Preparation

When we started this assignment, I took notes on what we needed to do, which I saved in another Word document. In this planning document, we have detailed kit lists, what we’re doing in the session, who’s doing what for the project, and plans for future sessions. Example below.

This carried on throughout doing this assignment, which I shared with everyone on Teams, and we continued to add to this document throughout the project, until we finished. I also took notes in the first Group Studio session in 2026, where we talked about what we needed to do for each part of the assignment, and I did this so we could go back and double-check that we’ve checked every box. Below are my notes that I took for the group.

Recording the first pop track

During most of the recordings for the first pop track, my role was predominantly either as a computer operator or as a recording engineer, positioning microphones. I chose these two roles mainly because one of my aims was to get faster at using Logic and be more proficient at it, and also so that I could get more hands-on as well, and learn new tricks and get better at more complicated things, such as re-amping guitar cabs, which we did for this pop track.

Overall, I think I achieved this goal, as I am now a lot better at using logic, and I now know and understand re-amping, and using various other pieces of recording equipment, and developed my recording techniques throughout this assignment, because of either the choice of technique or the various instruments we have recorded over the year.

We also chose to use the Session Bass player on this track, and after getting 5 or so takes of varying quality, this also contributed to our decision to restart the pop track.

For this pop track, we chose to record one of Flynn’s friends, Meg. Meg is a solo singer-songwriter who had a song that we started to use, and we got quite far into it, before we chose to restart for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons being: the song being in a minor key, slow BPM, and having a tough time moulding the song into a sound we wanted. After we had a discussion about this, we moved on to the second pop track.

Recording the second pop track

 For this pop track, we chose to write it ourselves, purely because we’d already lost time by restarting, and didn’t want to go through sourcing another artist. Ben did most of the writing, but we did have a few sessions where we all brainstormed ideas and wrote down stuff.

During this track, my main role was operating the computer, where I was loading up tracks to record, punching in, etc. Through this, I gained more experience with Logic, which helped me to where I am today. Recording the demo was mainly done in Ben’s room, and when we recorded the final track, a lot of it was done in the 2 hour group sessions.

Mixing the second pop track

When it came to mixing the pop track, I mainly used a combination of EQs, compressors, and reverb to achieve the effects I wanted. I wanted this track to have a lot of space, hence the reverb with 2.7 seconds of decay, and I also used an echo plug-in on the vocals to make them denser. A lot of the mixing I did was isolating instruments into their own frequency ranges and panning to where I wanted the instruments to sit, based on a variety of research I did into the pop genre, and past experience over the duration of this course and from listening to a variety of pop songs throughout my life. With the vocals, one of the main issues I had was making sure they were not too loud, but clear enough to hear. The vocalist sung with a wide dynamic range, and while I wanted to keep as much of that as I could, I also had to compress some of the vocals and control the gain on them so that the words came across, and you could hear what was being sung.

If I had to mix this track again, I don’t think I’d do much differently aside from taking on board the feedback I get.

Recording the acoustic track

When we recorded the acoustic track, we chose to use one of Kai’s contacts, who is a singer-songwriter playing acoustic guitar and singing. My main role was setting up microphones. When we did the initial recording of the vocals and acoustic guitar, we got a lot of bleed from the mic on the frets, so I ended up using less of that mic and more of the mic on the sound hole of the guitar. For this song, I also organised the violin player and prepared the initial string arrangement, which we then simplified as a group.

Mixing the acoustic track

When it came to mixing the track, I didn’t do loads as I wanted to keep as much of the raw sound as possible, so I mainly used a bit of corrective EQ and a tiny bit of compression. The main effect I used was reverb, which gave a nice amount of space on the track. Something I did with this reverb was add an echo effect before the reverb, which created a denser reverb, which worked really well for the acoustic guitar in particular.

Overall, if I had to do this track again, I would’ve spent more time in the studio, mixing and re-recording things to make it cleaner and get a better mix, as I think that if I paid more attention to this track, I would’ve done a better job, as I’d be able to hear a wider and more detailed frequency range.

Preparing for the location recording

Over Easter break, I recorded a wind orchestra, mainly for fun, but also partially to prepare for this location recording. I used 19 mics, and the QU24, but I spent weeks practising with the Claret 8 Channel and the extender. Thanks to this experience, I was the main organiser for the location recording, as I knew what went into it and how to use the location equipment. I left the organising for the location to my groupmates. For the artist we recorded, I got in contact with my housemate Joe Manson, and I asked him if he wanted to do it, and he said yes. He performed a track he had just written, and it went really well.

Recording the location track

When I was booking out the kit, we used a Phantom-C large diaphragm condenser microphone for the vocals, and a Calrec 1051c for the sound hole of the acoustic guitar. I chose the Calrec 1051c because of the fact that it has a small cardioid pattern and is very direct. This helped to reduce the amount of bleed from the vocals. We also used 2 NT1-As as room mics, which we positioned high above the artist so that we could capture a lot of room ambience and less of the direct sound from the artist.

Mixing the location track

One of the main issues I had was bleed between the guitar and the vocals. I mainly used corrective EQ to avoid this, as well ad some characterful EQ to get the right tone of guitar and vocals that suited the track best. I also used some reverb layered with the instruments to create an atmosphere that suited Joe’s vocals and the style of song he was performing.

When it came to mastering, I used the same tricks that I used for the other assignments, taking what I have learned mainly from lectures and other research I’ve done.

Overall

Overall, I think I have grown my skills throughout this assignment, but personally I feel like I could have improved on my writing skills a bit more, and also my project managing. On the flip side, however, I feel like overall my skills on logic and my understanding of the theory of microphone placements, signal flow in the studio, and my confidence with experimenting with all kinds of projects, in and out of the studio.