Band Recording

Today I've recorded a band. First recording of a full band I did at UH! I was a bit nervous, but going to Studio 1 and setting up everything yesterday saved a lot of hassle today. First of all, I had time to think over the placement of the band and to spend time positioning the mics. I recorded everything together, except for the vocals which were overdubbed later.

The problems started early in the day, when one of the signal from one of the overheads was not coming through. I switched the cables, tried a different input etc - no result. I was afraid the mic was broken, but when I switched them over, the other one wasn't working either. It turned out that some of the desk inputs weren't working. Later on, when I couldn't get the DIs to work, I realised what the problem was: the phantom power must be broken on some of the channels. KM184 and passive DIs didn't work on those respective channels, but an SM57 did. I was using Logic, so due to the setup I was limited to 16 channels - 12 counting out the broken channels.

I decided to ditch the DIs and only mic the amps and gave up the snare bottom to free up some channels. In the end, the setup was this:

1.Kick: Shure Beta52

2.Snare SM57

3.Hi Tom MD421

4.Mid Tom MD421

5.Lo Tom MD421

6.OHL KM184

7.OHR KM184

8. bass: DI

9. guitar 1 mic: SM57

10. guitar 2 mic: MD421

11. vox - Shure SM58 for the 'scratch' vocal, U87 for dubbed vocals

I have managed to get a surprisingly good sound! I don't think ever managed to get such a good sound for a band before, especially for the guitars. 

We recorded 2 songs. The first one went a bit slow, because I tried to get the band to play to a click, which they were not used to before. There were no vocals either, so they kept messing up the structure. With a bit of practice, they managed to stay on the click and I think they delivered a reasonably tight performance.

For the second one, I decided to give up the click and go for a more live feel. I also gave the singer an SM58 to sing in and put the vocals in the fold back. The result was a much more heartfelt performance and we finished the song in probably the quarter of the time we took for the first one. 

The next step was quickly choosing the best take with the band and overdubbing the vocals for the first song. Listening back to the second one, I realised that there were absolutely no bleed whatsoever from the scratch vocals, so muted them and overdubbed them with the much nicer U87. 

Due to how I set up the room, the instruments were pretty well isolated, even though they all played at the same time. I made a booth for the drums at the back of the room by using two panels, and placed the guitar amp in the opposite corner of the room, facing the treated wall, with the back to the drums and an acoustic panel behind it. The other guitar amp was on the other side of the same panel, but facing away from the other amp towards the booth of the drums. The bass was DI-ed. The vocalist faced the other corner of the room, next to the bass player, away from the guitar amps and the drums.

After recording vocals, we had enough time to play around with backing vocals, a whistle solo and some group clapping. Not sure how much of that will make it on the final recording, but we surely had fun!

Here is a link to the band's music: https://soundcloud.com/themarras1-1/almost-old