A pro addresses recording your Breedlove Organic Collection guitar at home
“I have no education or formal training with mixing or engineering,” says Rod Castro. “I think the best thing to do is just trust your ears.”
As a top session player on the busy Los Angeles recording scene, Castro, Breedlove’s featured artist for May, has long had a home studio in Burbank. He also keeps a rented soundproofed tracking space at a North Hollywood rehearsal complex. Given recent lockdowns throughout the music industry—as with everywhere else—Castro has been doing all of his work out of those two rooms rather than in dozens of Tinseltown studios.
He knows that you are likely doing the same, making music at home. Whether you’re new to DIY recording or an old hand, Castro has some great pro tips.
The first one, as noted above, is to use your ears, to always have faith in what you hear. If it sounds great to you, it surely will to someone else.
“I constantly do A/B comparisons with recordings that I like,” Castro says. “If I’m tracking my acoustic and I’m going for a particular kind of sound or vibe I’m wanting to recreate, it’s often influenced by another recording. Like this one track I was working on recently, it was very folky, but modern folky, so I started listening to John Mayer’s, Paradise Valley. I love how the acoustics were tracked in that record so I listened to those songs and I A/B’d them with mine. Then I’d start shaping the EQ, finding whatever frequency I needed to take out to make it sound more like that. I just trusted my ears. I couldn’t tell you why it was sounding a certain way. I couldn’t listen to something and be like, ‘oh yeah, take out the 500k’—That means nothing to me. So, I just trusted my ears to get the sound I wanted.”
Castro plays a 2013 Breedlove Legacy Dreadnought and just recently started using a sustainably sourced all solid wood Organic Collection Artista Concerto CE, which he has had outfitted with an L.R. Baggs Anthem System to match the older dread.
When micing the Breedloves on his own, he uses a Lewitt LCT – 540 Subzero large diaphragm condenser mic, which he first came across on a pre-COVID studio date. It’s a pro model, but it doesn’t have to completely break the bank.
Castro is a fan of keeping things—including signal chains—bone simple and says you can get by with remarkably little gear.
“My setup to record, for both acoustic, and electric, is so minimal. If there’s one thing I’ve realized, it’s that you don’t need a bunch of crazy gear to get good sounding recordings, because the most important thing is the playing itself.”
“It comes down to ‘Are you playing well?’ ‘Are you recording yourself well?’ I was talking to my buddy Matt Rubano, who’s an incredible bassist. He plays for Angels & Airwaves now, but he’s worked with Taking Back Sunday and Lauryn Hill, among others. He pointed out how there’s good gear and there’s amazing gear. The biggest difference between good and amazing is the price, because the cost difference between a $1000 mic and a $10,000 mic is bigger than the quality difference between the two. In other words, you should be able to get a good sound out of something decent.”
“My setup is simply that Lewitt mic going into a Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface. That goes into my laptop and then I just use UA plugins or Waves plugins to add compression and shape the sound of it. It sounds great to me, and usually whoever I send it to is very happy with it, so I don’t see the need to spend all this money on other gear when what I have works.”
“Also, what I recommend is to hit up your friends who are more advanced and experienced in recording, send them stuff you’re working on and ask for their advice. Just say like, ‘Hey, can you listen to this? What do you think it needs? What do you think is missing?’ Take everything they say into consideration and start applying that moving forward.”
“I think the best way to learn is by doing, and having your work reviewed by your peers.”
