Studio recording is very similar to live sound check. You’ll start by micing up all the instruments. Starting with the drums, you’ll need a bass mic for the kick drum and then an xlr from the mic into stage box input 1. Then you’ll need dynamic mics for the toms and snare, going into inputs 2-4. Lastly, you’ll need 2 AKG condenser pencil mics for the over heads. The kick drum mic needs to be inside the kick. The toms and snare mics need to be pointing into the middle, but out of the way out the drummers hit. Then, the overheads need to be at an equal level, pointing at the crash and high-hat. After, you need to connect the bass to the amp and then DI it, connect the guitar to an amp and mic it up, plug the singers in and then connect the keys and DI them. (More detail in the live sound tab).
Once you’re all set up for micing, connect the musicians headphones into the headphone amplifier, so they can hear the click from the studio and the people talking.
Whilst the instruments are being set up, you need to open logic and create new channels for each instrument, this just makes it faster to get recording. Once everyone’s ready, ask each person to play so that you can set their levels, (more on this on the live sound). Basically, you just need to move the volume level up, making sure it doesn’t clip, and then adjust the gain.
After setting the levels, you can talk to the musicians, holding down talk A on the mixing desk, and then ask them if they’re all ready. If they are, you can let the click count them in, or the drummer clicks, and then they just start playing, after you’ve pressed the record button. Due to it being recorded, they can do as many takes as they want, starting from where ever they want. If they’re starting half way through, you want to add another channel and record from that channel. Recording is best for singers because it means they can add harmonies etc. However, it’s also good for other instruments as it’s less pressure, and they can add distortion over clean etc.
When we were recording, we actually recorded the bass, guitar, keys and drums all in the same room, but the singer in the studio room. We did this so that the singer wouldn’t have any spill. We also DI’ied the bass, keys and guitar, so they wouldn’t have any spill on them. After getting a clean take, we overdubbed guitar, from clean to distortion, and added in the other layer of keys, which were chords. The guitar and keys were still DI’ed and they play over the track, so it was a quicker process and there was no spill. Lastly, the singers wanted to play around with adding some harmonies, so they had Abi doing the really low ones, then Lucy did the higher harmonies and the delayed ones. There was a little issue with finding the right key but after listening to the track a few times, she got it down.