Wes Maebe’s Production Notes for “Moonage Daydream” Cover by Lasso The Moon Promotions

Each track of this performance in tribute to David Bowie and Mick Ronson was recorded remotely by a musician sheltering-in-place. It was Wes Maebe‘s job to assemble these tracks into a song master. Wes has kindly agreed to share some of his DynPEQ tunings and application notes for this song.

Drum Buss: Quartet is across the entire drum buss for LF punch (red), a bit of extra Snare upward compression impact (green) and then broad band overall compression (blue).

Overheads: Since these are MIDI drums the kit had to have quite a bit of work done to make it sound less “in the box”. The overheads have the low shelf taking out all the roomy low end from the kick (put in there by the virtual instrument manufacturer) (red). Low mid is on Rotation point minimising the boxines of the snare in the room (yellow), a high shelf gentle compression to bring out the zing of the cymbals (blue) and then a little broadband, full spectrum compression across the entire track (green).

Acoustic guitar 1 was recorded with a Røde NT1 and a Shure SM7B. The NT1 was extremely honky on this particular instrument and if you listen to the original Bowie song, the acoustics are razor sharp, so I wanted to approximate that. I used an instance of Trio in this case to take out the honk around 650Hz (green), on rotation point whilst boosting and gently compressing the high end to get the sparkle (blue).

Both acoustics then go to the Acoustics Buss where Quartet dealt with mid issues, again on rotation point with some severe settings on fast attacks and releases to just deal with the occasional peaks in those frequencies (yellow, green).

Lead Vocals: A lot of work had to be done here, because the singer’s room is quite lively. As this is quite the belter of a song, his voice really set off those room modes. Quartet came to the rescue there to sort out those resonances (yellow, green) but also helped to then reshape some of the character that had been affected by all the EQ’ing (blue, red dynamic). So it allowed me to bring back some weight and low end character (red static).

Band Buss: Quartet then sits across the instrumental/band buss, just to tie everybody together and provide some gentle Low end compression (red), high mid spank (green) and and overall tickle at 3:1 (blue).