Those who have read these reports and reviews know that I enjoy fishing – quite a lot in fact.   Well, somewhere around fifteen years ago when Jon Guggenheim (who was working with me at the time) strongly suggested we go fishing with a friend in South Dakota, the boat we went out on is now getting a new look. 

Last month I was in Cleveland helping Jon celebrate his 50th birthday, and this past weekend Jon was traveling through Omaha.  We all spent a couple of days helping Jim replace the carpet in his boat.  Both Jon and I have spent many an hour on this boat and have memories of the first of one breed of fish caught and my 1st adult fishing day. It deserved our attention for a good spruce-up and, like any project of this nature, Jim greatly appreciated the helping hands. We made good progress and are looking forward to more hours spent hopefully reeling them in.

Approximately three years ago Grupo Ilusion De Tierra Caliente  recorded a CD at Tesco Productions, and they’re back working on their second release.  Fourteen songs have been recorded by the six guys which include two keyboardists, key percussion, acoustic guitar, bass, drums/electric percussion and two of the guys double up as vocalists.  Recording another Hispanic group is always enjoyable and these guys are great to have in the studio.

Tesco Productions put the newly acquired mic pre-amps to use for this session.  Overall we’re pleased with the results and the drummer (and the engineer-me) are particularly liking the “new” sound for the kick and snare drum tracks.  We utilized an HHB multi-tube pre for those two mics. The main vocal was processed through a Presonus channel strip with the harmony vocal on another Presonus unit.  The keyboards, bass and acoustic guitar also found new paths through our additional pre-amps we’ve added.

We’re getting everyone’s schedules together so we can start on the mixing process, and looking forward to hearing it completed.  You can see more pics of Grupo Ilusion De Tierra Caliente in our Photo Gallery. And by the way, yes the frogs danced. “Gracias!”

In my effort to continually improve the recordings you hear from Tesco Productions I have added several microphone pre-amp upgrades.  A variety of units have been acquired – even though multiple units are from Presonus who base their designs foremost around a Class A circuit.  Among the Presonus pre-amps are two Eureka channel strips which provides extensive eq, compression, multiple input impedence selection (which greatly helps match the pre-amp to instruments and mics, as well changing the contour of the recorded sound) and tube emulation if desired.  Also from Presonus I now have two Blue-tube units – both the original and updated version 2. These units have a tube in them which can be dialed into the audio path in varying amounts as desired.  The other piece purchased is the HHB Classic 80 multi-stage tube pre which adds another dimension for available sounds.  Our initial listening has been favorable overall and I know we’ll fine tune the best applications for each of these pre-amps in recording sessions to come.  Keep your ears peeled!