6 Strings and Classic Strings

There was no studio. There was a performance space in Brooklyn with a room worth recording in, a pile of Apollo interfaces, and eighteen string players arriving in a few hours. That's where 6 Strings and Classic Strings begins.

Fab Dupont and the team built a studio inside the venue, then tracked an 18-piece string orchestra and Yvette Young's electric guitar in one day, with Universal Audio.

Inside Day 1 — the build and the tracking:
• Why the orchestra goes on the floor, not the stage — better reverb, room for the players, and angles the cameras can actually use
• The Flux tree: three omnis in a triangle, tape-measured equidistant, loosely stolen from the Decca tree
• Schoeps on the sections, M49s on the basses the way Al Schmitt did it, and the spot mics added once Fab heard the cellos disappear
• Three Apollos and a 4-710 across an 18-string input list, laid out so the numbering stays memorable at speed
• A split on Yvette's guitar — clean DI before the pedalboard, stereo after it — so anything could be re-amped the next day
• A headphone cue so the orchestra could hear her without a note of guitar bleeding into the string mics

Then the call that shaped the record: the plan was to track to a click. Fab went to the concert the night before, heard what the orchestra did with the rubato, and killed the click. "Then it would mean: okay, stop, count off, and go. That's the opposite of music."