Stefan Boman is the house mix engineer at Atlantis Studios in Stockholm, Sweden. He began his career at ABBA’s famed Polar Studios in 1995, and has worked with the likes of Def Leppard, Alice Cooper, Backstreet Boys, Roxette, Avicii, Opeth and Ghost to name but a few. Asked to choose a favourite sound from a session he’s worked on, he nominates ‘No Song Unheard’ by the Hellacopters.
Back In The Room
“Prior to this album, the Hellacopters were kind of lo‑fi and all about distortion and attitude. But with this song and album, we really wanted to turn down all the gain and focus more on the subtle things like the room sounds. So the way we worked on capturing the room sound helped shift the group’s sound from one that was lo‑fi to one that was hi‑fi.
“We recorded the track at ABBA’s old studios, Polar Studios in Stockholm. We had the drums set up in a really dry room that had thick carpet on the floors, and all the ceilings were completely dead, and right next to it was a big marble room. We left the doors open to the big marble room, which had a Neumann KM84 mounted in the ceiling which was about 4m high. That way, you could have a super‑dry close‑miked kit, but those room mics had just about no direct sound and only reflections. It gave some ambience on the side that you could later choose in the mix.
Stefan Boman: The way we worked on capturing the room sound helped shift the group’s sound from one that was lo‑fi to one that was hi‑fi.
“We had the guitars in an all‑wooden room, with the walls lined with flat panels of pine wood so it wasn’t overly diffuse. Due to the good reflection from the wood walls, and also how we arranged the room that the guitars were in, it brought a subtleness to it instead of just being overpowered with aggression. We used a couple of Neumann U47 FETs as room microphones, which, with all the wood reflection, gave the sound a real classy and nice tone.
“The tom sound was very important too. We ended up taking the bottom skins off on the toms and placed a Sennheiser MD 421 in the tom. We had to add a bit of EQ and took away the frequency around 350Hz in order to get rid of that ‘beach ball’ sound that you get from miking the inside of a tom, and it worked really well. The vocals were later overdubbed but were recorded in a completely dry room as we wanted to have more of a slap‑back kind of delay on the vocals instead of any natural reverb.”
Tape Treatment
“In the mix I added a bit of compression, and that was it, as we managed to nail the recording perfectly, so the mix was just fine. It was more about just doing a bit of tweaking and balancing, pretty much. I have to add that the whole album was recorded on a Studer A820 reel-to-reel, which helped polish off some of the transients on the drums and add ‘oomph’.”