Bob Dylan's "To Ramona" - Paul Hallman (Live Studio Recording)

Bob Dylan wrote the absolute best breakup songs.

Even when he’s tender, even when he writes a love song, he’s still cutting. Never sentimental. Long live the Jester.

I was going to do a Dylan song for #openmic next week, but I have this recording of “To Ramona” that I did a couple of months ago that I’d rather post now. I have something else in mind for the contest. There are some minor flaws in this recording that may or may not be able to be fixed through waveform editing (mainly some plosives that you can see shaking the windscreen in the video), but I like the performance. However, I really hate editing waveforms and MIDI, so it’s likely I’ll just record it again at some point. I did this as an experiment to figure out if I could get a good mix of vocal and acoustic when recorded live. That’s always tricky to do because each mic picks up some of the instrument the other mic is intended for, so you can’t isolate them when you are trying to make each instrument sound its best during mixing. It’s even trickier for me because my vocal mic is SUPER sensitive. It picks up the guitar very clearly. I currently only have two microphones, an Avantone CV-12 (I highly recommend this mic, especially if you replace the tube with a vintage one) and a Shure SM57, so I don’t really have any other options. I think I did pretty decent with the mixing, it’s just the plosives and the fact that I think maybe I can hear my roommate announcing her arrival home ever so faintly at one point that kind of throw a wrench in the works.