Honestly, I really enjoyed project four. The activities we were given were really enjoyable and the project focused on production more than performance overall, which is what I prefer. Learning how to correctly mic up a studio filled with instruments, how to correctly set up a sound desk and how to professionally record a band are just a few of the things I learned during this project.
Personally, as an aspiring producer I found this project very helpful and almost a reality check. In the sense that I learned there is a lot more to producing than just making a beat and recording an artist. There’s much more than just that to it and that is what made me love producing even more. I feel like i did fairly well in this project, my recording session went well because me and my partners set everything up correctly and in result of that, we managed to get a decent recording of the band playing for us. Although the session went well as a whole, there were a couple of things i think I could have done better. For example, even though I set everything up correctly; I believe I took too long to set up the equipment and the mic’s. If I had the opportunity to do it again I would definitely be more efficient with my time given. As well as this, I also think I could have set the levels on the sound desk a little bit better. Only because on quite a few occasions the levels on the level indicator clipped, meaning they were too high. One thing I feel like I can improve on is my general knowledge of production techniques. Things such as headroom when dealing with volume and side chains when dealing with dynamic control were definitely things I didn’t know how to use at the time. Due to the fact I didn’t know how to use these it restricted how well i could mix my recording. I also didn’t know what remedial was and when editing my mix which was ready to be bounced I didn’t realise what normalising was.
I do feel I like I did some things well too. For example, when mixing the tracks I applied Reverb to the vocals for Sonny and Ant. This made a very big difference because it made the vocals sound a lot cleaner and gave the lyrics more life. I used a plug in called Silververb to apply the reverb. I also decided to leave 12 seconds of recording on the end of the music because once the music had stopped The two vocalists begin to speak and their conversation brought humour to the end of the mix.