Recording Session 2- Before and After

Before the second recording session, I looked over the electric guitar recording methods which I had previously researched (see previous blog post).  I also ensured that I remembered the set-up of the microphones for the drum kit in order to avoid wasting time during the session, trying to remember and constantly moving the microphones about. I brought a pen and piece of paper with me in order to note down what was in each channel.

After meeting with and greeting the band, I stayed in the live room in order to set up the microphones, starting with the Drum Kit. It was soon after this that we realised the pressure of having only 3 group members (rather than 5) as we faced the challenge of mic-ing up each instrument, in order to keep ourselves organised, we decided to mic up each drum but not plug the XLR cables into the stage box immediately. This was so that we could plug them into each channel in order of their arrangement from left to right, I then noted onto a piece of paper which microphone was in each channel in order to make the sound checks, panning and grouping easier. After this, we finished setting up the rest of the microphones for the guitars, bass and lead and backing vocalists, ensuring that wires were tucked away safely and that the overheads stayed up as they kept sinking despite our efforts. Due to the time pressure we also didn’t feel confident to try any creative guitar recording methods, however, we did ensure that the microphone was at a good angle and close to the speaker cone to pick up more high and low end frequencies.

Due to the time pressure and lack of group members, we then realised that we had somewhat neglected the live room and ProTools hadn’t been set up fully, whilst this was being sorted out, I turned my attention to the mixing desk and the patch bay. After we set up talk back and fold back according to the band’s requirements, we used talk back to communicate with the drummer so that we could pan the drums on the mixing desk in order to create a stereo image of the sound and adjust the gain on both the mixing desk and the sound card in order to prevent peaking. After this was all set up, I proceeded to group all 8 of the drum tracks using the patch bay into a stereo track. We then ensured that none of the other instruments were peaking on the mixing desk and soundcard by doing another sound check. After this, we went ahead and recorded the band for the first time, we noticed peaking throughout this and therefore recorded them twice. When we brought them through to the control room in order to play back the recording, we noticed that the lead vocals weren’t too audible, however, we had to decide to fix this during the mixing as, due to time pressure, we didn’t have any time for another take.