Commercial Pop Track
I was not as involved in the production of this track as I was in the others, as I was only able to attend a couple of the sessions. I was mostly serving as an executive producer, checking in between sessions to provide a fresh set of ears and ideas, as well as checking everything was running smoothly. I also produced my own final mix and master for the track, as seen below.
For this track, we worked with a songwriting student, Bella, who wrote the song “The Man You Are”, which we knew would be the perfect song to record as a pop track after getting it stuck in our heads after a couple of listens. The track has a very short intro, a repetitive chorus and a generally upbeat feeling, making it perfect for a project like this.
One challenge i faced during the process was the mixing on the brass section, as I don’t work with a brass section all too often. I took a similar approach to working with vocals, filtering out any parts that were breathy or parts where the sound of the trumpet’s moving valves could be heard, and then adding a compressor and an EQ until it sounded the way I wanted it to.
I used flex edit on the vocals to make every note sound perfectly tuned to achive that processed sound that is common in a lot of pop tracks. I also added a sidechain compressor and sidechained the kick drum in to the vocals to give the mix a stronger sense of rythm.
Acoustic Track
Our acoustic track was written and performed by our group member, Finlay, who is also a singer/songwriter and a songwriting student. Because of this, we were able to start with a relatively comprehensive and polished demo. The track was originally envisioned to be recorded with electric guitars, however we were able to rework the song to fit the breif for this module, replacing any electric guitars and basses with acoustic ones.
For this track, I mostly acted as the operator for the desk and behind the computer on Logic, and I was responsible for gain staging microphones, setting up the headphone mixes, patching in outboard effects and preamps, routing to logic and hitting record.
We began by laying down an acoustic guitar and vocals, which were both played by Finlay, as this would help to guide the rest of the track and allow all of the other elements to fall into place on top of it.
During the course of this project, we had the opportunity to work with industry session musicians within the conservatoire, one drummer and one double bassist. Unfortunately, we only had one hour with each of the players, leading to an incredibly rushed setup and only having time to record a couple of takes in our allocated time. Looking back on the recordings, we found that there was a lot of bleed on most of the drum mics and the bass was almost pretty much unusable, with lots of peaking, scratches and other undersired sounds.
We ended up using the drums from this session, however we decided to re-record the bass using an acoustic bass guitar rather than a double bass, as this worked better for the song and felt more stylistically appropriate.
Location Recording
For our groups location recording, one of our members, Arthur, was running a small concert (similar in style to a tiny desk) at the Howard Assembly Rooms. This was a great opportunity for a location recording, as it was still a relatively controlled environment, with enough
Before the session, we made lots of comprehensive plans, including microphone and gear lists and stage layout schematics. We also organised a runthrough in a practice room, using all of the same equipment we would be using on the night, including the mixer. This helped to make sure that everything was definitely going to work on the night, and that both we and the artists would know exactly what was going to happen.
For the event, I was mostly there in an engineering capacity, helping to carry microphones, cables and other equipment to the venue, set them up, take them down again and rearrange between sets.
Despite our strong organisation, there were still some challenges setting up on the day. When collecting Equipment from the equipment counter in the collage, we forgot to double check that we had everything we should have got. Unfortunately, this lead to us being short by 3 SM57s and a couple of microphone clips. I personally ran all the way back down to get them, and then all the way back up to the venue.
Once we got set up, the show itself preceded relatively smoothly, with minimal issues. After everyone was sound checked and all the microphones were in place, it was my job to get to the stage once the band had got off and rearrange microphones, keyboards and cables to their correct positions, in accordance with the plans we had made leading up to the event. We did encouter some feedback during one or two songs, but it was easy enough to quickly fix, and didn’t hurt the quality of the performance much at all.
Unfortunately, upon reviewing the recordings, some of the microphones were peaking and one of the guitars was plugged into the wrong amp when the band “Cab Driver” played, however we were forward thinking enough to record all the bands sets, and were able to use a recording from “Frogg”, one of the previous artists.
When mixing the track, noise gates and compressors were essential to isolate parts from each other and reduce the overall muddiness of the sound.
