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

The 'Lana del Rey' vocal sound

I've been thinking of trying to emulate Lana del Rey's vocal sound and see if it might work on the vocals for 'Let Go', so after a quick google search, I came across this article, which I found to be a very interesting read - I never knew the album version of 'Video Games' was actually the demo version. I never really noticed that the piano was sampled or listened carefully to the strings and harp to realise they were also sampled, and by using a IK Multimedia Miroslav Philarmonique, which I own and I always thought was inferior to East West libraries - which to my ears still sound quite 'fake'. This is why, for my songs, I've tried to use, as much as possible real instruments, and double the sampled strings with real violin, or create the illusion of an ensemble by layering many takes of the one violin.

Listening back to 'Video Games', the orchestral instruments  indeed sound quite 'MIDI', but I can tell there was a lot of effort into drawing in articulations. It's a simple arrangement, but work well and it was tastefully done - and it's encouraging to think that a track created in this way had such as massive exposure and made it on the radio.

I found this excerpt particularly interesting in relation to the Lana del Rey's signature vocal sound: 'The vocals were bussed to an aux track and we had several plug-ins on the bus. In addition to the high-pass EQ, we had a Waves de-esser to knock out some of the pops and hisses, and a Waves compressor with a light ratio but a heavy threshold, and then another compressor, the H-Comp, with a higher ratio. I like to run multiple compressors in a signal chain, with none of them compressing too heavily. It does not 'small' the sound as heavily as one maxed out compressor. After that, we had an H-Delay and an RVerb, just set to a hall reverb, mixed in really high but with the bottom and top end rolled off, so the main reverb you were getting was mid-range.'

The funny this here is that they didn't do anything particularly special to achieve that sound, and that is actually the plugins chain I normally use for processing my vocals. 

Here is the link to the article:
http://www.soundonsound.com/people/robopop-producing-lana-del-reys-videogames

AV Session at UH (B01)

Along with working on my own music, I've been trying lately to put together some recordings and video for a future showreel that will hopefully go onto the 'Portfolio' section of my website and maybe will help get me some work recording or filming other people.

All the video experience I had before was from shooting my own videos (but, of course, someone else was filming me) and later on, editing them in Final Cut X. I find editing video very satisfying and I usually have a good eye for choosing angles and making people look good on camera, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to make some videos for other people using the facilities at UH. After getting trained on the C100 Cannon cameras at UH, I was ready to go.

This week I had two AV sessions, one solo piano and one for a singer-songwriter (vocals and electric guitar). I recorded the audio using the Soundcraft Vi2 desk in B03 and left the recording going throughout the several takes while I was in the performance space, manning the cameras. I used two cameras at the same time, one static, one moving and changed angles after each take. The audio was not recorded to a click, so the editing will be a bit challenging, but I have done such editing before for my own songs, and even though matching the audio and video takes takes more effort, I found that it's worth the effort to retain the 'live' feel of the performance.

For the piano session I used 2 pairs of KM184s (condenser, cardioid) - one pair for the spots (one mic for the low strings, one for the high strings) and one pair in an ORTF configuration (on a stereo bar, 17cm distance between the mics, angled away from each other at about 110 degrees) to pick up a more distant, roomy sound.
















For the second session I used an SM57 on the guitar amp and also recorded the DI-ed signal. For the vocals I used an U87 and, as a special request from the artist, an SM58 (he wanted the recording to resemble his live performances in which he alternates between two mics - one of them having a lot of reverb on it to create a special effect). I resolved to only use the signal recorded through the U87 but add reverb on the relevant bits.

Recording Brass for 'If Silence' and 'Falling Star'

A couple of weeks ago I recorded a small ensemble of brass players for two of the tracks that will be on 'City of My Mind', the album I'm working on - and part of my MSc portfolio.

The ensemble was formed by three trumpets, four saxes and one trombone. Every two instruments were mic'ed using AKG C414s and U87s.

The arrangement was written in Logic using sample instruments and then exported as a score.

Here is a video from the session, the chorus of 'If Silence':

Drum Recording

Today I recorded drums in Studio 1 at UH for 'If Only You Were Real' and 'Falling Star', two tracks that I'll be submitting for my Final Project.

I used less microphones than I would normally do, partly because there were not enough mic stands available, partly because lately I've changed my mindset in the sense that I'm trying to not use more mics when less will do the job.

Mic list:
Overheads: AKG C414 spaced pair
Kick: AKG D112
Snare: Shure SM57
Toms: Sennheiser MD421 x 3

Usually, to this I would have added a snare bottom, a kick out, a hi-hat spot and a pair of room mics.
Another thing I did differently to last time I recorded in Studio 1 is that I recorded onto Logic (I normally record in Pro Tools). However, the rest of my project is in Logic, so it made sense to keep everything in the same DAW. Now onto editing!

Recording piano in B01

Today I recorded some piano for three tracks, one ('City of My Mind') is part of my project, two tracks will be just acoustic versions on which I'll overdub vocals later on and film videos for them to post on my Youtube channel.

The piano was recorded with a pair of Neumann KM184s placed under the hood of the piano and spaced out, to pick up the two main “clusters” of strings (the thinner strings for the high notes, located at the widest part of the piano, and the thick, low strings which reach to the end of the tail). These microphones provide a detailed, close, brilliant sound when placed here. I used anoter pair of KM184s with omnidirectional capsules, pointed at the tail end of the piano facing in. This combination really brings out the low end, and also provides a more ambient perspective. On its own, it’s actually quite muddy, but when mixed in a little can add body to the sound. Lastly, a pair of AKG C414s set to cardioid were used as room mics. These were placed in a near-coincident configuration (ORTF) to provide an accurate image of the piano. They were placed around three meters from the piano, and when mixed in gave control over the front-back perspective by introducing the natural reverb of the room.

'City of My Mind' Percussion

Today was dedicated to editing the percussion I tracked a while ago for my song 'City of My Mind' and bringing everything into Logic.

Different DAWs ultimately serve the same purpose, but the functionality of some makes them, in my opinion, more fit for certain tasks; for this reason some of my projects go through several DAWs before everything comes together in one single project.

For example, this song was arranged and written in Logic 9; the piano and the percussion were recorded and edited in Pro Tools; the ‘strings’ (one violin recorded many times changing microphone positions to recreate the sound of an ensemble) was recorded in Reaper. Everything was then bounced as stems and brought together in a Logic X project to be mixed. The reason behind this was that I find Logic better for working with MIDI and composing, Pro Tools commands faster for editing and Reaper, as a free software, is very handy for recording on other computers or for transferring projects and stems from one computer to another, which is what happened when I recorded the strings.

This is a video from the recording session with Kohi, an amazing percussionist. I had fun recording him and also producing, which is apparent from the video.