Jonathan Wyndham Talks Tracking at Studio 606

Nashville, TN (September 9, 2024)—On a session at Foo Fighters’ Studio 606 for the Audix All Access YouTube series earlier this year, Nashville singer-songwriter Jonathan Wyndham and his musicians were captured exclusively by the manufacturer’s microphones.

“The way the session came together is a fun story,” Wyndham recalls. “My manager is an amazing audio engineer, Kevin Majorino. We met on a tour, and sitting on a flight from Hawaii to Japan, I’m binging Jason Bourne movies and he’s just working on his laptop. I spent the next year convincing him to manage me. Kevin is a bigtime Audix user and said, ‘I think we can do an entire session using only Audix mics.’ We wound up at Studio 606 because he knows the guys there. It’s not open for public bookings, so it was amazing to be in the hallowed halls!”

After making a splash on The Voice in 2014, Wyndham originally planned to write songs on Music Row, but soon found his prowess on guitar sought out by leading country and pop artists such as Colbie Caillat and Jesse James Decker. He released his own album, Nashville Rock & Soul, Vol. 1, in 2021.

Miking the Prog Metal Drumkit for Live Sound

A dual-dynamic approach recorded Wyndham’s guitar, yielding results that delighted the artist. “Oliver Roman, the house engineer there, let me use some amps from the studio’s collection,” Wyndham says. “I chose an older—and modded—Marshall and a mid-’90s Vox AC30. I ran stereo, with both an i5 and a PDX720 on each amp. Normally I’m a fan of pairing a dynamic with a ribbon mic, but they had this dialed in perfectly in-phase and we quickly hit this moment where the tone was just perfect.”

As to drums, he recalls, “When I pulled up the tracking session, they’d sent me to start the mix, and just listened down to the raw tracks off the board I was stunned. The sense of imaging through the SCX25As was just bananas.”

Wyndham was no less impressed with the A231 as primary vocal mic. “Honestly, I don’t think we needed much EQ at all,” he says. “I can definitely say my own vocal had none. The great engineer Al Schmitt once said that a microphone is to an engineer as a lens is to a photographer. He thought if you needed EQ, you had the wrong mic or placement for the source. That’s the thing about Audix. They make so many different mics tailored to different sources that you don’t need a huge budget to have something like the options Al was talking about.”