Plain White T’s “Live & Rare” and Mixing at 513 Recording

Last week we had the pleasure of recording the PLAIN WHITE T's at the Saguaro Hotel, in Scottsdale, AZ, for another one of Hot 97.5/103.9's "Live and Rare" sessions.

First of all, I wanted to point out that these guys were very kind, professional and as talented as any of the bands we have worked with. When their major single “Hey There Delilah” was super-popular (circa 2006-ish), I remember being totally annoyed with it; as it was playing EVERYWHERE and seemed a bit “whiny” for my tastes. Now it’s about ten years later and my tastes and experiences have matured (ha!). By the time I had finished mixing and mastering their live performance, I was very pumped with the sound and couldn’t seem to get their songs out of my head!

RND mixing console at Fivethirteen

As usual, we setup and recorded the performance in a medium/large bar area (as seen in the video above), using a hybrid PA/recording rig that we built, developed and finally just purchased from Robin Wilson (Uranus Recording). There were no second takes, overdubs, edits or Auto-Tune and this time I chose to mix it at my favorite new studio- 513 Recording (A-Room, see pics below). I did the mastering here at the Laguna Suite a few days after the mix, and I think it sounds better than any of the other “Live and Rare” sessions we’ve done (since 2010). Enjoy the pics and resulting videos below..

Gear rack at Fivethirteen

I took advantage of 513’s amazing collection of analog hardware and used only a handful of plugins. In fact, that alone added a warmth and sheen I haven’t been able to achieve in the past, when I was using only digital processing. The tracks played out from Pro Tools (10) and hit numerous pieces of analog gear before being “summed” in their Rupert Neve Designs 5088 console. Here’s some more pics from the session-

Shadow Hills Dual Vandergraph on the Mix
500 series and more gear at Fivethirteen
dbx and Manley ELOP at Fivethirteen
Eventide DSP4000 at Fivethirteen
RND console and Pro Tools 10 at Fivethirteen

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