Task 1 – WAV Mixes
Track 1 (Genre Specific Emulation)
We decided to do 1970s disco/funk for the genre specific emulation and the song we decided to emulate was We Be’s Gettin’ Down by Graham Central Station, we decided to do this because Isaac knew musicians which would be a good fit for the song and genre. Once we had picked the song, Isaac had the musician start practicing their parts.
The first part we recorded was drums, the mics we used for this recording were;
- Kick in – DM1B
- Kick out – ATM250
- Snare top – SM57
- Snare bottom – SM57
- Hi-hats – Calrec 1050C
- Overhead L + R – 414
- Room – Phantom V
We used these mics with the idea that the drums in the original recording (especially the kick) were very muddy as they were recorded in the 70s.
At first, this session was challenging as the drummer was playing fills and accents that were not in the original song. After telling he drummer what to play and letting him figure it out, we were able to get a decent recording
The plan with the guitar recording was to use an sm57 and a sonotronics orpheus to record a vox amp whilst the guitarist used a fender stratocaster and a pedal board, the use of a stratocaster and a vox amp here really helped whilst trying to get the classic thin, twangy sound of old electric guitar recordings. In the original recording of We Be’s Gettin’ Down, the guitar is very buried in the mix until its solo, it is hard to make out what the guitar is playing for alot of the song, this is why we let the guitarist play licks from the solo in the parts that were difficult to make out, we would later mover these parts around to try and match the original as best as possible. During the mixing session, a fuzz-wah effect was added to the guitar part to make it sound even more like the original recording.
I was not present at the bass, vocal, and mixing sessions due to illness
The mics used during these recordings were;
- Bass – d6, dm1b and DI
- Vocals – warm audio 251
During the mixing session, there was a problem with getting the talk box synth in time due to the original track not being recorded to a metronome, if done again, I would make sure that all the musicians were playing to the same metronome from the beginning to avoid this mistake. A heavy vintage style compression was added to all the recordings to make the parts sound even more like they had been recorded in the 70s, the vocals had more fo this compression than the rest of the recordings due to the vocal performance being very dynamic. A general reverb bus was added to everything to give all the recordings a similar ambience and more creative reverbs were used on the guitar and vocal parts to try and replicate the interesting timbre of the limited reverbs of the 70s. Finally, a tape saturation was used on the master to give the whole song more of a 70s feel as that would’ve been the recording method used at the time.
Track 2 (Live In the Studio Stereo Recording)
We decided to do a duo of female opera vocalists for this recording, the idea was to have 2 mics recording in an XY position and then 2 mics further back recording the vocals but with more room ambience. At first, lining up the mics with the singers was difficult as it often felt like one was louder than the other, but after some adjustments, this problem was fixed. The mics used for the XY were sonotronics STC-3x’s and the mics further back were sonotronics orpheus’s, these mics are reliable for capturing the high frequencies sung by female vocalists whilst also being able to handle a wide dynamic range. The idea during the mixing was to pan the microphones to the extreme of their respective side to maximise the stereo width of the recording, an EQ was used to cut out frequencies below 200Hz and above 10kHz to ensure no unwanted room sounds were affecting the recording, a lo-fi effect plugin along with a limiter were used to make the vocals less harsh during the louder parts of the recording. The XY recordings were also made louder than the room recordings to give more presence to the vocals. All the recordings were sent to a bus with an orchestral chamber-emulating reverb.
Track 3 Remix track
My plan with the remix was to use the recorded vocals to create a trip hop track, i chose this genre as i thought the female vocals reminded me of portishead and that funk music often converts well at a slower tempo.
I first dropped all the vocal recordings into a logic session and spent a few hours searching for nice parts that would fit with a shorter structure as the remix needed to be around 2:30 minutes. After i had found the parts that i was going to use, i time-stretched the parts from 147bpm to 105bpm and started putting together the parts i had chosen. I decided to use a swelling single note that was sung as the foundation of the track, at first i tried using it as a drone but then realised that it would be nice as the main harmony of the song. I made it into the harmony part by separating it into 6 different tracks and then transposing the record to create 2 different chords that repeat throughout the remix.
The next part i decided to make was the drums, the brief said that the drum sounds had to be recorded as found sounds and could not be samples that were not mine, i decided to record the sounds later but write the drum part using samples so i could build the remix around it before remaking the sounds myself. When i got round to recording the drum sounds, i started with the kick drum, i knew that the genre usually has muddy kick that sit under the rest of the kit so to get the kick sound, i just slightly tapped my sm58 without its cover on which gave me a deep but not clicky kick sound. I then recorded the hi-hat, i did this by making a shh sound into the mic and layering it with a hissing sound and then adjusting the envelope to give it fast attack and fast release. I then recorded the snare sound by hitting the top of a metal box and layering it with the sound of with the hard part of the body of an acoustic guitar to create a rim shot sound which is common in the trip-hop genre.
The brief said that i need to include at least 2 instruments record by myself so i decided to do bass and electric guitar, due to limited time and resources i had to record bass and guitar through a digital interface, this meant that i had to focus on the EQ of these parts to make sure that they didn’t seem thin which is a common problem when recording with DI. I also used the bass and guitar amp designers in logic to try and further emulate the sound of recording from an amplifier.
I decided to add a synth part that comes in during the guitar solo, the synth was made using State Machine Bit flip which is a synth that specialises in retro sounds which i figured would be perfect for a trip-hop genre remix. The synth adds subtle swells and droning notes that give the song more of an ambient feel at the last part of the remix.
My main focus during the mixing process of this remix was to make sure the vocals sounded nice but also fit the lo-fi, vintage sound which is common in trip-hop. The way i did this was by giving the vocals a short reverb and using EQ to get rid of the frequencies that a modern mic is able to pick up, i feel like i was able to accomplish this without missing out on the nice frequencies in the vocal recording. I decided that using distortion on the drums would also be a good way to give me more of a raw, lo-fi sound and make them sound more like acoustic drums than found sounds.
