Below is a rundown of all the gear we used during the recording process:
sonny the vocalist singing into the mic
The old patch desk we used for our headphone outputs
The analogue mixing desk we used – MACKIE. 8 bus mixing console
Vocal mic – SE titan
Guitar amp and mic – Sennheiser md 421, peavey xxx 2112
Bass amp – Trace Elliot GP 11 mkII
Snare mic – Shure SM57
Kick drum mic – AKG D112
Tom mics – AKG D440
Drum kit – pearl export series
Snare drum – My own Mapex Armory Tomahawk
Mapex double bass pedal
My own set of sabian AAX cymbals
Drum overheads – AKG small diaphragm condensers
full view of the drum kit
As a band, we collectively decided that it would be better to get Lewis, a tutor at college to be our recording engineer. This was a good idea because it allowed us to save a lot of time by having a dedicated person in the control room who knew what they were doing instead of having me running back and forth. Also, lewis is very experienced in the field of recording and did a far better job than I could’ve.
In this short clip, we are sound checking the drums but encounter a problem with my hi tom, we are getting a signal through the desk but it is not going into logic, neither me or Lewis could figure out what was wrong so we just decided not to use the mic on my high tom and let the overhead mics pick it up instead. This was a good time saving solution as I don’t use the toms that heavily in my playing anyway.
A short video of Sam, the guitarist of the obscurities practicing his parts along to a metronome, it is always handy to practice whenever you can as the rest of the band aren’t that used to playing in time with metronomes.
The first song we decided to record was the last one we wrote, long time. This was because we knew it would take the longest to record we ended up having to do a couple takes as there were technical difficulties with the metronome and sam not knowing his parts properly. There were a few problems with me not being able to hear the metronome through my headphones which was causing me to go out of time. To solve this, we had to turn the headphone channel volume up almost painfully high as it was the only circumstance that I would be able to hear it.
In this video you can hear me still gong out of time with the metronome as I can’t hear it through my headphones. I ended up going that badly out of time with my playing that I had to stop and turn up the volume through the pre amp.
As Sonny said in this video, we had to resort to plugging in his phone to play the metronome from it so that I would be able to hear it. Also in this video, Sonny messed up the metronome which made it go on the off beat and put me and cain off. However, we managed to recover and kept this track.
In this video, we have Sonny overdubbing the guitar parts as he knows them better than sam since he wrote them. it was for this reason that we wanted the guitar and vocals in a different room to the bass and drums to prevent bleed and easily overdub parts.
This is our second take of colossal. This was by far the easiest song to record as it was the first song we wrote and is the one we know best. This recording went off without a hitch but we still wanted to get another track down to see if we could do it any better.
In this video, we are performing our final take of colossal to get it perfect. Sonny is also overdubbing some guitar parts such as the solo and harmonics in the intro
We are now tracking our song ‘Potential’ we ran into some technical difficulties here where the kick drum was sliding too much along the floor and moved it’s way into touching the kick drum mic. This gave a very distorted and overpowering sound. I had to manually fix this by moving the mic further away from the kick drum skin.
Towards the end of this video, we are discussing how to record our final song ‘What’s done’ we came to the conclusion to play the guitar clean all the way through, and then overdub the distorted parts. Also, instead of speeding up the tempo in certain sections, we decided to just play it in double time to save us the hassle.
After recording ‘Whats Done’ a couple of times, we realised that we were massively going out of time towards the end, so we decided to re record the second half of the song with Sonny on guitar and to not pay attention to the metronome to get ourselves as tight as possible.
EVALUATION:
This recording process was enjoyable yet challenging. We were on a strict time schedule as we only had the morning to record so we had to try be as quick and effective as we could.
If I was to do this all again, I would do it in the same manner, but have the guitarist in the live room with me and Cain, this way we would be able to read each other better because we’d be face to face, but still have the amp in the control room to prevent bleed. I would also scrap the idea of playing along to a metronome as it caused a lot of problems such as not being able to hear it and some members of the band not being used to playing to a click. These two factors were what caused the most pain and time loss so taking these steps next time will ensure a less stressful recording process. Ignoring all the problems that we had whilst recording, we still managed to get down some solid drum and bass tracks to build the rest of the band on using overdubs. Because of this, I class it as a successful recording session.