was) more or less 'there' at recording stage and mixing should ideally be mostly about musical balance, general tone and charatcter. While doing these sessions, I'm in a lovely position cause I'm in my most familiar mixing environment, so mixing really starts from the first listen.

For drums - this time - I used very little EQ, just a bit on the kick, snare and overheads - toms were left completely untouched (which I find rather rare!). I didn't gate anything, but used a touch of parallel compression from the Gyraf G10, Rantanen LA-4 clone, dbx 160 and 160X (mono parallel for kick and snare respectively).

On guitars, more or less the same thing applied - very little EQ - but a little more compression from Rantanen 1178 clone.

For the sub-bass I used a little Sansamp PSA-1 (plugin) already in the recording to get a bit more definition of the notes - it was a DI signal so there was a lot of sub-harmonic action compared to "high bass" and adding some harmonics (distortion) helped it out a little. It was compressed further with an LA-2A.

Piano was a tiny bit more processed, there was a little high-frequency compression (Waves C4) and a little low-mid cut and top end boost - a little goes a long way as they all within a range of 6dB...

Suvi's vocals sounded great to start with so little processing was necessary: bit of compression (I actually left the monitoring compressor - the humble but transparent Avid Dynamics 3 - on the track!), a bit of EQ (varying 12,5 kHz, 240Hz and 1,6kHz boosts), a bit of reverb (Stocktronic plate with EchoBoy delay before it) and an automation ride gave it what it needed. During the instrumental sections I turned the vocals down to get rid of unnecessary leakage.

The backing vocal tracks had to be cleared of leakage too, I ended up muting them where Timo and Olli weren't singing. Olli's vocal track required a little more drastic filtering to deal with the remaining drum leakage, but worked like a charm.

Master processing was my usual chain of MS Audiotron desk - master EQ - G-SSL - Otari MTR-10 1/4" tape machine (15 ips, RMG 900 tape)

Vastarakastuneet required even less processing on both piano and voice. The setup was "same, but less" though I used the LA-2A on Suvi's vocals. That was it - nice and simple!

Olavi Uusivirta: Elvis Istuu Oikealla

2012-03-23T03:38:00.002-07:00

To celebrate the release of Olavi Uusivirta's new album "Elvis Istuu Oikealla" - produced, recorded and mixed by Julius Mauranen (me) right here at Studio Kekkonen - here's a little Making of-video of a few select tracks. You will notice something in common with some of the clips...

Enjoy!

More videos of the making can be found here and here...

Oh, the album has just been chosen "Record of the week" at YleX and has received a very warm welcome indeed from the press (for which both Olavi and the increasingly tired-looking character in the video are very grateful for indeed), here's a little round-up:

Helsingin Sanomat
Rumba
NRGM
Voima
Lily / Kuuntelija
KSML
Sounds of unknown

And for my part, thanks to Olavi and everybody who was involved in the making of the record. That would be Jiri-serkku, Jaakko M., Jaakko K., Olli, Kiiski, Juho, Janne, Tero, Pauli, Risto, Noora, Timo, Suvi, Saara, Paula, Joel, Riku, Sami and Vesi.

Thank you. You were wondeful.

Julius

A look at 2011... And next live session coming up!

2012-02-25T06:32:00.001-08:00

Firstly, apologies for such a terribly long silence, there has been a lot of stuff going on and the blog has been sadly neglected! This will not be the case for long, as there's some cool stuff about to happen!

So the breaking news: Part two of our Kekkonen elää! - Live at Studio Kekkonen series is going to be recorded next week! And the artist performing will be the one and only SUVI ISOTALO! We're super excited about it!

As most end-of-year lists and similar have been released ages ago, we thought we'd join the party a little late and sum up the Year of the Rabbit by looking at what we've worked on in 2011. It's been a wild year with a lot of turbulence in the recording industry and life in general, but once again - a lot fantastic music has been made within these walls!

2011 - One hell of a year!
(And one hell of a long blog entry)

So here's what we were up to last year, in roughly chronological order:

Julius finished work on Matti Johannes Koivu's highly acclaimed and successful album "Toisen Maailman Nimi". Most of the work had been completed in December 2010, but the finishing touches were given in January. That was a fun project! And intense!
(Matti of course visited us in October for an exclusive live session as you probably remember and if not, check it out here!)

Matti-Johannes Koivu - 80-luvun lapset

Mikko started recording the vocals and some instrumental overdubs for Leningrad Cowboys’ “Buena Vodka Social Club” which would continue on and off for the remainder of the spring with super talented vocalist Ville Tuomi and producer/multi-instrumentalist Marzi Nyman, as well as continuing work on recording the superb Mimmit album “Maailman ympäri”, a world tour of ethnic/fusion acoustic music aimed for kids. Mikko was also busy teaching a music recording course at the Theatre Academy Helsinki for sound design students, including a 2-day live recording session for the superb free exploration group Ma-A trio (Jone Takamäki, Otzir Godot and Tuomas Rounakari)

Mimmit - Panda

Janne was also working hard producing, recording and mixing the second Vesterinen Yhtyeineen album "Erikoismiehen jäähyväiset" (with Julius helping out engineering the band sessions) which was released in May. There's a slight case of déja vu here, as the calendar for January and February 2012 got filled with bookings for Vesterinen...

Janne was also asked to collaborate with Akukon Oy - the biggest acoustic consulting company in Finland. He was part of the design team (with Henrik Möller and Anssi Ruusuvuori) and an acoustical project manager, working on Logomo - a new multipurpose concert hall in Turku.

In February (cross-musical pun intended, even if you didn't think) Julius mixed Cykles' self-titled debut album, which was a blast. I hope the record didn't pass unnoticed, cause it's a great one. Read what NRGM thought of it in their review of the album. We did a rather unusual mastering road trip with Ilkka, the singer of the band to go see Jaakko Viitalähde and his Virtalähde Mastering at his new HQ in Kuhmoinen (yes, it's far away, but a lovely place).

Cykles - Car Crash Daydream

In March Mikko mixed the upcoming album for Reversion, good old hard hitting progressive metal! Svante Forsbäck from Chartmakers did a superb job on an agressive master, look forward to that one, slightly delayed but coming! Oh, and in March Svante also did a great job on mastering My First Band’s “Mercury & Glitter”, mixed by Mikko in late 2010. Mikko also continued work with LC & Mimmit, also doing music post work throughout the year for the kid’s TV series “Mimmikoto” hosted by Pauliina and Hansu from the band on MTV3 Juniori.

My First Band - Baby You're Too Young (I Wanna Make Love To Your Mama)

Later in the spring Anssi Kela set to record a song collaboratively with a group of people over the internet, a project called "Biisirinki" and Julius ended up recording both Anssi's and the duet's second half Yona's vocals and mixing the parts submitted by the participants. It was a fun little project to do! Anssi reported the project pretty well in his own blog where I (Julius) babbled a bit about my part too.

In early spring, Aves dropped by to mix "You, Lucid" (that was widely noticed by the music blogging community). The release of the track happened around the same time we started this very blog.

Somehow in the midst of all these things Julius managed to find time to mix Wiidakko's "comeback" album, simply titled "Wiidakko". The first single "Seis seis seis" was released in the spring and Fresh Tunes Finland put out the album in December with "Odessa" as the second single.

Wiidakko - Odessa

In April, Mikko recorded and worked on the backing for the "live band rock” played by the actors for the upcoming feature film “Miss Farkku-Suomi”, based on the book by Kauko Röyhkä and featuring his classic songs. The session was supervised by the great Riku Mattila who had also played on the originals, a fun session! Mikko also mixed and recorded overdubs for Big Blue’s self titled debut, released worldwide on the prestigious Italian Cam Jazz label. Nordic jazz at it’s finest!

Big Blue - Mini-Male

Later in the spring, Mikko finalized the mixes on the Mimmit album and TV series and mixed a beautiful album he had recorded earlier, “Cathedral” by finnish Jazz Emma-award winners Oddarang, released in Finland and the UK by Texicalli & Edition Records.

Suvi Isotalo's second album "P.S. Maj'lle" already got a lenghty blog post of its own, but it was another great Julius project, so worth mentioning another time! And obviously, as mentioned, Suvi will do a session with us!

Early in the summer, Julius visited Mankku with Hope Comes in Many Forms, a great band who will release their debut album in the spring or summer of 2012!

Delay Trees released a new (fantastic!) self-released EP titled "Before I Go Go" as a free digital download and limited cassette edition (this would be a spot for another pun) in the summer. Julius mixed it, naturally!

The mixing of Black Twig's debut album "Paper Trees" was definitely another highlight of the year for Julius. The album was produced by our friend Nick Triani, recorded by Kia-Sofia Ryhänen and Nick and sees the light of day on Nick's fairly newly set up Soliti label, by far the most interesting record label in Finland at the moment. The record came out 11.1.2012! Go buy it, now! It's great!

In the fall, Mikko had one of his most enjoyable sessions ever with the recording and mixing of Verneri Pohjola Quartet’s “Ancient History”. Motto of the session: “Jazz-Narnia” - released worldwide on the German ACT music label. He also got to record and mix the Emma Salokoski Ensemble track “Kuiva Maa” that was featured in the TV song competition “Syksyn Sävel”, documented in the blog earlier.

Mikko also recorded and mixed a part improv soundtrack by the great Pekka Kuusisto for a video advert for the Finland Festivals organization and mixed Arja Koriseva’s classy christmas album “Rakkaudesta Jouluun”, as well as tracking a rendition of “La Cumparsita” with Olavi Uusivirta to serve as the theme song for the Canadian documentary “Under the Red Star” by Shebafilms. He also held a mixing workshop for the talented people at Nokia’s sound design team. B2B!

Our friend Kimmo Antikainen also visited Mikko's Control Room to mix the album "En vielä tahtoisi nöyrtyä" by the cabaret band Kitkerät Neitsyet.

Julius crammed in a small mixing project for a yet to be launched Japanese group with producer Yoshio Tamamura. Also, mixing for the upcoming Suvi Koivu album began late in the autumn! Mikko also started yet to be unreleased mixing projects with the very talented "Voice of Denmark" competitor Bjarne Langhoff and the amazing duo Eva & Manu.

The remainder of the year Julius has spent on producing and recording Olavi Uusivirta's fifth album, also documented here. Pre-production and recording happened between September and New year, mixing was completed in early February. It's definitely one of the best projects... Ever? Quite likely. The album will see the light of day in March, so be prepared for something very cool!

Oh, and although Janne was extremely busy most of the year with the Logomo project traveling between Turku and Helsinki, he also designed quite a few nice studios: Rähinä records’ studios, Atomic Spa, Das Båt, AV-studios for Jyväskylä University and Heltech, a radio studio for GBMM, a functional workroom/studio for Timo Kämäräinen, few home theatres, a film studio for Janne Jankeri, modifications for HIP studios and Promix recording studio in Azerbaitsan, Baku.

And of course, our assistant Kia-Sofia Ryhänen was helping out with Vesterinen Yhtyeineen, Hope Comes in Many Forms and Olavi Uusivirta band sessions as well as recording the forthcoming Kiki Pau release!

Olavi Uusivirta album in the making + thoughts about freelance engineers

2011-12-09T01:10:00.000-08:00

As some of you may have noticed, I've been keeping myself extremely busy producing and engineering Olavi Uusivirta's forthcoming fifth album.

So far (and looks like this is unlikely to change [touches wood]) it has been a thoroughly enjoyable and otherwise fantastic project. Olavi and I have worked together in the past: on Soma albums and his own first two albums where I've done a little engineering plus featuring on the debut album (recorded, mixed and co-produced by our very own Mikko Raita) with - believe or not - my thighs. I'll tell that story another time. Back to the album!

I won't go into any details on what kind of an album we're making or any of that stuff. I think writing about it during the process is a bit silly - cause we as the makers of the album really only know what kind of an album we're making after it's finished. Also, it gives people some sort of a preconception on what they will hear, but I hate to say that it's usually completely distorted and weird. Fellow artists, producers and musicians can't really get a good picture of the record if they're given only a verbal or written description and for the layperson (whatever that means) it can be seriously misleading and even harmful.

So let's say we're really excited about the album, it's going to be fantastic and we're working our skinny arses off to make it fantastic!

Well, this wouldn't be a proper teaser if I just wrote that "I have a secret, but I'm not telling you". That'd be a bit unfair. So I give you a little snippet of one of our working days. This was not recorded at Studio Kekkonen (as you can see), but at Finnvox where we were recording grand piano for a day.

The video is shot by Olavi himself and portrays the almighty Jiri-serkku (better known as Jiri Kuronen) performing a piano track, which in fact is a keeper. One can spot yours truly producing the track by waving my arms around in a very producery way (that's what is taught in audio engineering schools: hand signals), but my part of the dialogue is cut, which IMHO makes it a much better teaser!

For the recording geeks: The piano was recorded with two Neumann FET U47's near the hammers (for some attack to cut through in the final mix), two DPA 4011's outside the instrument for a more natural sound and two Beyerdynamic 160 ribbon mics - this was a mono setup for another track. Also, I had a pair of DPA 4006's as ambience mics. The ambience mics went through the SSL AWS900 preamps and the other mics went through AMS Neve 1081 pres with some EQ. I tried the UREI 1178 compressor on the close up mics, but decided to rather compress the piano in the mix as one instrument (i.e. all the mics grouped together) rather than compress a single pair of mics. So no compression was used.

This trip to Finnvox reminded me of the old days, before we had our own studio. Back then, a mere few years ago, there was a legion (OK, not that many, but a whole bunch) of freelance recording and mixing engineers who hovered from one studio to the other depending on their personal tastes and availability of the studios. Most of us had preferences over what to use, but generally we worked in a variety of "big" studios: Finnvox, Sountrack (now turned E-Studio), Petrax, Sonic Pump, Seawolf, Mango (now turned Mankku) and HIP. I may have forgotten some. Before we entered the recording industry, this was normal practise, but additionally a lot of engineers had actual permanent jobs as staff engineers in studios (very few have that nowadays). Anyway, engineers were freelancing and the big studios were happy as they had a clientele who block-booked the studios for weeks. We as the freelancers were happy, as we had no debts to pay and studio rents to pay.

All that has changed now.

In 2005 when we started building our studio, there were signs of a lot of engineers building their own studios or developing close bonds to one big studio, doing practically all their work there. At some point, in 2008 or so, I kept hearing the big studio owners saying "Business is kinda ok, but it's more and more short projects and no block bookings and by the way, why have we not seen you here for the last two years?". That kept becoming more and more common and in 2010 we and some of our closest colleagues and friends thought of all practising proffessional recording and mixing engineers we could think of (there's not THAT many and we know practically all of them) and came to the conclusion that there were only two or three real freelancers left. Everybody else had built their own little place or exclusively used one studio. The big studios were and are still used regularily for large sessions with whole bands, or just drum sessions, grand piano, string ensemble or other session requiring a large space with good monitoring options, some special instruments (such as Hammond organ or grand piano) and a large collection of mics. But usually this is for only a coulple of days, maybe a week. After that, the project is moved to a smaller place, typically the producer's or the engineer's studio. Or rehearsal room. Or home.

Obviously, there are many reasons for this development: record sales are declining, so budgets are smaller. The amount of work for any given album has stayed constant, so work has to be moved to more affordable places. This is a no-brainer. At the same time, more people have made investments to build their own studios - just like we did. And when done right it's really not cheap, I can assure you. So either the studios are insufficient in quality (which results to poor-sounding records) or the owners have to take a big risk by investing a lot of money on the building.

So to be able to make records and make a living out of it, the producer/engineer (a very common combo these days) has to jump through some hoops to make the budget work in order to pay his bills. But to maintain high quality, this means expenses.

Bummer.

I could go on and on with this, but I want to conclude it by saying that I love having my own studio. It's an absolutely fantastic place and it's set up exactly how I want it to be. By having built it, ran it for five years, developed it to what it's become, I've also developed myself professionally to a completely new level and will continue to do so. I wouldn't change anything about that.

At the same time, I kinda miss my freelancing days, when I didn't have to worry when to switch to a new version of ProTools or when do we have enough downtime to do costly maintenance or who's turn is it to go to the wholesaler to buy coffee and toilet paper and where are all my receipts for the accountant and how much did that cost again? Those times when I worked at Soundtrack for a week and then at HIP for two weeks. Meeting colleagues in the lounge of Finnvox.

Ahh, the good old days.

OK, OK, I'm not YET old enough to really say that and feel entirely credible.

A lot of the stuff I miss from those days has to do with the element of change - which I find can be an inspiring and powerful thing. It can also be really annoying as it brings an element of (bad) randomness along with it. I'm talking about "Hey, where's that compressor that was here last month?" or "How was the patchbay wired here again?" or "Is there too much bass in my mix, or is it this room?" not to talk about "What was the security code in this studio again?".

In the end, the fact is that those days are gone and aren't coming back and that's OK too. I'm really content with the way things are, as said before, I love our studio, it's a fantastic place and I wouldn't go back if I could. But I do wonder sometimes how the new breed of engineers are going to learn to appreciate the notion of sonic quality over budgetary constraints and the idea of limited but sufficient studio time. In my part-time stint as a teacher of microphone techniques, mixing and ProTools trickery at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences I try to pass on the general idea and I'm sure that as long as there are ambitious aspiring engineers, there will be truly ambitious work done in the narrow field of recording and mixing music.

Julius

Whoa! We have www.studiokekkonen.com !

2011-10-20T02:59:00.000-07:00

www.studiokekkonen.com is now open!

Five years ago when we opened the studio, we decided that in the next month or so, we will design a website to promote our studio.

But we were a bit busy at the time.

Then we got even busier.

And even busier.

Busier.

Busy.

Bsy.

Bs.

B.

Etc.

Then we realised that five years had passed and here we were still busy. And we still had no website.

Finally, we decided that it's time to do something about it and here it is!

(In case you missed it, here's the link again)

www.studiokekkonen.com

Fabulous photos by Esko Pettay
Our beautiful wallpaper is Ritva Kronlund's "Paratiisi", Pihlgren ja Ritola Oy
Web design by Antti-Veikko Salo / Kolhoosi
All fabrics at the studio are from Marimekko

Huuuuge special thanks to A-V who had the patience to read through the 150 emails we sent him during the last week. He made it happen and didn't murder us although he probably wanted to.

Julius

Kekkonen Elää! # 1 Matti Johannes Koivu Live at Studio Kekkonen

2011-10-12T22:45:00.000-07:00

As we promised, it's here!

KEKKONEN ELÄÄ! - LIVE AT STUDIO KEKKONEN #1

We at Studio Kekkonen - that is Julius Mauranen (me), Mikko Raita and Janne Riionheimo - were playing around with some ideas to celebrate our five years in existence (we all have made records for much longer, but these premises have been here since 2006) and do something fun. Our friend, producer, record label guy, radio guy, everything guy Nick Triani gave me the spark by mentioning that we could ask permission to use leftover tracks and post them on this blog (thanks for the push, Nick!). We developed the idea further by making little sessions with artists performing live in the studio, film and edit them with a modest, slightly homegrown fashion and put them out here. And that's exactly what we've done.

Each artist will pick what they want to perform and how they want to perform it - as long as it's not been released elsewhere or then it's something extra special. Something they might not usually do.

We will make these as often as we can, but as we are extremely busy here, it will be roughly every two months. Future artists in the series include Suvi Isotalo, Vesterinen Yhtyeineen, Delay Trees, Murmansk, Vuk, Iconcrash and Nuria. (+ Some other very nice ones we can't even talk about yet). More will be announced as the series goes on! Follow us on social media to hear about the series! Twitter, Facebook

But to the point! We are proud to present you the first part in our live session series! Enjoy!

"Kekkonen Elää! - Live at Studio Kekkonen":

MATTI JOHANNES KOIVU: BUDDHA

CREDITS
Vocals and guitar: Matti Johannes Koivu
Guitar: Antti Rajala
Bass: Topi Karvonen
Drums: Tuomo Laakso

Music & lyrics: Matti Johannes Koivu

Arrangement: Matti Johannes Koivu, Topi Karvonen, Tuomo Laakso, Antti Rajala
Recorded live in Studio Kekkonen by Julius Mauranen with Mikko Raita
Mixed by Julius Mauranen
Directed and edited by Olli-Pekka Komonen
Matti Johannes Koivu appears courtesy of M.Dulor.

THANKS

Firstly, a big, huge thanks to Matti Johannes Koivu and his band for doing this! If you liked this, but haven't got his latest album, I suggest you order it right away from the M.Dulor label shop!

Secondly big thanks to O-P Komonen for his guerilla skills with the camera and editing board!

Big thanks to Kiiski for the pulla.

ABOUT THE SONG

"Buddha" was originally recorded for Matti Johannes Koivu's fourth solo album, the brilliant, critically acclaimed Toisen Maailman Nimi (released on the M.Dulor label). The record was mixed by Julius Mauranen at (you guessed it) Studio Kekkonen. FWIW, Julius also recorded the acoustic parts of the album that featured the unique talents of pianist/harpist Iro Haarla and bassist Ulf Krokfors.)

The track, however, was left off the album at the very last minute. It was mixed and ready to go, but Matti with co-producer Tuomas Ilmavirta thought it didn't fit comfortably on the album after all. Matti also had second thoughts on the original arrangement and the decision was made to leave "Buddha" off the album.

This is the sort of thing that happens every now and then when making records, we have to proverbially kill our darlings that have been laboured over by a number of people for hours, days, even weeks. It feels bad at first - when you're making records with a passion, you fall in love with every great song you work with, but eventually, you realise it's for the greater good (i.e. it serves the artist's creative vision and the album entity) and live with it."Buddha" became one of those darlings that had to be laid down.

Luckily, we had another chance to make "Buddha" available to the world, and this time in a different form!

ABOUT THE SESSION

The session itself was a blast! The band were in top form, the atmosphere was really good and we had a great day. Besides, we had pulla. And everybody knows that you can't go wrong then.

Pulla makes sessions tick. Proven fact.

After the setup (which takes quite a while when done right) - the band nailed the song on the third take. We had to do a few more to get some more video footage, but what you hear is take number three, unedited and without any overdubs (nor added sugar or preservatives and most definitely no monosodium glutamate).

Now as this session was the test drive for the whole concept and in hindsight there are a few things concerning the technical aspects of filming and marrying the sound to picture we should have thought a bit further beforehand. On the other hand, it is a new thing for us, so there's bound to be something that goes funny. But it turned out fine and the little things will iron out over time.

ABOUT THE RECORDING (Now there's just nerdy stuff ahead!)

The setup was such that the band (drummer Tuomo Laakso (who's also a visual artist!) guitar player Antti Rajala, and bassist Topi Karvonen) were set up in our live room. Antti's and Topi's amps were set up in other rooms (storage space and office, respectively) to avoid uncontrolleable leakage (the thing that happens when a microphone picks up the sound of instruments it's not meant to pick up). We put Matti in our other control room and his amp to another space - again to avoid leakage, mainly to his vocal mic.

So all in all, the four musicians occupied five spaces, but three people were in the same room. Sounds much more confusing than it is!

Matti wanted to hear some of the drums and his guitar acoustically (as well as through headphones) to feel more comfortable with the sound he hears - which is absolutely vital when recording - so we left doors a little open. We could control the leakage and how much he heard of the drums and his guitar with the door. Simple and elegant. The guy who invented the door probably didn't realise that it was actually a piece of recording gear.

Matti plays Finlandia instruments guitars into a Rikstone amp. The setup sounds amazing as it is. All there is to do is to capture what it is. This time I had the pleasure to record it using a Sandhill ribbon microphone. (All Finnish products, strangely enough!). The mic preamp I used was also Finnsh, Knif Audio V804 into a vintage dbx 160VU. He was singing into a Neumann U48, one of the most sought-after vocal mics in the world. The signal went likewise into an V804 and compressed with a handmade LA-2A clone.

Tuomo's drums were mic'd with two AKG C414-XLS's as overheads, an AKG D112 + a DIY subkick on the kick drum, SM-57 on top and a mad old Grundig lo-fi mic in the bottom (I wanted to try it and it sounded great!), toms were mic'd with Line Audio CM3's (very neat little mic!) and the room mics were Neumann CMV-563's with MK55 capsules (our M7 capsules are being reskinned at Thiersch Elektroakustik at the moment!). There was a Sennheiser MD441 on the hi-hat, but there was no need for it so it stayed muted. Oh, and underneath the ride cymbal was a Karma Audio K-Micro mic for giggles (they're tiny tiny mics and cost practically nothing). Well, we didn't need it either. All mics went through our heavily modified MS Audiotron Multimix with a little EQ here and there.

Antti's guitar is a beautiful old Hagström that he played through a Creamsound amp. That was mic'd with a SM-57 and compressed with a dbx 160VU. As with Matti's guitar, the sound is superb to start with.

Topi played a Fender Telecaster bass - something of a curiosity, but it sounded exactly right for the track (we tried a Precision bass too). This time instead of going to his Orange amp (that has a bottom end that could start wars), we chose to use a Music Man 65 that could be driven a little more with less seismic action. The cab was an Ampeg 1x15, mic'd with a Shure SM7B (I never tried it on bass before this, but I can highly recommend it!). There was a BSS DI signal too.

ABOUT THE MIX

The whole sound was there right away. All I had to do in the mix was to make it glue a little bit more and add a little reverb on the track and do a little general sweetening. I compressed the drums a bit with our Gyraf G10 compressor, Knif Audio Vari-Mu, and a dbx 160VU. I squeezed the ambience mics with an Alesis Micro Limiter (wonderful lofi thing). On bass I had a Rantanen 1178 clone. On guitars I only had a touch of parallel compression (Rantanen LA-4 clone) and vocals were further compressed with an LA-2A (I can't get enough of it, can I?). I used a Roland Space Echo inserted before our Stocktronic Plate for vocal reverb and for guitars I used the one-of-a-kind Knif Audio K.Verb spring reverb. On the master I had a little bit of EQ from the magic stereo channel of our desk, light compression from the G-SSL and some saturation from real tape (Otari MTR-10, 1/4" RMG 900 at 15ips). Some plugins were used, mainly for EQ and a little help for the drum ambience from a convolution reverb, the Waves IR-L.

There was no mastering on this particular track, I brought up the volume a little bit to save you the trouble of touching the volume knob.

I hope you all enjoy the track!

Julius

Emma Salokoski: "Kuiva Maa" at the Syksyn Sävel song contest

2011-10-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Mikko checking in for blog duty, "hello, world"!

So, turns out both me and Julius have a song we worked on in the legendary TV song contest Syksyn Sävel this year, it's a situation of double Kekkonen trouble! I'll share a few words about my work with the great Emma Salokoski and her amazing Ensemble recording and mixing the beautiful track "Kuiva Maa". Click on the 2nd video with the vinyl picture to hear the song!

Emma Salokoski: "Kuiva Maa" @Syksyn Sävel

Juppu already blogged about his work on the great 2nd Suvi Isotalo album that has the track "Kaikki Sanat" also featured in the competition, check that out too!

Anyway, about recording and mixing "Kuiva Maa"...

To start off, it's a very nice song written by jazz trumpet great Jorma Kalevi Louhivuori, with evocative lyrics by Emma and a powerful arrangement by Emma and her Ensemble. I was tasked with recording the band and mixing the song for release in Syksyn Sävel.

(Warning, this will get technical and even audio engineering-nerdy, so if you're not in to that kind of thing and happen to know finnish just skip to the links above and listen to Emma's own words about the song and the making of it instead, or better yet, listen to the song!)

Recording the basics

The band track was recorded live in a quite hectic session at a nice larger Helsinki room called E-Studio, on their freshly installed NICE Studer A994 large format analog console utilizing both Pro Tools HD and a 16 track 2" Studer A800 for recording mediums. (We only have a modest recording space home at Kekkonen and no grand piano, one reason for picking this particular room was also the fact that they have a very nice sounding Estonia full-size grand)

Hectic, because the go ahead for the session was made in regular music business fashion (quite late) and, as normal with the caliber of musicians Emma has in her Ensemble (Tuomo Prättälä, Lauri Porra, Mikko Kosonen and Marko Timonen), there is always some work juggling shcedules. As it happens, the best compromise for this particular session was that we had only a few hours after Emma had returned straight from the airport (from London performing in Aamu Song's Reddress) To when our drummer had to leave. As we were aiming for, and succeeded in, a live take from the band, those few hours were precious indeed. Thankfully these people are superb players who nailed the song in a few takes, with Emma providing the necessary guide vocals to set the right mood for the players. This includes the live guitar solo too!

Tech talk about the recording

We tracked the band simultaneously to digital as a clean safety and to 16 track analog with boosted levels for some tape saturation, via recording the tape returns off the delayed reproduction heads. This allowed us to have the charasteristic tape-abuse sound but also the mixdown option of using the cleaner digital only-tracks if preferred (via nudging the tape tracks by the amount of the head gap delay after each take), maintaining perfect sync between the two sets of tracks without having to sacrifice our precious few tape tracks for a timecode track. This kind of "advanced routing" can be daunting especially on a high-profile live tracking date like this but having super flexible routing options on the Studer desk certainly helped!

Despite the live playing, we were aiming for a slightly drier and easily controllable, and dare I say, "70's" overall sound so we utilized 3 iso booths to acoustically separate all the players.

Mic highlights would be a pair of fantastic prototype Sandhill ribbons on the piano along with regular joe AKG 414's and SM57's. The drum tone was mainly in the U89 overheads set up Recorderman style (my favourite OH technique) as well as close SM57 for snare, Sennheiser 421's for toms and 441's for the kick and hihat. A big part of the drum sound is just the fat tuning of Marko's drums, his mellow but precise playing and the fact that we had him in a fairly small dry-ish room. Mikko's Martin acoustic guitar was picked by a pair of AKG C 451 B's, and we decided for a DI electric bass warmed up by Lauri's own GT Brick preamp/DI.

After the basics, the multitrack visited Musicworks for some Clavinet and Jupiter overdubs by Tuomo and Emma's lead vocal recordings with vocal production guru Leri Leskinen, returning to me at Kekkonen for mix preparation and some last recordings in the form of a meaty Rhodes track by Tuomo and last-minute addition vocal doubles by Emma with our trusty Neumann U48.

Mixing

The track was mixed by yours truly in my room at Kekkonen, accompanied by Tuomo who also acted as the music supervisor/producer and band representative, as well as Emma herself and Warner Music's A&R/Executive Producer Lasse Kurki. The mixing process was relatively smooth except for the fact that we only had one shot at it; Mastering with Svante Forsbäck at Chartmakers was already scheduled for the next day, early morning too!

This meant that instead of leaving the mix overnight and doing recall tweaks in the morning (or later, read below) we had to nail it during that one day like in the old days. Thus, we took the evening slow, created a reference file that we listened to on various systems, before I commited the final mix and sent it to mastering.

Svante did a great job of taming the slight midrange build up of the mix and there you have it, less than a week later it's on a TV competition site ready for your enjoyment! Ah, modern times...

Tech talk about the mixing

Notable mix outboard on this track was my trusty EMT 140 Plate reverb, used mostly on piano and guitar as well as little on the vocal, and the great Jonte Knif's Vari Mu compressor on drums, and his amazing old prototype Tube spring reverb "K-Verb" on keyboards. The full mix was routed through a Vintagedesign SU1 for additional crunch by its Neve-esque summing amp to be recorded back to Pro Tools to a "master" audio track. Key plug-ins used were the stock Digirack EQ-3, MDW EQ, Echoboy, TL Space and Massey CT4.

Oh, about the tape vs digital basic tracks: We ended up using everything else from the Studer A-800 "tape" tracks, except for the quiet piano intro and outro.

As hinted above, a few words about the way I like to mix. I work in a hybrid Pro Tools HD DAW/analog outboard environment, with an Avid ICON D-Command controller for tactile control and automation, which means that along with some digital photographs of rack units and audio samples of my plate reverb I can return to any mix with 99.9% reliability in "total recall" fashion. I've grown accustomed to abusing this nice possibility. Even though my best mixes are usually built in creative "old school" mixing spurs, often only a few hours on a song after mix preparations, I can still evaluate the finer details of automation, translation et al over the course of days or even weeks on various systems and do a tweak recall later on (if needed) - and still be able to work on different songs, even different projects, in the meantime. Many clients obviously like this possibibility for easy recalls.

Anyway, I guess that's enough for now. Go listen to the music if you didn't already, and don't forget to check back here for the upcoming "Kekkonen Lives!" video!

Mikko

Emma Salokoski: "Kuiva Maa" @Syksyn Sävel

Live at Studio Kekkonen series begins!

2011-10-08T01:47:00.000-07:00

To celebrate our fifth anniversary, we at Studio Kekkonen are happy and proud to officially announce a new feature in our studio and this blog:

KEKKONEN ELÄÄ! - LIVE AT STUDIO KEKKONEN

Exclusive live-in-the-studio sessions with some of our favourite artists performing unreleased material - recorded, mixed and filmed at Studio Kekkonen!

Basically, we decided to sacrifice the final remains of our free time and do something that would be inspiring, interesting and fun! We ask our friends / artists / bands / clients to come and give us little live performances right here at Studio Kekkonen. We record and mix the performance and arrange it all to be filmed and edited, then we post the results here for your unlimited enjoyment - for free!

We ask the artists to pick a song (or more) that has not been released elsewhere, such as brand new songs, outtakes from albums, maybe unexpected cover songs, maybe avant-garde noise experiments or klezmer-versions of the first songs they ever wrote when they were 13, anything they feel is worth recording and sharing to the world in this format! It's up to the artist.

Of course cynics will point out that this idea is by no means new or original. Abbey Road does it. Nigel Godrich does it. YLE does it. Many others do it. Why should we do it?

Well, why should we not do it?

Firstly, lots of unbelieveably talented, interesting and generally cool and amazing and beautiful and wonderful people (see sidebar) visit our studio all the time, working with us on their records. A lot of the time that final record (and maybe a blurry photo) is the only remaining document of them spending time at Kekkonen - in a way fair enough, that's what we do here (excluding blurry photos)! But it'd be nice to have something more as well. Besides, those people very often become personal friends of ours, some very close. This is a great excuse to get together and do something nice!

Secondly, practically all of our clients love the atmosphere at the studio. They like spending time here, some have practically made it their living room. And hey, why shouldn't they, it's a fantastic and cosy place where there's always music in the air (accidental Twin Peaks reference), nice people and great coffee (that's Dale Cooper again)! Artists feel at ease in our studio. It's easy to get inspired here. It's nice to make music here. There's a vibe.

Thirdly, making records is not only about having fun (though most of the time it is GREAT fun!) - it's also really, really hard work. It's exhausting, stressful and consuming - especially at the final mixing stage which is where we do a lot of our work at Kekkonen. Then the aforementioned coffee often isn't a nice little treat, but an absolute necessity to keep going at unsociable hours for the umpteenth day in row. We wanted to create something that would be a sort of therapy or antidote to that stress for the artists (and maybe even for us?). A day of only the fun side of music-making! No outside pressure, no deadline, no worries. That's the way we want to approach this.

Fourthly, we like to try out new and exciting things! We've been here for five years and I think it's about time that we do stuff we've never done before. We all (as human beings do) spend lots of time on irrelevant, boring and anything-but-fun things in our spare time, so why not take the time and make the effort of doing something worthwhile musically, sonically and socially?

Finally, we love you - our dear blog readers, supporters, fans of our artists, record-buyers and other hippies - so much that we want to give you a special treat! We really hope you find our series of live sessions musically interesting, entertaining and of course great-sounding - and even visually pleasing - we decided to outsource the visual side of things to somebody who actually knows (unlike us) what he's doing with moving picture no matter how little space available (yes, yes, we ARE smaller than Abbey Road) - OP Komonen, who I got to know during the making of Anssi Kela's "Aukio" album, OP documented it all reality-style and even made a little music video of the lead single "Aamu".

The first session has been recorded and it'll see the light of day next thursday! So stay tuned to this blog and if you don't yet, follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook so you won't miss a beat!

And a little teaser of our first session, in the form of a (blurry!) photograph:

Who could these guys be? Not a very difficult mystery to solve, especially if you take a look at recent photos on our Facebook page...

We'll be announcing performers later (I DO like cliffhangers), but I promise you that they are the crême de la crême!

And just for the sake of repetition: the video will be published right here in our blog on October 13th (that's next thursday).

Juppu

Juppu's past adventures in hi- and lo-fi #1: Vesa-Matti Loiri, part one

2011-09-23T01:36:00.000-07:00

This is the first post in a series of recollections and memoires from some of the most memorable sessions Julius has been involved in. Some of these will be more in-depth than others, some will be not much more than funny stories or anecdotes.

This one is very long and divided into parts for several reasons: it is possibly the most memorable session I've ever been in and it involves Vesa-Matti "Vesku" Loiri, who's one of the most influental, loved and respected performing artists in the history of Finnish recorded music, film, theatre, opera, football or falling over (and yes, all of those qualify as art). Also, there were only three of us involved in the sessions that took place near the town of Ivalo, in northern Lapland, 1100 km from Helsinki. I also have a feeling that the other two (the artist himself and producer and my dear friend Hannu Pikkarainen) may remember different sides of the sessions. Or then not. They may or may not have written down or recorded them. I don't know.

And the part about dividing it into parts, well, it is about three albums and there are a lot of things to remember. I hope this makes it a better read!

Anyway, here's my take on the subject of

The making of Vesa-Matti Loiri's "Ivalo", "Inari" and "Kasari".

Part one: Background

In the spring of 2006, before my involvement on the project, the record label (Warner Music Finland) had come up with this idea of making a record based on Johnny Cash's fantastic "American Recordings"-series of records - mostly acoustic, low-key, slow tempo versions of Finnish classic pop songs - with emphasis on songs with strong and moving lyrics. They had the artist (who, interestingly enough, never had been a big fan of Johnny Cash's music), they came up with a guy who would be just the right person to produce it (Emma-winning producer and guitarist Hannu Pikkarainen, more about him later), they had a release date, but they also had a problem.

Loiri likes to spend his summers in a little hideout cabin near the town of Ivalo in Lapland - about as far you can get in Finland and still have some services of the modern world (such as an airport, decent grocery store, two hotels). But due to the projected release date, the record would have to be made during the summer and Vesku had absolutely no intention of coming to Helsinki to make the record. Why should he? He had everything that he wanted there and he wasn't originally that keen on the idea of making a new record. He had other things planned, such as spending time with his two sons and taking it easy. His message to the record company was loud and clear: he wasn't coming, the record would have to be either postponed or cancelled altogether. The guys at Warner (at the time Pekka Ruuska and Pete Eklund) were under a lot of pressure, they had counted on this record to be one of their major products for the final quarter of the year (you know, Christmas and stuff... When people used to buy records in the old days) and it looked like it wasn't going to be made. Shit.

After a number of very stressed hours or days, Pete came up with a solution of taking the studio to Lapland. The artist agreed, as long as his other plans weren't going to be affected and I was contacted by Pekka to gather a mobile recording set and go do the record. Why they called me was because Hannu, the producer had mentioned me in a discussion about engineers. What's interesting is that we barely knew each other at that point. We had worked together on a very short overdub session for an artist he was producing. I remember having to be talked into doing the session by colleague and friend Juha Jäntti (thank you for insisting!), since it happened in the most rushed, stressful and panicy phase of the building of our studio. I agreed to do it and we got along really well with Hannu and based upon the vibe he got from me during those maybe three hours, he recommended to hire me.

(Side note: I don't know what would've happened if I hadn't done that overdub session but I guess the moral of the story is NEVER to look down on a gig, no matter how minuscule it may seem, you never know what may come out of it.)

So there I was, going to record Vesa-Matti Loiri - whom I had never met - with Hannu Pikkarainen - with whom I had worked for three hours - in a makeshift studio more than a thousand kilometres from home and we were told to come back only when we had a finished (save mixing) record, preferably one that would have the potential to be very successful.

But to be honest, I didn't have the time to think about all that, I was busy trying to work out what to take and how to make sure we had everything we needed. That was sort of difficult because I had no idea what our to-be-studio was like (to start with, I didn't know whether it had electricity or not). For some time I tried to inquire about it, but as it was a remote, rented house that had just been bought by a new owner (whose contact details we, conveniently enough, didn't have in the Helsinki end) and the old owner was something of a hermit (whose contact details we didn't have either for that matter) - my attempts were in vain. At this point I just had to figure out all the things that could possibly go wrong and work out ways to overcome those things - part of the job description, as any self-respecting recording engineer knows.

For a few weeks, I was all "What if such-and-such-part breaks?" and made historically and hysterically frequent visits to Yleiselektroniikka, our then-local supplier of audio connectors and such to get the oddest audio adapters, fuses, wire, AC splitters and maybe a little more than enough spare XLR and 1/4" connectors. And a few RCA's that probably won't hurt.

But then a few days before the trip I was all set, I had absolutely everything covered. I had the core studio equipment (more details next time), I had every possible audio connector and cable I might need (and of course a soldering iron and connectors), I had the phone number of the closest audio related and IT companies if there was a catastrophy related to those things and I even had the phone number to the local electricity company in case there was a need for a diesel-powered generator. However there was a technical hurdle waiting for us in Ivalo, but I'll leave that to next time (yes, I just needed to have a cliffhanger).

I was quite confident everything was going to be ok, or if not, I could come up with something. I was nervous, of course, but prepared. Until the last evening when my mother casually asked the question:

"What happens if you don't get along with Vesa-Matti Loiri?"

Thanks, Mum, I really needed that.

Part 2 coming soon! Until then, enjoy the Spotify playlist I made of the records.

Juppu

Delay Trees song featured on "Grey's Anatomy"!

2011-09-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

Big news. As in BIG news. As in MASSIVE NEWS WITH BELLS HANGING FROM THEM!

Again, this is concerning the wonderful Delay Trees! "Gold", the title track of their eponymous debut album - produced, recorded and mixed by Julius Mauranen here at Studio Kekkonen - will be featured in the next episode of the immensly popular and - here musically speaking - very influential TV series "Grey's anatomy". The episode will air this weeks thursday in the US.

For those of you who don't know, Grey's anatomy is not only watched by millions and millions of people around the world and is one of the highest revenue earning shows on US television, it's also known for acting as a platform for highlighting and promoting music - as a matter of fact, Grey's anatomy is something of a pioneer in the field (Yes, I did learn a lot of that on Wikipedia).

For those of you who don't know, Delay Trees are the greatest band in Finland and you should all go and buy their self-titled debut album now, either on CD from Levykauppa Äx, on vinyl from Cargo in Germany or as digital version in iTunes in the US. And if you're a sceptic, have a listen on Spotify (where the opening track is misspelled as "Cold" (facepalm...)) and THEN support new music and its makers and go buy the album so we can make a new one. You can also download their new Before I Go Go EP for free on their website! As said before, the album is produced, recorded and mixed by Julius Mauranen, the EP is produced by the band, recorded by Teemu Vilmunen of Ultramariini, mixed by Julius.

We don't obviously yet know the scene or how the song is featured in it, but even if it was only three seconds of leakage from a patient's iPod headphones while he's being rushed in the ER in the background with Meredith and Derek getting divorced and re-married in the foreground by a priest dressed as Elvis (do not ask how I know the characters, I don't even have a television), it'd be HUGE news. Why's that? Well, a LOT of music is being pushed to the show and to get through - especially as an indie debut act from some peripheric european country - it really, really must have made an impression on someone who's willing to put it out to millions of viewers. Credit for that goes to Dan Koplowitz and his whole hard-working team at the mighty Friendly Fire Recordings, GREAT WORK! Naturally, credit also goes to Delay Trees themselves (and of course their producer/engineer who made it sound so amazing - watch out for future blog posts about makings of great past records, Delay Trees will be most definitely be featured).

Gold by Delay Trees

Very happy Julius

51 songs from Studio Kekkonen

2011-09-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a little (well, ok, it's 3 hours so not really little) Spotify playlist for your enjoyment!

51 songs from Studio Kekkonen

We just gathered a lot of the stuff we've done over the years into some sort of a manageable thing. We did leave out a lot of stuff, honestly.

On the playlist you find anything from Joonatan Rautio to Fireal to Delay Trees to Ismo Alanko to Sakilaiset to Vesa-Matti Loiri. This is just to present the scope of projects we've gone through. A lot of the stuff isn't on Spotify, some of you may not have Spotify, so watch our Soundcloud for more music (in the future, too!).

This playlist is as much (or even more) of a reference list as a playlist. I mean, we don't really expect the same audience to dig all of this stuff (or on the other hand why not, it's all good?). It simply portrays what we've been up to for the last 5-7 years and isn't categorised by engineer (Mikko, Janne or me) or genre or anything else, but serves a purpose, if not for anyone else, perhaps for us - at least when amnesia creeps in.

I promise you that there will be more concise and thematic playlists in the future! Meanwhile, you can listen to this and go through a lot of different worlds...

Juppu

Suvi Isotalo - P.S. Maj'lle

2011-09-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a video off one of my favourite records that I've mixed this year, Suvi Isotalo's second album "P.S. Maj'lle" (out on September 21st 2011 on the Sound Of Finland label).

About the record...

It was such a fun record to work on. Produced by the ultra-talented Timo Kämäräinen, the album is something a bit different than Suvi's first album "Jollet rakasta" - which, BTW is great too! Whereas the first record leaned more towards 1970's singer-songwriter tradition, on "P.S. Maj'lle" Suvi and Timo wanted the record to have an edgier feel to it. There's more experimentation and playfulness in terms of the soundscape, but at the same time the themes of the album are very personal, some of them very dark.

Well, as this is not a record review (that'd be really weird) and I most certainly aren't a music journalist, I won't delve any deeper in this wishy washy description of music - which anyway is practically impossible. But maybe a few words about the mixing? I did - after all - mix the album!

Slightly geeky stuff about the recordings...

The album was recorded in various places, two (or three?) studios and different other locations. Timo recorded a lot of it by himself and his tracks sounded excellent. With such great musician as Timo (who is an extraordinary guitarist, check out anything out of his discography), Olli Krogerus (drums, they also have a duo called Toot toot with Timo) and of course Suvi herself (amazing singer and songwriter!) you can't go wrong. The arrangements were spot on (including some great strings, though edgier than on the first album), so my job was really just to enhance what was there and go crazy when it was appropriate.

Technically, as the music was recorded in different locations over some time (and one of the tracks was originally a demo), there were some variation in the sound of the recordings. That sometimes introduces problems, but in this case it felt like every sound had a reason, so there was no need to jump through hoops to get everything up to some imaginary line or standard. Having great musicians, great arrangements and a charatceristic sound to start with is really the optimal situation to start mixing a record!

Very geeky stuff about the mixing!

A little bit of something for the geeks (like me) then... The album was recorded in 96kHz (save that one song that was a demo originally) and recorded and mixed in ProTools at Control Room 2 in Studio Kekkonen, by yours truly, Julius Mauranen. My way of working is a kind of hybrid, balancing, routing and part of the processing is done "in the box", but I use a lot of analog processing. When mixing a record in 44.1kHz or 48kHz, I often sum the mix on our heavily modified MS Audiotron Multimix desk, but as the outputs to the desk are via RME ADI-8 DS D/A converters (ADAT optical) that only operate up 48kHz, I opted to keep the material at 96kHz and just bring the 2-buss into a custom-made stereo channel on our desk, where I could use the fantastic onboard EQ as a master EQ.

By the way, the MS Audiotron was modified and the custom channel with its Sontec-style EQ were done by Jaakko Viitalähde of Virtalähde Mastering a great mastering engineer who's built practically all his gear himself. And some things for us too! There's a mod in the desk that allows me to use outboard preamps as a summing amp, which is just great! On Suvi's album, I used the Knif Audio V804 preamp - possibly the best pre I have ever used - as a summing amp. The preamp (as well as some other gear we have) is designed and built by Jonte Knif, a Finnish genius tube equipment designer / god. His gear is absolutely stunning. Anybody who has anything to do with recording, mixing or mastering should try out his products. They are simply mindblowing. More of them in a later post, I promise you.

From the desk, the signal went to a Gyraf G-SSL built to order by my friend, ex-SSL tech Dave Evans (link to be added!), who did some nice quirks into the design. The album was mostly mixed with a ratio of 4, attack of 30 and release of either 0.3 or "auto". From the compressor (inserted inline), the signal went to our Otari MTR-10 1/4" tape machine (with RMGI SM900 tape at 15 IPS) and then back to ProTools. This is my master chain 90% of the time. I love it.

Suvi's vocal chain, if I recall right - was LA-2A clone "Laakkonen" into a 1178 clone built by Tapio Rantanen, tech at Finnvox. For reverbs I used our Stocktronic RX4000 plate reverb (also used by Tore Johansson), a Roland RE-201 Space Echo and various plug-ins, including Soundtoys' Echoboy and TL Space.

(On this particular track, I don't remember exactly what I used for the filtered vocal sound, but I'll update it when I can check it out.)

Meanwhile, enjoy the song and video and check her stuff on Spotify! And of course, support new and fresh music and go buy the album on September 21st!

Juppu

Suvi Isotalo - P.S. Maj'lle video on Vimeo!

Prehistory of Studio Kekkonen: The old place

2011-09-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

So, this year Studio Kekkonen as it's known these days has been in its place for five whole years. There will be more posts to come on the subject, but we'll kick off by looking at the very beginnings of what has become one of the finest studios in Helsinki (if you don't mind me saying that).

So here we go:

Prehistory of Studio Kekkonen (From 2003 to 2005)

Back in 2003 or so, Mikko and Janne were looking for a shared studio space (Juppu joined in a little later). They even had a starting point: Janne had previously done some work for a real character called Toni, a keyboard player who was a known figure in the Finnish scene of traditional popular ("Iskelmä") music and a kind of gear collector. Any gear. As in ANY. He had a few (rather grotty) spaces in Pitäjänmäki, north west Helsinki. Some of the spaces were for storage of his stuff and one was a office space, converted into a studio. Well, the converting had consisted of putting a window on one of the walls, running a multicore and calling the other room "control room". Really, it was a room with speakers and other recording gear in it. We knew this, but were happy to have something. These days a lot of people call that kind of space "a studio", but that's another story. This place was dirt cheap and it was something.

The gear we had in the beginning was a PC, a pair of Genelec 1030's, NS-10's, Digidesign Digi 001 (later 002), a few instruments (guitars, amps and keyboards), a few mic stands, cables and semi-pro mics. So really, nothing to write home about. By then we had already been around the block enough to know that it wasn't much. But then we had Toni's gear, of course. Now when I said he collected gear is a bit misleading. He really just gathered stuff. Any stuff. In the dark corners of his storage rooms you'd find a dozen 12"-17" VGA displays, none of which worked, some sort of automatic line mixer they use in malls, karaoke machines, PC components, semi-pro patchbays, bits of PA systems. Et cetera. Rubbish. Junk. Stuff. But there in the middle of the stuff, there would be a Neumann U47 (arguably the most wanted mic on the planet, besides the ELAM 251). Or an AKG BX-20. Or ANOTHER Neumann U47. Then another 4 broken VGA displays. Then a RCA 44. I kid you not. He had absolutely AMAZING vintage mics and outboard gear, yet it was all stashed in with the rubbish. Then he kept praising some dreadful Spirit digital console or a pair of hideous-sounding Russian mics. He REALLY is a character. So we got to use this weird mix of very pro-sumer, average stuff and this amazing, classic but poorly maintained gear (one of the U47's was later named "Frankenstein") included in the rent. Just a few years later we were fortunate enough to acquire some fantastic vintage equipment of our own, but only one mic - the Neumann CMV-563 - was originated from Toni's "collection" - I actually found it fallen and forgotten in the back of our mic "locker" (and even that (and some cash) we traded for a stereo pair of the same type). That was mostly due to two factors: firstly Toni didn't really keep his gear in great shape and secondly he was very difficult to deal with - purchasing that one mic from him required about thirty phonecalls, three meetings where he just didn't show up and when he finally did, the first thing he did was drop the mic on the parking lot (in its case and only from the car floor height, so it wasn't damaged - miraculously).

Another great feature of his was the fact that you NEVER could guess whether the gear would be there when you got to the studio. Twice I remember walking into the studio and to my horror see that the mixing desk (yes, that same horrible Spirit digital thing) was MISSING and once I got there seeing that it was not only missing, but replaced with a Behringer desk. Toni had other strange habits, such as suddenly changing languages in the middle of the sentence. Even in the middle of a word. Finnish, English, Swedish all happily mixed up. At the time these things were both hilariously funny and extremely annoying, but later I've thought that my life wouldn't have been quite as fulfilling had I never dealt with this guy. He's a warm-hearted and well-meaning chap and secretly we all really liked him despite his certain absurd traits. Plus we had access to his great gear.

Mikko left the place at some point in 2004, cause he got accustomed to working in places like HIP Studiot and Finnvox and the now-defunkt Crystal Sound and did not really need the old place any longer. Juppu and Janne continued working there until the summer of 2005 (that's when the dub collective next door started rehearsing a bit too often for comfort) and then began the hunt for the new studio - what we thought would be just a "slight improvement" to the old premises. Little did we know...

I wish I could post pictures of the Old Kekkonen here, but there is only one known picture of that place (Janne has it, I'll post it when I have it). That sort of tells something about that place. It wasn't really too photogenic... If any reader of this blog has any pics from the old place, send them to us!

Stay tuned for more history!

Juppu

Aves video!

2011-09-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

Our aforementioned friends at Stereotype Helsinki are keeping busy, they've just put out an amazing video for Aves' "You, Lucid" that I posted earlier - expect more tracks to appear as time goes by. But until then, you can watch this on repeat. It's one jaw-droppingly stunning visual experience. Plus early on in the video, there's a figure who seems to walk amongs gigantic rhubarbs. Nobody can resist gigantic rhubarbs, that's a proven fact. And if in my earlier post I said the track itself takes you on a journey - this takes you on a complete trip. Director for the video is a visual artist called Juho Risto Aukusti Lähdesmäki. That's a very long name. The song was mixed at Studio Kekkonen by yours truly, Julius Mauranen. Enjoy:

Aves - You, Lucid from Stereotype Helsinki on Vimeo.

Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! - Live #1 Iron Country Sisters

Kekkonen elää! #9 Vesterinen yhtyeineen - "Valot eteiseen" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #9

Vesterinen yhtyeineen: Valot eteiseen

About the song and the session

About the recording

About the mix

Kekkonen elää! #8 Juurakko - "Eipä Kasva Kaikki Laulut" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #8Juurakko: Eipä kasva kaikki laulut

Kekkonen elää! #7 Delay Trees - "Perfect heartache" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #7

Delay Trees: Perfect heartache

ABOUT THE SESSION

ABOUT THE RECORDING

ABOUT THE MIX

Kekkonen elää! #6 Sakilaiset - "Poppia" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #6

Sakilaiset: Poppia

ABOUT THE BAND AND THE SESSION

ABOUT THE RECORDING

ABOUT THE MIX

Kekkonen elää! #5 Nuria - "The great escape" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #5

Nuria: The great escape

Kekkonen elää! #4 Joakim Berghäll & Aki Rissanen - "Bamboozle!" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #4

Joakim Berghäll & Aki Rissanen: Bamboozle!

Merry Christmas! Hyvää Joulua!

Kekkonen elää! #3 Verneri Pohjola & Aki Rissanen - "Hyperballad" live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen elää! #3

Verneri Pohjola & Aki Rissanen: Hyperballad

ABOUT THE RECORDING

ABOUT THE MIX (from Mikko)

Hello blog, sorry I've been away.

Studio Kekkonen five... no, SIX years this month!

Kekkonen Elää! #2 Suvi Isotalo Live at Studio Kekkonen

Kekkonen Elää! Live at Studio Kekkonen #2

Kekkonen Elää! Live at Studio Kekkonen

SUVI ISOTALO: VAPAA

SUVI ISOTALO: VASTARAKASTUNEET

Olavi Uusivirta: Elvis Istuu Oikealla

A look at 2011... And next live session coming up!

Olavi Uusivirta album in the making + thoughts about freelance engineers

Whoa! We have www.studiokekkonen.com !

Kekkonen Elää! # 1 Matti Johannes Koivu Live at Studio Kekkonen

Emma Salokoski: "Kuiva Maa" at the Syksyn Sävel song contest

Live at Studio Kekkonen series begins!

Juppu's past adventures in hi- and lo-fi #1: Vesa-Matti Loiri, part one

Delay Trees song featured on "Grey's Anatomy"!

51 songs from Studio Kekkonen

Suvi Isotalo - P.S. Maj'lle

Prehistory of Studio Kekkonen: The old place

Aves video!

Kekkonen elää! #8
Juurakko: Eipä kasva kaikki laulut