Tiny Ruins takeover: Olympic Girls tech insight – part I (Drums, Vocals, Guitars)

Tom Healy plays electric guitar in Tiny Ruins. He produced, engineered & mixed albums Brightly Painted One and Olympic Girls. On the recording process for the latter, Tom says:

On a couple of songs, "Holograms" and "How Much" if you listen closely there is the dry booth recorded drums doubled in places with the roomy drums from the table tennis room. Oh and you can really hear it on Bounty where we recorded with Alex in the table tennis room and using one mic position ages off the hallway so the drums sound beamed in from another room.

I think we used a few drum kits, Alex may have to correct me here, but I know he has a lovely C&C kit, some tracks were done on the 60’s Rogers that lives in my studio courtesy of a friend. You can hear his unique vision of a drum kit on the album. He incorporates a lot of percussion in how he plays. Songs like "Olympic Girls" are held by a steady Caxixi, or a delicate shaker on "Sparklers". You can hear the toweled down tom tom rolls on "Sparklers" and the rattle of old woodblocks on "Stars False Fading".

My Fender Jag, Hollie’s Firebird and a friend’s 12 string Ricky were the electrics we used. Always Eventide effects on them if there are for the more unnatural tones, they make such great pedals which can cover so much ground and really inspire me. Hollie's wonderful acoustic arrangements would have been recorded either with a KM84 or a C12 for the brighter tones or an old STC 4038 made for the BBC in the 1950s if it needed to sound a bit more oldskool and soft.

There were couple of signal paths that I copied from when we recorded Brightly Painted One. I know we had compared a bunch of holy grail vocal mic’s for Hollie’s voice for that album and I so I just copied the chain we looked the most. It is a Neumann TLM 49 into a Neve 1073 and a tiny bit of Pultec EQ boosts and an NZ made Buzz opto compressor, not the most glamorous microphone of the bunch we tried but for some reason it works so well with here. It just felt really natural with her voice. -- Tom of Tiny Ruins