My Performance:
For Blake and Finlay’s recording session, I played the bass guitar part for MGMT – Kids which consisted of playing the route note of the chord played by the guitar, as well as the route note an octave above that. We didn’t have a long time to rehearse, so me and Lars, who was playing drums, practised together alone first as the bass and drums are very closely linked together and we wanted to ensure that we could play well together first before incorporating other instruments, such as lead guitar and vocals. The final mix of Blake and Finlay’s session can be found here:
My Recording Session and Mixing:
I began my recording session by setting up the microphones and cabling before the band arrived so that everything was ready in the live room before the level checks.
For the keys, I had to take outputs directly and convert the cable from a jack lead to an XLR lead for it to be able to send its signal through the multi core on the wall, which uses a snake cable to take the signal into the control room next door, I used the same multi core for all the microphones to send their signal to the control room.
For the guitar and bass, I placed microphones facing one of the cones slightly off centre as I found that this was acoustically better for the microphone after some research on microphone placement. The microphones I used were for the Fender guitar amp, and an AKG D440 for the Trace Elliot bass amp.
For the drums, I used an AKG D660 placed on some dampeners inside the bass drum to absorb some of the floor vibrations and isolate the bass drum more as shown. For the toms and snare drum, I used AKG D440s clipped onto the rims of the drums as shown. And for the overheads, I used placed in a ‘cross-firing’ position as shown.
After this I organised the cabling to the multi core and wrote down which input had gone to which channel, I then continued to set up our digital Behringer X32 mixing desk which allowed us to convert the analogue signal to a digital signal, which the computer can use with much more ease than an analogue signal as it only requires one wire to carry every channel. I then brought the band in to check gain levels, once every channel was allowing as much signal through as possible without peaking and distorting, I open Logic 9 on the mac I was using and set up a track for every channel I was using, and did one last level check with the entire band together to make sure the levels looked ok in logic. I then recorded multiple different takes of the band playing MGMT – Kids until I was happy that it sounded good enough.
I bounced this file down, the raw audio without any mixing can be found here:
I then normalised all the audio files and began a rough mix of levels, EQ (The green graph in box that alters the levels of different frequencies), compression, and pan in logic.
I also bounced this down and the audio can be found here:
I then proceeded to add effects and sends (Auxiliaries) onto each channel to allow the channels to blend their audio a bit to give them a nicer, more appealing sound.
I also bounced this file down and the audio file can be found here:
I then continued to automate some effects like volume, the level of reverb and delay they had, and the level of send to a bus with reverb and delay in.
I also bounced this file down, you can find the audio file here: