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UNMASKED: A Journey of Faith, Health, Curiosity & Authentic Conversations with Ashleigh Chevalier
Welcome to UNMASKED, the thought-provoking podcast where host Ashleigh Chevalier invites you on a journey of authentic exploration through life's joys, hardships, and defining moments. Join this Christ follower, fitness enthusiast, and curious adventurer as she delves into the interconnected nature of our diverse experiences.
UNMASKED breaks the mold of single-topic podcasts by embracing the beautiful complexity of human interests. Each episode features candid conversations about:
- Faith and spiritual growth
- Fitness journeys (CrossFit, lifting, archery)
- Travel adventures and discoveries
- Entrepreneurship challenges and triumphs
- Animal companionship and training
- Marketing insights for businesses
- Family dynamics (motherhood, divorce, healing)
- Recovery from domestic violence
- Music, art, and whiskey appreciation
- Plant care and gardening wisdom
- Neuroscience and health discoveries
- Space exploration and engineering fascinations
About Your Hostess
Ashleigh brings a refreshing perspective as someone who doesn't claim expertise but rather genuine curiosity. A libertarian who values personal freedom and respects diverse viewpoints, she creates a judgment-free space where listeners can explore ideas without political divisiveness.
Her personal experiences with family, animals, career challenges, and overcoming domestic violence inform conversations that resonate with authenticity and hope. She's a professional marketing and strategic development coach for her business Level Up Collaborative, a professional touring and recording musician (singer, songwriter, instrumentalist and performer), and an amateur fitness enthusiast.
UNMASKED isn't just another niche podcastβit's a reflection of how our varied interests connect in meaningful ways. Whether you share Ashleigh's faith or come from a different perspective, you'll find value in these honest discussions about navigating life's complexities.
Subscribe now to join a community where nothing is off-limits, expert guests provide valuable insights, and every episode reminds you that you're never alone on your journey.
*Remember, today is just the beginning.
#AuthenticConversations #FaithJourney #LifeUnmasked #PersonalGrowth #CrossFitLife #EntrepreneurMindset #MeaningfulConnections #DiverseDiscussions
Ashleigh Chevalier (00:00)
Hey everybody, it's Ashleigh Chevalier. I'm here with my good friend, Johnny Terrell, who is the owner of Soulhaven Studios in Virginia Beach. Last episode, we talked about AI and music and what the recording academy is doing. Pretty interesting stuff there. And this episode, we're just gonna take a deep dive into some of the best mics you can record in. As a vocalist, I drool over these mics. I'm gonna let him show you and talk about the benefits of these because different voices and different instruments need different things. So Johnny, what you got for us?
John Terrell (00:29)
All right, yes, so it's a thing just like every guitar, every snowflake, every microphone's different. And then they're all different. And certainly when you get to like high end mics, they could be different week by week from the same company. And so when you find a great mic, hang on to it for sure. So yeah, the two mics I was able to grab quickly, I have the Telefunken U47.
Ashleigh Chevalier (00:35)
Totally
Ooh.
John Terrell (00:49)
model of this is within the first 2000 ever made. so it was built in the late 50s, early 60s. It was purchased, Capital Studios was selling a bunch of gear. So Capital Studios is infamously where Frank Sinatra recorded, Mary J. Blige, Duke Ellington, like all that stuff. So these are mics that were used for all of those when they were just letting some stuff go.
It's an incredibly warm tube microphone. It is one of the gold standards for vocals. I mean, you see it all the time with, if you see Taylor Swift in the studio recording, if you see Samara Joy, yeah, so yeah, they're using the U47, which is, yes. So this was most of Cayenne Roses, most of the vocals was that.
Ashleigh Chevalier (01:21)
really?
Have I sang on that one?
Okay.
John Terrell (01:35)
And then actually, the two mics I'm gonna throw up today are both the ones we used on that record. And the other mic is a Neumann TLM-170, which is predominantly used for a lot of voiceover recording for animated shows and broadcast. It's an unbelievably transparent mic. Like you can put it in front of it and you don't hear the microphone, the character of it. So it's just very transparent. And the voicings of these are drastically different. And so a lot of times...
If I have a singer who has a complex tone, which you very much do, where you have unbelievably sweet, quiet, like these beautiful tones, and then you absolutely can blast and just rip these just unbelievably beautiful big vocals. So the U47 has a great mid-range, like really punchy, and the 170 is super clean, crystal top end. So if you know...
some of the songs were, say, maybe going a little bit heavier. I may introduce the 170 over the 47, just to make sure we keep that top-end clarity, but that you can't beat that mid-range punch. think, a lot like you, I'm spacing the name of the song. She's a lot like you. Less like you, yes, thank you, sorry. But that's all, like, I think that was one of the two songs where this mic was used exclusively, just because it stayed perfectly in that mid-tent, and it's just like,
Ashleigh Chevalier (02:50)
you. Yeah.
John Terrell (03:00)
It was so perfect.
Ashleigh Chevalier (03:02)
Now was that
for acoustic and the full band one or was that just the acoustic recording?
John Terrell (03:07)
That was just the full band recording. That was the full band recording. For the acoustic sessions, used the 170 just because I needed the transparency because we were recording everybody in one room and I needed to be able to get enough rejection. And then the two mics are super sensitive so I didn't want to have to deal with a ton of bleed from the bass and then the acoustic guitar. So was able to get a little more rejection from the 170.
Ashleigh Chevalier (03:11)
What did you use for the acoustic sessions?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Rejection? What do mean? Like a bubble around the sound kind of deal?
John Terrell (03:35)
Yeah,
well because the you know the the you know you're playing guitar and singing and so Although the mic is on your on your voice It's also picking up that acoustic guitar So I wanted to be able to reject just so I can get enough control over your vocal and then opposite wise I can get enough separation from your vocal to guitar so I can like independently deal with that
Ashleigh Chevalier (03:46)
Okay.
Is there
a mic you use for different styles of vocals beyond those two? I love Neumann personally. I sang with a Neumann at In Your Ear Studio for the Shockoe Sessions Live. I loved the sound of that. β But again, a lot of bleed. I couldn't have those tracks mixed down because it didn't have that rejection you're talking about. But the vocal sound was, I was in love with it. I was like, my gosh.
John Terrell (04:02)
Sure, are great.
Mm-hmm.
Sure. Yep.
Sure.
But that's what makes those kind of live recordings tricky of how to deal with that. it's just a thing. Yeah, so not necessarily styles, but I do listen to the singer. So usually, if I've gotten good at, if I can hear somebody talking, know what mic I'm gonna throw on their voice. And so even Mike's like, it's set up for other things. Like we have a Sony C800, which is like one of the top.
Ashleigh Chevalier (04:39)
Okay.
John Terrell (04:45)
top tier mics ever made that we just got that for vocals, strings, anything. It's just an incredible microphone, but we just got that recently, which I'm actually excited to hear what it sounds like on you. β So, yeah, I mean, we have that. have a bunch of the high end Shure KSM mics that sound great that like it's the exclusive mic of like the Montreal Jazz Festival. Like it's just a great sounding for horns, sometimes vocals. I'm just looking at them looking in the live room now. See what else is up.
Ashleigh Chevalier (04:47)
For what?
Hmm. I'm trying to say
I sound like a horn when I sing.
John Terrell (05:13)
No, no, no, no, no, Oh, no, no, the Sony C800 is like the, like the primo mic. But yeah, but it also could be the song too. that's why with studios, find places that have a pretty solid mic collection that you could swap stuff out. if you have a mic that's like, okay, I'm not loving the feel of this, all right, I'll swap it out for something else, no big deal. our studio between both rooms, I think we have,
Ashleigh Chevalier (05:15)
I'm totally kidding!
John Terrell (05:36)
We have eight or nine different Neumann mics. We have a handful of telefunken mics. Yeah, so mean, we have a pretty wide mic closet, because again, every vocal's different, every song's different. So it's...
Ashleigh Chevalier (05:38)
Thank
Well,
male and female, different style, like timbres of the voice, deeper registers, and that doesn't mean or higher registers. know, countertenors of super high voice, like Jeff Buckley, of my favorite singers and artists to talk about. My friend Will, is in the band Lord and Spiral Grave, a metal band, both touring. Well, Lord just coming back. But anyway, point being, he introduced me to Jeff Buckley, the Grace album.
And when I heard him sing Lilac Wine, which Nina Simone also covered, he's a countertenor. Have you ever heard him sing that? And I was like, he's a countertenor. The ability to sing that high, that's a mezzo range. He can sing as high, and it has to do with the tenor. So I'll take a short break to explain this for musicians who aren't fully aware and leaning into my classical training here.
You've got bass and then you've got baritone, tenor in the male and then you have a counter tenor. And there are sopranos, male sopranos, they're rare but they do exist. And then you've got soprano one and soprano two which soprano one is the highest and soprano two tends to overlap with mezzo. They don't usually differentiate unless you're in a choral setting. And then you go into alto and
contralto. so what those ranges are if you're looking at a keyboard, all right? You've got huge range of keys on the keyboard and you've got your middle C. And if you go for middle C, which is your C4 right? C6 is your high C. And when you're listening to your soprano one sing the Queen of the Night aria, they're dancing up and around. When you're talking about the whistle register, like Mariah Carey, right? When she's singing
John Terrell (07:30)
Mm-hmm.
Ashleigh Chevalier (07:31)
above C6, right? Like she's in a whistle, I mean, I'm not pinning her note, I'm just saying like she's above C6. We were talking about a mezzo, you've got somebody who can go a little bit below
John Terrell (07:36)
Sure. Sure.
Ashleigh Chevalier (07:41)
G3.
Like I can go all the way down to E3 just below that G3. Haven't always had that. That's partly age and maturity, I'll talk about that in a minute.
and I do have an A in my whistle register. It's been a long time since I've hit it, but it's there. I don't really practice it. It's a muscle. I qualify as a mezzo because my tessitura, the place where I'm comfortable, β is right in that C5 I start to hit F, I'm uncomfortable. So like, I tend to break at the E flat. I used to break it F sharp, but that's the change of my voice, right? So a famous singer,
Cecilia Bartoli opera won't get into that too much, but she started as a soprano, as a mezzo, and then shifted into soprano. People's voices change, right? But then if you're talking about the mezzo range, which I just gave, doesn't tend to go down to C, most people break around the G That is your like mezzo range,
They can go to a G or an A. A lot of mezzos can still hit that C6, they don't want to live up there like a lyric. And if you have a countertenor, you're talking about a tenor who can overlap into the mezzo range. But the timbre of the voice,
is like the color or the tone. You mentioned this a minute ago. I can have like a bell light kind of like shimmery higher register, but then I have like a really broad low, which is those are all timbres. My tessitura is where I'm comfortable to repeat that. then the timbre is the color that you might hear. And you hear timbre a lot when you're talking about string instruments
John Terrell (08:45)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Ashleigh Chevalier (09:07)
So that is my explanation for those who want a little insight on timbre, tessitura, and ranges, because it is directly applicable to what you're talking about on the microphone.
when you're talking about less like you on that black mic that's right in front of you β or that one? Okay, which was, you said that held the mid range? Okay.
John Terrell (09:25)
For the studio. the studio, yeah, yeah, yeah. So has a more
focused mid-range and not as much like sparkly top, although the high-end on this sounds amazing. verse, totally.
Ashleigh Chevalier (09:34)
for power, but the
higher isn't what it's focused on.
John Terrell (09:39)
Sure, yeah, yeah. So something like a pure Neumann, which again,
there's nobody that does high end as clean as Neumann microphones. And then also what's happening in the mix. If you're dealing with lot of violins, banjo, mandolin stuff, that vocal mid-range is what's gonna be important. So that's where a warmer vocal mic helps that pop through. Now if you're with like...
kind of grittier electric guitars, darker drums, maybe you want the Neumann so that vocal stays a little more on the top.
Ashleigh Chevalier (10:10)
Well, let's talk about that a little bit. So I want to talk about compression, we'll talk about that in a second. Physics is directly applied to the way sound waves are on a space. So a lot of times musicians don't think about that, but I know as an audio engineer you do. So when we're singing in, and I'll go into this in later episode, but when we are singing vocally and you're learning through your vocal range, like lower notes exist lower
and they bounce and they're slower and they exist lower on the spatial range. And the higher ones go faster, not just because they take more power, but because of where they actually exist. They don't necessarily take more power. That depends on the individual. But your vocal cords are just going so, so, so, so fast and the waves are going really fast and they exist higher up in this specific space. And it's the same like if you're thinking about colors and wavelengths.
John Terrell (10:36)
Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Ashleigh Chevalier (11:00)
like β the reds and the yellows are lower and they're broader and slower and then the ultraviolets are higher and faster and take up more space at the top, right? So those are very interesting similarities between audio and visual that we don't necessarily see.
John Terrell (11:18)
Well, they're actually
one of the, this is way nerdier physics, but they're actually one of the same. If you speed sound up past 100,000 hertz, that's when you start getting into light, and then that's where you get to the refractions. But that's a whole other thing. Yeah, it's all, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ashleigh Chevalier (11:33)
No, that's, see, there you go. See, I did the extension of what I was talking about. No, see, I love it. Okay,
but that all applies to where mics are set, like how you're micing them, and then the range that it accepts, right? Okay, so then explain how, so did I explain correctly, like how you stack the layers and why there's only so much space?
John Terrell (11:46)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Yes, β with a β audio source, have your positive and negative, and that's your push and pull. So when you have a speaker that's pushing, that's compression that's going up, and then pulling, refraction going down. So if you're in a DAW, you can actually see the compression, refraction. And then there's the zero point. So when you have sound sacrosanct with each other, most of the time people get in trouble with low-end instruments,
like kick drums and bass guitars, where if one is pushing and the other's pulling, that speaker is not going to move anymore, and it's not going to feel as good. β So, you have to make sure those are moving at the same time. You can do a little bit with editing, there's tons of ways to deal with that. But with vocals, it's the same way. So, if you get into doing vocal doubles or harmonies, β if they're in the same placement with the same microphone, β it's going to move the same way, is not audio-wise going to
push very well. And so you have to have the differentiation because it makes it a complex waveform, which is again, why with that, with your record, when we did the harmonies, so let's say I use the 47 on your, for the lead, I used the 170 on the backgrounds. So it had a different texture. And so this is something I picked up from Dave Cobb, producer who works with Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, all that. But he is, he's a very big proponent of, or Brandy Carlisle. Yeah, right.
Ashleigh Chevalier (13:17)
All my favorites. I love
all of those artists.
John Terrell (13:20)
For sure, but yeah, yeah, a lot of times
he'll have like vintage tube mic and then like a high end other mic, depends on whatever works for those sessions. But those things are up, again, as options. Those are not happening where they're being played at the same time, but it's just like having that tonal texture, certainly with a vocalist that is as rich as you, where if we need to flip it, it's just an easy on-off and then you're on to the next thing.
Ashleigh Chevalier (13:47)
I like that definition vocal texture because I'm definitely a textured vocalist. You could add that to your timbre. β And I would define texture as like the bell tones, but also that grit where sometimes I'm bringing out that bluesy. And that's interesting you say that because auto compression, I've dealt with this situation live and we're not talking about microphones that are used live. We're talking about studio microphones.
John Terrell (14:02)
Sure. Yeah.
Ashleigh Chevalier (14:13)
I know, I guess you said some of these are used live, but they require 100 % attention the entire time that an artist is performing. And this is often not understood. Like I've gotten pretty sensitive to rooms now because my voice is so like small to loud. was like, have to, if I'm gonna perform with my band in a closed venue, not outside, because I have a little more, like there's a little more resilience and tolerance to the air.
John Terrell (14:41)
Sure,
yes.
Ashleigh Chevalier (14:42)
β
I really need a sound person because I don't want people bleeding out of the room and the mistake is made that β sound guys can just like turn something on autopilot and leave, no, cannot leave me on autopilot. I don't think you should leave any live performing artists on autopilot because there will always be a musician that is, they're always gonna push it even if their voice isn't gigantic. It doesn't matter.
John Terrell (14:45)
100%, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. But it's
dynamic. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Ashleigh Chevalier (15:10)
They might even need it more because they're closer and they need like,
know, if they get quiet, you can't hear them at all. So I've gotten a pretty big proponent of like, you should be riding the mic of your artist, especially if you're being paid. I think they should be paid, but do your job.
John Terrell (15:26)
Yeah, well,
but that is the, I mean, I'm getting into the live sound world, it's just, I'm so removed from it. But yeah, but a lot of times, what I'm seeing is when I go out with an artist I work with, it's like, hey, we're performing, and then I go see them, like, you basically just paid that guy to bring gear out, but he's not doing anything. Yeah, and so, but that is, vocal ride levels are super important. I'm now a little more aggressive, even.
Ashleigh Chevalier (15:42)
I can bring my own gear.
John Terrell (15:53)
β like on my output stage of either my preamp or if I'm using a little bit of compression, but I ride that gain. I'm right, as I'm going into Pro Tools, I'm trying to keep it as, but that also takes me knowing the song a little, like making sure I know where you're going vocally. But that way, like as it's getting printed to tape, β or hard disk or whatever, it's an even throw. But I think it's the same thing with a live sound guy, like keep your hand on the fader, and then just, because it's a constant push-pull.
Ashleigh Chevalier (16:07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
John Terrell (16:21)
I think that's why if you get to the point of having a sound guy who knows you and knows your music, that's so valuable. It just helps the performance. If they know, like, all right, here's where Ashleigh and the guitar player are going to be going back and forth and trading fours, otherwise he's going keep the vocal up, keep the guitar down, and then guitar soloing, and he doesn't realize what's going on.
Ashleigh Chevalier (16:44)
Well,
and I think that it's really important for the listener experience because we're in the entertainment industry, you know, so maybe we'll do an I'll do another podcast with a live sound technician and talk to him about it because there are different mics that are better for different stages and different styles. And I think as a working musician, that'd be very great insight. So just a quick recap. We talked about some of the microphones you use in studio that I've used personally, which
John Terrell (16:48)
Yeah, totally.
Sure. Yeah. Sure.
Ashleigh Chevalier (17:09)
If you haven't checked out album, Cayenne Roses, you can hear these microphones and a whole host of other things that are on Soul Haven's discography if you go to soulhavenstudios.com. And I talked a little bit about ranges and the point on the keyboard for middle C, and what that looks like, timbre, tessitura. I've been singing since I was five. There are different, like the study of voice is called vocal pedagogy and I have
I did study all of that in music school. But what becomes acceptable over time in the classical world and how popular or like working artists use it might be different. So I'm always open for discussion or comments about your understanding of these different ranges. And I'm open to being wrong. So and if I am, go ahead and drop a comment and we'll dig deeper on it in another episode. We're done for today. Check out the mics below in the show notes. I'm Ashleigh Chevalier.
I hope you have a Johnny T who is it?
John Terrell (18:06)
I'm Bye.