Devour Music

I only got a few minutes on Charlie Christian's birthday to knock a "Happy Birthday" video in his honor, so I jammed on two choruses of "Honeysuckle Rose" in Db, which is where he played it with both the BG Sextet and recorded it with the full Benny Goodman Orchestra in 1939.

I'm playing my 1937 Gibson ES-150 and 1939 EH-185 amplifier, while the rhythm track was recorded using my 1939 Gibson L-5. Everything was recorded with an AEA R84A Active Ribbon Mic.

I've always felt one of the keys to Charlie's tone was the fact that the speaker was somewhat far from the microphone, which takes so much of the spiky high-end off, and the room sound makes it sound really massive. So different than putting an SM57 right up against the grill - it sure works for a lot of things, but not this kind of tone.

There's no fancy outboard preamps, just a humble Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen into Logic. And there's no EQ, save for a HPF at 100hz, and the only effects are some vintage-style compression.

This was also in preparation for our annual Charlie Christian Birthday Concert which we held on 8/4/24. You can check out the livestream of the whole show HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV35k453CLE.