This week we had our second session in the Neve studio. This has been one of my favourite classes for the trimester. Seeing the desk in use rather than having it explained made a lot more sense to me as a producer. I have worked out through the year that I learn best by practicing and seeing how consoles work rather than learning on paper. I had taken some videos from our first session that were helpful that I has watched prior to this weeks Neve session. However I hadn't been in the studio since the last time.
We got to the studio and Adrian has already set up the pro Tools session that we were going to be working from. I think that it would have been more beneficial to have showed us how it was set up prior to recording but we were on a small time frame so I understand that we could have fit in everything. We then had to set up the live room and make sure all the microphones were sent to the right inputs on the desk. We had in totally 13 microphones to record the drum kit and the bass guitar rigg. We ran the bass guitar through an amp the from the amp into a DI (direct insert) box then in the to the insert board. Using a DI improves the sound of the guitar rather than just have it miced up on the amp.
As for the drums we had about 11 microphones to use for different parts of the kit. I had never miced up a drum kit before so I took alout of photos as the setup we used sounded so good! This process was a little bit frustrating. It made me realise that I need to extend my knowledge if microphones so I could make my own creative choices when doing something like this. I the most interesting part of this process that I was surprised by how much of a difference it made was suing two microphones for the kick drum; one in the sound hole and one in the drum. We took the cover off the back of the drum so at we could put the mic inside.
Here is a list of the microphones we used to mic up the drum kit i wanted to log this here so I can refer back to it when i go to record drums for my next project for the trimester!
Instrument
Mic and other instructions
Kick Out- M88
Kick In - PZM
Snare - sm57
Snare Bottom -SM57
Hi Hat - AKG451
HI Tom - MD421
Hi Tom Under - MD421
Mid Tom - MD421
Low Tom Under - MD421
Underhead L - KM184
Overhead - Sennheiser MKH416
On the Bass amp we had a M88 and an active DI box.
This was a very helpful session and I know I will come back to this post when i next go to record a band!
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