Studio time

(** – Refer to the bottom of the page.)

We used two mics and a DI for recording each instrument. Before recording i ran through each part of my song and made sure they were ready to be recorded.

To record guitar we used three inputs, a *SM57 (dynamic microphone)*, a *MD421 (dynamic microphone)* and a *DI box (Direct Input)*. The SM57 was about an inch away from the grill of the amp pointing towards the middle of the speaker cone.

The cyan coloured ‘X’ shows the area of the speaker cone where the SM57 microphone was pointed towards.

The MD421 was about 3 inches away from the grill pointing towards the dust cap of the second speaker.

The cyan coloured ‘X’ shows the area of the speaker cone where the MD421 microphone was pointed towards.

The DI box works by an XLR cable going into the back of it and connecting to the sound desk where it will then go into the DAW. This device needs a 48V power supply, known in recording as phantom power. You plug your guitar into the ‘input’ port record. You can also plug in another jack lead from the ‘link’ port to your ‘input’ port on the amp to record DI and also have it play through the amp so you can record with mics at the same time, which is what we did.

The yellow coloured arrow points at the input port where you plug in your guitar, and the blue arrow points at the link port where you plug in a jack to go to your amp input.

It took me a couple takes to record the first guitar part because it’s the one that plays all the way through and i messed up a few times during recording, but overall i got a good take and carried on with the rest of the recordings.

When we recorded the distortion we used the exact same mic setup as the main guitar part.

We then recorded the palm muted guitar part with a distortion tone to go underneath the main guitar in the choruses to make it sound thicker and add depth. This also took a few takes to record because I accidentally played into the verses where the palm muted guitar was not intended to be. Luckily after only a few takes I got the switches between verses and choruses and got the final take.

Then the acoustic guitar recording setup came along.

We used a DI on an electro acoustic guitar and also recorded it with a *Titan condenser microphone* and a *R1 ribbon microphone* to record the guitar.

The Titan mic was placed 6 inches away from the body of the guitar pointing towards the space between the bridge and the sound hole.

The cyan coloured ‘X’ shows the area of the guitar where the titan microphone was pointed towards.

The R1 mic was placed 6 inches away from the body of the guitar and pointing towards the 12th fret of the guitar.

The cyan coloured ‘X’ shows the area of the guitar where the R1 microphone was pointed towards.

I moved onto the acoustic guitar parts. I started off with playing in the verses with the acoustic guitar but i was playing the chords on the lowest octave i could on guitar, which would be power chords on the low E string as the root notes.

After I did this, I started with the other acoustic guitar which plays an octave higher which would be power chords on the A string as the root notes. These guitars combined took me a few tries, and they sounded quite well together.

And about an hour of recording later, I. Was. Finished. I couldn’t believe that i finished my recording in roughly an hour because before recording i was still really indecisive about the structure and tone and pretty much everything to do with the song. But i did it, somehow i did it.

I was recording with Evan and when we finished, he asked if i’m doing bass. I was originally thinking to use a software bass on Logic Pro X. But after I thought about it, i had just more than an hour left in my recording session, so i thought i might as-well record bass because i had enough time for it and i didn’t want to regret not recording it just in case i didn’t like the sound of the software bass or i couldn’t sequence it properly. So then i started to record bass, but i kept on messing it up. I was trying to make it more complicated then it needed to be, and then Evan gave me a good idea, “keep it sweet and simple”. So I simplified it and it sounded really good, even better than the complicated bit I made up. I kept messing up and started to get a bit angry with myself, so Evan offered to record it for me because we were now running out of time.

When we set up the bass amp we used a DI box and we used the same 2 microphones that we used for the acoustic guitar. We had the Titan mic about 8 inches away from the grill of the bass amp pointing towards the middle of the speaker cone.

The cyan ‘X’ shows the area the Titan mic was pointing at.

We placed the R1 about 4 inches behind the condenser mic pointing towards

The R1 mic was far enough away to capture the sound pf the whole amp as a whole so it captures everything in the cyan ‘X’ thats marked.

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SM57 Dynamic microphone
MD421 Dynamic microphone
DI Box
Titan Condenser microphone
R1 Ribbon microphone