Aside from developing my work in the live industry, I have also done some work in the studio. I feel like a lot of this work provides a good understanding of signal processes and mic use, so I will be including some of it below.
Below is a track I recorded in the studio, and also the write up that I did for my advanced studio techniques outcome 1
Studio Session Write Up
RECORDING The band that was being recorded had a very typical and basic setup, involving 1 Vox, Two guitars bass and Drums. Any attempts to do any preproduction with the band (i.e reference tracks, amount of parts) were met with being uncertainty so I went into the session fairly blind about what to expect. However I started with micing up kit with the following;
Kick – AKG D112 Placed about 6 inches in the shell, slightly to the right to avoid directly clickiness from the beater. Snare – Shure SM57 Placed at around 45deg angle to the outer part of the skin, at about 3-4 inches away Hats – SE Electronics SE1A Placed at about 30deg angle to the top hat, at about 3-4 inches away Overheads – AKG C414 & SE Electronic SE1A Placed in a mid side positioning 3ft above the centre of the kick shell, this technique was chosen to fully capture the spread of the cymbals and tomtoms
For the drum recording the rest of the band played live after being DI’d directly into protools and then sent to the drummers headphone mix, we recorded all the parts and then used these as guides for the other parts that were subsequently recorded. 4 complete takes were done for the drums
Bass The bass guitar was DI’d into an analogue compressor, fairly compressed to compensate for the for the players inconsistency and then patched into protools. The Sans-Amp plugin was put on the channel when recorded to give the artist the sound they desired, but was later removed as it clashed with the mix. The bass was done in 3 takes but required several punch ins
Guitar The lead guitar part actually just ended up being the guide part lightly processed to give it some colour, as the take was tight and gave the sound desired.
The rhythm guitar part was recorded from an Orange Crush LDX, picked up with an SM57 about 2in off centre. This gave it a nice tuneful crunchy sound that complimented the players style and use of pedals (He was using only one pedal, a heavy distortion that I do not know the name of)
Vocals The vocals were recorded using an AKG C414, placed around 1ft away from the source as he had quite a loud voice, some light reverb was placed on the track for his foldback to help deal with the dead sound of the room and give him a clearer idea of how his voice would sound in the mix. The vocals were done in one take, there was a double recorded but a lot of the timing was off due to the vocalist being unable to hear himself clearly (he didn’t tell me this and we didn’t have any more time for a do over) there was also some fluff and harmony vocals thrown in to beef up the sound.
TRACKSHEET
1.Kick 2.Snare 3.Hihat 4.Overhead mid 5.Overhead side L 6.Overhead Side R 7.Bass 1 8.Bass 2 9.Guide guitar Lead (FINAL) 10.rhym guitar 11.rhym guitar 2 12.solo 13.Solo slide 14.Lead Vox 15.vox Double 16.vox extra 17.lead doubled
Evaluation
My biggest problem with this recording session was the lack of organisation beforehand, the band had been unable to provide me with a lot of information that I had requested in regards to song length and unable to provide me with any reference tracks for the sound they were going for. They were also fairly unrehearsed, and required a good bit of time fiddling around with parts with different tempos before we could actually get down to the nitty gritty of recording.
In terms of what I could’ve done better, there is a lot there to. My placement with the snare mic was way off and ended up sounding terrible, I wasn’t on the ball enough at the time to realise and correct and ended up suffering a lot in the mixing process trying to fix it. The overheads were also not optimally placed, and didn’t pick up some of the tom hits quite as cleanly as I would’ve liked, which was frustrating because I did not have them close mic’d and was relying on the overheads to capture them. For the bass, I wish I had asked for way more takes that I got, I settled for rough and unprofessional sounding and wasn’t critical enough.
The guitars I’m actually quite proud of, the only change I would make would to spend a little more time working on the solo and making it gel better with the track overall.
I think my biggest regret would’ve been in regards to the vocals, I should’ve allowed for more time to do them, and better coached and listened to the performer in order to get the best performance out of him. Not noticing timing issues with the vocal double was complete negligence on my part and is unforgivable. Luckily I was able to save it with an artificial double, but it didn’t quite achieve the same sound I’d been looking for with a legitimate double