First Studio Recordings

Back in the cold winter months of February i and my fellow group set about recording a single as a work assignment for university. The musicas were chosen as one of the group members knew them well. They had opted to record a cover song by first aid kit called Heavy storm. As this was my first studio session i learnt a lot of the dos and donts of the studio :).

Arriving early is something i started doing on my first ever session. Its an invaluable time in which i can see what equipment i have been left with, wether pro tools has decided to be nice and i can patch the desk and set up the desk. It also helps to set up pro tools in such a fasion where each of the tracks has a sensible name ;) not track 1, track 2 , track 3 etc etc etc. (kudos to the guy who had to go through this and name it all correctly) With the session basics set up we could start mic'ing up the instruments.

As far as the microphone placement went i knew very little except what i had learnt as a live sound man. following in this i chose standard microphones and placed them in a logical fashion. 

Drums:

Kick - Akg d12

Snare - 2 x sm57

Hi Hats - Akg c451B

Overheads - Akg C414B

Bass Guitar:

Di Box

The result of this when mixed was rather good giving the lack of the groups experience. I ended up recoding bass through a di box for the next 6 months. From here it went down hill :( . 

To attempt to record the guitar we used a matched pair of earthworks SR 30s and a AKG c414. This would probably have worked if we had boosted the pre amps enough,  but for some reason never did. To bring up the levels in the post production/mixing the audio tracked was bounced and using final cut pro the noise was removed. This removed the noise but also the upper harmonics. Lesson learnt ALWAYS SOUND CHECK LEVELS!!!

The vocals caused the most problem. Once again being new to recording we opted for 2 microphones for recording each vocal take. One would take the brunt of the vocals behind a pop filter, while the other was left to the side to pick up more room and less direct. The result was full of sibilance but ok for a first attempt. ooooooo i meant to say we used a rode NT1A (which i still hate) and a neuman u87 ( which i love :) )

Many problems arose during the session some of which i will comment on. The Bass and drum parts were taken live with guitar and vocals in the ajacent room to keep the band in time. The session would have benfited from no vocals at this point just the guitar in the live room. I now always try and do recordings live where possible. (more on this later). The origninal song has 2 tracks of vocals all the way through which was hard to match in our session and as a result was not great. Also the singer with the higher voice was left with some of the more lower parts which werent within her range. 

All In all i was fairly happy with the session and eager to jump back in and improve on my mistakes. Next up in the line of works was a metal band :P

The finished Audio