Here is a list of all the problems we encountered and how we solved them:
Unhappy with our first mixes – After our two days in the studio, we got our rough mixes sent to us by the engineer and we were overall happy with them. However, there were some things that we were unhappy with and that we would like to have changed. To solve this we arranged a date to go into the studio collectively and give our feedback on the mixes in person, this helped as nothing was lost in translation, we could give our engineer direct feedback, and we were all listening through the same speakers. Altogether, this gave us the most accurate glimpse of how our songs were sounding and proved to be very beneficial to iron out any creases.
Unhappy with our music video takes – After our first day of shooting, we realised we were unhappy with how the footage looked, there was a number of reasons for this, the first being that you could tell we weren’t giving it 100% effort. This was mainly because of how many people were on set with us during filming, not including the band, there were five people behind the camera which was very unnecessary. coupled with the fact that these were all close friends, it made it difficult to focus and take seriously, in some takes you can see some of us laughing and giggling because it was awkward to pretend to play a song in front of friends. To get around this, when we re-shot the video we took only one person with us, and that was the camerawoman.
Another problem with this shoot was that you could tell that I, in particular, was hitting the drums softly. This is because there were houses nearby where we were shooting so I didn’t want to be too loud. This made for an unconvincing and unrealistic performance that we weren’t satisfied with. To solve this, when we went to re-shoot the video, I put bits of fabric inside my drums to dampen them down more and make them quieter, this stopped the bottom head from resonating as there was something touching it. I also detuned my drumskins to where they were finger tight. This made it so that the drums didn’t resonate at all and made the sound of a punch when hit, drastically reducing the noise and allowing me to hit them hard, to give the illusion I was actually playing them properly. To give a similar effect to the cymbals, I put duct tape on the bottom of them (this is a common music video trick) to stop them from ringing and making as much noise. This resulted in a clangy metallic sound that was a lot quieter than the normal cymbals and made it so I was able to hit them hard in the video.
The band losing a member – For a number of reasons, we had to let our rhythm guitarist go from the band, this presented a lot of issues for us. One of them being that we had to re-shoot the music video, This was a fairly easy fix as we were wanting to do this anyway. We also had to decide what was going to be done for his parts. To solve this we simply had a couple of rehearsals where our lead guitarist learned the rhythm parts and combined them to make one part.
A member of the band not being able to make it to the studio – Because our studio engineer had double booked and we had to record our music a day later than planned, this meant that our bassist, Cain, couldn’t make it to the second day of recording. This was because of his work schedule which he couldn’t change on such short notice. To solve this, we had to get the bass tracks down the first day, this ended up not being much of an issue. However, the recording process of the bass did feel a bit rushed but we don’t think that it is audible tell on the recording.