Janet Lee "Restless Heart" @ StarMount Studio

Janet Lee "Restless Heart" is a musical journal of one of the most hardworking and sought after songstress in town.

We had much fun recording the album, as it involved many talented musicians starting from WVC Trio doing up the music, always a pleasure to work with the band. Followed by Cecilia Yap, a fantastic soprano singer to be featured in "茉莉花", not to forget Tan Jie on the chinese flute in "The Villager" This was interesting as the instrument was recorded entirely close mic in our tight vocal booth, yet sounding lively and the nuance were well preserved. Guessed it was down to the performer's ability and also the mic pres and converters from Horus interface. No compression or EQ was done on the flute at all.
Vocals were guided by Song Fan, and tracked entirely with sE Gemini Mk2 into Tree Audio Branch.  The band was done live, with 4 mics on drums ( overheads, kick snare), stereo sE 4400a in omni, RT1 ribbon tube on double bass and JZ V67 on the saxophone. All were routed into the mic pre of Audient Zen console.

Its a product of over hundreds of hours clocked in the studio, and the mastering was done at Westside Mastering by the Grammy Award Mastering Engineer- Woody Pornpitaksuk.

Songs are available in iTunes and Spotify.

Music Video:

 "Into The Sky"

One of the many sessions

During "Rider of The Wind" with Nish Tham and Janet Lee

Bihzhu "Bright Veins" @ StarMount Studio

Body percussions, indian ethnic percussions, gamelan and gongs, electric guitars, 2 choir groups, ringtones, double bass, coins, synths and more were being featured in Bihzhu's latest single "Bright Veins". 

With the same production team, Bihzhu as content creator and lead singer and Savy as music arranger and producer, once again we are able to have a dynamic and creative outcome that offers more compared to the "Nightingale Tales".

We used blumleins on the body percussions, most of the sound sources were captured with our favorite stereo ribbon tube microphones RT1. They work best on body percussions and claps, producing an un hyped and very natural sound reproduction, especially for finger snaps and claps.

Session was all the way 192khz 32bit and the track count went past 60 tracks. And we are still able to go further without slowing down the DAW at all, which was quite impressive for an i5 intel processor with just 4gb of RAM.

The objective of the music is to be as open as possible and it open its arms to participation to the music. Percussions and percussive sounds were mostly present in the song, everything was lead by Bihzhu's powerful vocals and backing harmonies.

We went mobile with the system, as we traveled out to capture the gamelan and gongs. Set up was simple and quick. Horus made connections easy with their DB25 to XLRs, and with Ravenna network, we got the shortest signal path as the Horus was placed right around the gamelan set, and all being connected to the DAW via network cable.

The track was mixed by Alex Tan of StarMount Studio and mastered by Woody at Westside Mastering. Such fun collaboration with so many talented and passionate personnels.

Watch "Bright Veins" Music Video, produced by Chris and his dynamic team, and get yourself a copy fromiTunes too!

Bihzhu, Zal and Savy discussing on the body percussion

Santosh providing the ethnic percussion touches.

Fly on the bass