We began our first recording session on the 19th of March, looking back we should have created a contingency plan as we hadn’t arranged a date recording with Fakie so we couldn’t start with drums this didn’t cause many issues in the long run but i feel we would have had less issues with timings in our recordings had we started with drums. We set-up alicans guitar in the studio using a re-amp box, we did this as we wanted to get the amp as distorted as we could using its volume because we didn’t have any pedals and Alican was worried about damaging his hearing being in the room with the amp, I think recording it in the studio was a mistake as we lost a-lot of what makes up the tone of the guitar in this song, especially the screaming feedback and that vintage crunch distortion sound and resulted in us having to create that artificially using plug-ins during post-production. We used a Delta 2 and a sm-57 to record the amp signal in the room. we were able to get some pretty good takes down and although it was missing the feedback and a-lot of the raw feeling in the track we were still fairly happy with the outcome.

After arranging a time to record drums with Fakie we set up a recording session on the 27th of March at 9am. For about the first 30 minutes it was just me. I used this time to set up mics for the drum kit as well as setting up the crash, ride and hi hats. I spent the night before the recording session looking into different micing techniques, unfortunately I wasn’t able to find much information on how they were recorded originally on the track so I chose to do a very standard set up using the drum mic pack from facilities. This includes the AKG D112 for the kick, an SM57 for the snare, an MD421 for toms (which I later realised were not necessary as there are no toms in this song) and an MK-012 as overheads.

After the sessions with Fakie we had recorded piano using a very simple setup using a pair of neumann KM185 and got a half decent take out of it which only needed slight time correction, but after this session when we went to check back on our files and begin on our next recordings, we realised we had not backed the drum file up and lost all recording from that day. This was a very silly mistake and one we did not want to make again.

When recording vocals we used a JZ V67 into a Neve preamp which was driven to add warmth without distortion. I believe I was able to replicate Iggy Pop’s vocals quite well during this session and not much went wrong which was a blessing. While recording vocals in the vocal booth, we also recorded piano in the main room using the same set up as last.

For our last recording session we got Fakie in again to record drums as he did it perfectly the first time. Using the same setup as the first time we were able to get a pretty good recording, later down the line we realised there were a couple of timing issues I’d attribute this to, recording everything else before drums. After recording Fakie we began EQ’ing our recordings using the desk that was mostly spearheaded by Alican with help from the rest of us.

For our first stereo recording we recorded double bass, drums, piano and vocals. We did this using two Delta 2’s on either side of the room and an akg c414 to capture the sound of the room. During this session we struggled with placement of instruments and mics as we hadn’t taken into account the shape of the room and the space the instruments required. We tried experimenting with moving the drums and piano but weren’t able to move them as much as we wanted to mainly due to our fear of possibly damaging the instruments, but after giving both drum and piano a slight nudge we were slightly happier with our placements but felt as if drums were too overpowering. To combat this me and Ben tried to move the wooden boards to block out some high end from the drums as the high hats and brushes were still completely overpowering the recording and aftering doing this it improved it much more.

In order to fix this we had to record another group. I tried contacting most of the musicians I know but due to the short notice and us only being able to book a 9am studio session I wasn’t able to get anyone in. Thankfully Ben was able to gather 3 friends to come in and record a jammed out funk track. Unfortunately I missed set up and the first couple of takes of the recording as I had woken up late and live about 50 minutes away from the uni but one I made it into uni they had already managed to record some pretty good takes that in my opinion were miles better than our first so although it was annoying to lose our files I think in the long run it helped us as we ended up with a much better quality recording. As this was a stereo recording there wasn’t much mixing to do but slight eq and choosing which take to use.