Overall band set up
I had never recorded a band before this session had only practiced micing up and recording the instruments separately. In the practice sessions my classmate Mike had come and help me as he has been in this course since the beginning of the year and has had much more experience with microphones and desks. I asked him very nicely if he wanted to help me record this EP for The Jang and thank goodness he said yes because there are a fair few times when my prior knowledge hasn’t held up and he has been there to teach me (what a legend). I knew that Mike had recorded an Ep earlier in the trimester and even though the diversity in the music he is knowledge of using the desks here at SAE was going to be very helpful for me to learn from him.
We have had two recording sessions so far and two mixing sessions the first session was Monday the 12th of November from 5-11:30 In this session we recorded the drums and bass and had a guitar Di and vocals. In the next session we had all the drum and bass takes done and one of the guitar tracks almost completed so we didn't need the whole band to come in. This session was on the 14th of November and we used Audient B for this session. I am more confident in the Audient B control room as this is where Nell and myself recorded the vocals for our last project FYF.
Mike's favorites studio is 8024 for recording bands so I took his advice and we used this studio to do the first recording which was the biggest one where we recorded drums, bass and a bit of guitar. This studio was the best option for us as we needed to have two live rooms working so that the four piece band weren't all crammed into the one small live room. So in the first recording we had the drums and bass in live room A and guitar and vocals both in live room B. I'm glad that we used this technique as when it was all set up it was cool and seemed professional. It was however a little bit annoying for the band to communicate when they needed to but luckily there are very tight and didn't need to talk to each other much. They knew all their songs inside out and we only took about 3 or 4 takes of each song to the ones we needed.
We needed to do a little bit of sound replacement and punch ins for the Bass which was a Di input but that was the only thing for the first session as the drum takes were all perfect and we has some variation in each which was cool and the drummer communicated with us and the band as to what they wanted.
In the next session In Audient B I was much more confident as using the desk so I set up the session and desk and Mike set up the live room with the vocal mics while I set this up. Its safe to say this session ran a lot smoother than the first one as there was less people to organise and less microphones to set up (I shall talk about this in detail later).
BASS:
We planned on micing up a bass amp with a HEIL PR48 but on the day the bassist’s amp was very average so we decided to D.I instead. This was a good creative decision as the DAW technology these days for this technique is so cool and means that we have a perfect line signal to work with, there are no other factors to affect the signal of this or any inconsistent sounds. We used an insert compression to help the sound be more natural and full and this was very effective even while recording it sounded great. I am yet to mix the bass much and have only tired a few things like out board compression which sounded great and I plan on using it for all the bass takes. The takes went smoothly and we only needed to use the quick punch tool in pro tools a few times to get the prefect take only took about three goes.
DRUMS:
The reference tracks the band has sent met had very defined sounding drums in them they were loud in the mix therefore I needed to make choices that would give the same effect as these drum tracks did. This was one of my main concerns when it came to the microphone choices and actually how i would go about mcing up the kit. I wish I had done a bit more research and given myself more time in the studio to play around with different mics/ set up extra ones to playa round with. Here is a diagram of how we ended up setting up the kit.
I would have liked to use more microphones to mic up the kit as from what I read online and from what I have experienced being in studios myself it's more of an industry standard to have a microphone on the top and bottom of all the drums. However due to the limited time we had to set up and record as well as how many microphones we have access to I thought I'd play it safe. We only ended up using 10 microphones on kit and only miced the top of each drum skin. I used a lot of the techniques from the Neve session that we did back in week 6 to execute the most effective and efficient set up. I found the Neve session that week was what inspired me to be able pull off what we did in this recording i didn’t think that my engineering skills were quiet up to scratch but learning about mic placement in this session gave me the hands on skills I needed to feel confident when it came to the day.
Something that we did try which was a technique Mike got told about was placing an SM57 inside the kick drum to capture punchiness of it. When he suggested this I was like sure we can give it a ago. One of Australia’s most popular rock bands Tame Impala use this technique when they record drums and although the sound of their drum mix it quite different to the sound we want to get from the kit the kick drum it what drives their music so i thought it would be worth a shot. Although this isn’t a regularly used technique Parker of Tame Impala rationalises this technique “I just love that ‘bop bop’ sound of the kick. I hate the kick drum sound that’s way too clicky.” (Kevin Parker, 2013). We placed the Sm57 on a pillow inside the kick facing toward the drummer and tried to make it as level as possible. Although we also used a Heil PR48 on the out of the kick as well to capture the outer basser tone as well I think that the combination of these two microphones has given us an interesting sound to work with. The Heil PR48 is a standard mic used in the industry on a kick drum and is similar to the BETA 52 we used in the Neve session but I had read good things about the Heil so decided to use it instead to try something new. We had the Beta 52 in the session in case we needed to swap them over also but the sound was great so we didn’t need to.
We used Md421’s on all three toms as this was a safe option when capturing only the top skin of the drums. This microphone is a great dynamic microphone that is being used by a lot of studios as it has a large frequency response to capture both the lows and highs of the tom which I thought would be a good addition to help make the drums sound huge due to the little amount of microphones we were planning to use. I watched this video on youtube to get a good idea of where abouts I should place it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXTpna_7ro4.
I was sort of a last minute decision to grab some under head microphones as well as overheads as I was worried that I didn't have enough mics to make it sound huge I thought that this addition would capture some of the natural reverb coming from under the hats as well as the toms. We picked two different pairs of mics for this one was the M3 pair for underheads and the over heads were NT 5’s. I was tossing up which ones to use as over heads then thought why not grab both and used one as over and one as under. The result as this is great as it adds a bit more depth to the overall sound of the kit.
We used an SM57 on the snare as it is industry standard from what i have experienced and read online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN9lvpp088U I watched this youtube video to get the right placement. I would have liked to use a mic underneath as well but due to time i didn’t i sort of regret this as eh more i read online the more people say that it makes a difference and you get a less poppy sound if you mic both.
GUITAR:
This was one of the funnest recording sessions out of the two. We started to record on the same day as the drums as bass to play around with microphones and how we ever going to go about the official recording. In the first session we had Henry the guitarist in a live room and gave him and mic to talk to us. This was a little disjointed and still we weren’t able to communicate as effectively as we would have liked. We used a simple micing technique by placing one in front of each cone in the amp and a mic behind the cab. This wasn’t capturing all the sound and sounded thin even But it was okay to work with. I think that one of the reasons this was hard to capture was due to all the effects pedals Henry uses while he plays. He has a minimum of three going most of the time and hardly ever plays clean to capturing the organic sound that comes out of the amp with no clashing frequencies was hard to do with this micing style. After talking to Adrian he suggested that next time we try an XY mic technique over one of the cones using an Sm57 and a pencil mic. We used a AKG 451 condenser mic as the other mic rather than two SM57’s which worked out really well the sound was full and captured the treble really nicely. Moreover we used a Sennheiser Md441u on the back of the cap to get a more surround sound and get some of the lower frequency sounds to pop out more.
Henry’s amp had a stand built into it which meant that we could tilt it up so it was on about a 20 degree angle. This sounds better as the sound can then fill more space rather than just be going in to the floor. This was something I have tried myself while recording and have noticed the difference. Also considering that the amp we used was a Fender 1974 twin reverb and the amps were designed to get the most optimal sound out of them by tilting them while playing live and recording.
We tried a different technique as well as these as an addition to this simple set up. In the first recording we did it was a bit rushed but Henry asked if we had access to any ribbon microphones to use in the nest session to place higher above the XY pair. I had never heard of this technique and it never would have crossed my mind had he not mentioned it. I asked Dave about it at uni and he said that it was what slash used in his live set up and i should look into it so I did. Slash has done a run of two different ribbon mics that he collaborated with Shure to make. This has come from his experience with using typically sensitive ribbon microphones and wanted to make something that wasn’t so precious that could be used live. They seem like awesome mics but i think that the ribbon mic we used would have had a similar effect. We gave it a go by placing a Royer about 40cm from the cab and 40 cm above the amp. This sensitive mic was able to handle the frequencies very well due to the distance and added a lovely ring to the tone of the guitar and gave it a more surround sound. I'm glad that we tried this technique as it worked really well and is something I can add to my bag of tricks when recording electric guitar.
I also check out this article about how to record an amp with a ribbon mic http://royerlabs.com/recording-electric-guitar/. It talks about this different ways you can use the royer to record guitar safely without damaging the microphone. As well as the distances you should have it from the amp this is where I found that because what we were recording was loud and distorted we would need to place it a few feet away from the amp.
While in the second session we wanted to have Henry in the control room with us so he could hear the exact sound coming out of the DAW as we recorded. This was going to be achieved originally by having his guitar amp in the live room and his pedal board in the control room by simply using the THRU input in the live room and output in the control room. However the line had a buzz in it so i went to tech team to see if they had another solution… and they did. The process was that we used an adaptor XLR to TRS in the live room into a channel we were using then in the control room had a TRS to XLR plugged into the chanel that we went into in the live room but in to the XLR out out of the desk. So it was basically the same but we ran through the desk line instead of the THRU line. This was handy to know for future recordings as it was a simple solution in the end and meant we could carry on the recording as planned. Our initial idea was to get a long guitar lead that went under the doors of the control and live room and I’m glad we didn’t do that as the signal would have been compromised.
VOCALS:
The vocal session we had last Thursday was great apart from being a little rushed and it was very late and the boys were tired while they sang. But we set up four different microphones an AKG 414, Electrovoice RE20, Slate VMS and an NT2A.
We decided on this range of microphones to be ready to set up as there was two voices we needed to record and with this range of microphones we would have the right one for both parts somewhere. We used an SM7B on the day we recorded the bass and drums as a guide vocal that sounded pretty good but the vocalist wasn’t singing right on the mic as he had no reverb in his headphone mix and wasn’t pushing his voice as it wasn’t a real take. I still however didn’t think this was the right mic for his voice we needed something that would capture a but more range well such as a large diaphragm condenser.
The vocalist Harvey asked if we had an RE20 to use for the recording but upon some research we discovered that is was not a lot different to the SM7B so we got the mic to try but I kinda knew it wouldn't work as well as the SM7B. So the first mic we got him to try was the NT2A which was definitely the right decision as it immediately sounded fuller and more sparkly which is what the SM7B was lacking. There was no muddiness in the takes either which was something the Sm7B created in the frequency response to his voice.
However, the problem with this session was that it was late and both Henry and Javier was very tired they were projecting their voices enough or focused enough for most of the takes to be effective and we were all a bit stressed by this point as there was only an hour left. It was evident that when we changed microphones for Javier (main vox) that the AKG 414 wasn’t the right mic for him it sounded too gritty and grungy and they want to vocals to be quiet crisp like the reference track they sent.
As Henry’s backing vocals are all at least a 3rd or fifth higher than Javier's main vocals which is quite high at times any way we got him to use the NT2A but this wasn’t as effective as I’d hoped it would be. He was also straining his voice a lot due to being tired and this didn’t help with the quility of the sound. I think he will need a smaller condenser microphone when we record this thursday instead such as an SM7B or RODE RE20.
Overview:
As an overview of these two recording session I am happy with all the creative choices we have made so far and I am proud of how the mixing is coming along (new post soon) as well as I am excited for the final recording session this Thursday to polish of the vocals when the band aren’t so tired i shall do some more vocal microphone research in the next few days to finalise some decisions as well as grab some microphones to experiment with.
As for the ups and downs there have been a few setbacks in both sessions mostly due to technical difficulties with the desk and solving problems. These I have learnt from and i am confident that this session on Thursday will have next to no set backs so we can get some perfect vocal takes.
REFERENCES
(2018). Why tilt back my amp??? | Harmony Central. Retrieved from https://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/forum/guitar/acapella-28/1624299-
LONERISM, TAME IMPALA IN THE STUDIO. (2018). Retrieved from http://www.audiotechnology.com.au/wp/index.php/lonerism-tame-impala-in-the-studio/
drum kit images - Google Search. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.google.com.au/search?q=drum+kit+images&rlz=1C5CHFA_enAU823&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=dCFc89lBOn_K7M%253A%252Cb28HE3gteeZotM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQP4QAoCsLwH3cxJnS8wK-jVJ4HLg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwihnLWTl9reAhVKQ48KHRUiDMEQ9QEwAXoECAUQBg#imgrc=dCFc89lBOn_K7M:
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