Method 1 – Live Band/Ensemble Capture
Pre-Production
To prepare for this capture, I sourced the jazz band through a friend on the jazz course who agreed to play for us with their quartet, consisting of Drums, Bass guitar, Electric guitar, and a Saxophone. The group planned to play a jazz standard which they had played before and rehearsed in great depth; however the drummer had to drop out, and a new drummer was introduced (who had never played with the band before). We decided that as we were only told at the start of the recording session to continue and use their best take. The group did multiple takes, four of which we recorded, we picked the last take as this was their strongest performance overall. Looking back now however I would’ve asked for another, more polished take.
Recording
To record the band, we used the Glyn Johns method with an additional bottom snare microphone on the drum kit given the limited space of the room we were working in. We used dynamic microphones for the Saxophone and Electric guitar to reduce bleed from other instruments whilst we took the direct input from the bass amplifier for a cleaner tone.
To set up the room, we used dividing walls to separate the drums from the rest of the instruments and spread out all musicians as much as possible to reduce further noise bleed (although this was difficult in a small space).
The musicians were happy to do as many takes as we needed and they were very independent when setting up, which made our job easier as they all had good knowledge of their own instruments’ tone and sound that they used to help us record a clear and accurate representation of the take.
Mixing
We levelled the microphones running into the Lynx Aurora in the studio. After getting the correct level, little was needed in terms of post-production mixing. We did a simple volume and pan mix, including panning the drum kit over heads to left and right channels, to ensure that each instrument sat well in the mix and had the space they needed during their solos.
Project Management
The studio was booked for three hours, which we didn’t fully need in the end due to our time management. Once getting in, we started by fitting the drum kit with the relevant microphones (two small diaphragm condenser overheads, a kick mic inside, and a bottom snare mic). We then moved onto the guitars, miking up the electric amp and taking the direct input from the bass amp head. By this point the musicians, who were slightly late, had arrived and set up. All that was needed was to set up the Saxophone mic on a stand and for the musicians to adjust their instruments, so they were happy with the tone and comfortable to play them well. We then went and re-checked the microphone positions, moving the Sax mic closer and adding the bottom snare microphone after a few takes which we thought was necessary for a tighter snare sound.
Generally, we shared roles, using our own areas of knowledge to help the session run smoothly. I acted as a project manager as I had sourced the musicians and booked the studio time, this meant sometimes making decisions on the mix and setting up the Pro Tools session for recording.
We decided to do this recording after the overdub, so we could finish that in full in the Specialist Study sessions to give us the confidence to tackle this alone outside of these sessions. Doing the overdub first helped with aspects of this recording although live recording as we now know, is a whole different challenge.
Method 2 – Overdub Production
Pre-Production
I sourced the singer and guitarist for the overdub project knowing that they were both capable of the task. Knowing who they were I suggested that we record a cover of The Police’s Message in a Bottle everyone was happy with this and so we settled on that as the song we would record. We recorded the whole project over two Specialist Study sessions but with the added guide track and pre-production, it took us three weeks. Then when we came to check the files, we discovered that the PC’s local drive had been wiped and all backups posted to Teams were unusable (one didn’t have the audio files saved, and the other simply was no longer available online when we tried to download it). This led to a very quick turnaround to re-record the whole project before everyone went home for Christmas. We used that Monday’s Specialist Study session to put down another guide track by using Logic’s Stem splitter and Ableton’s tempo correction to give the musicians something to perform along to.
Recording
After our discovery, we booked a mixing room for the following Wednesday, where we tracked guitar and bass again. This time the other group members decided to use two microphones on the Electric guitar amplifier to enhance the tone. The bass guitar was plugged directly into the pre-amp in the control room where we recorded the track and then comped the best parts throughout the song. Next, we recorded Drums, for the overheads we used an X/Y microphone pattern as well as miking up the snare top and bottom, kick in and out, hi-hat, toms. This microphone pattern captured the best stereo representation of the drum kit, which I decided we should pan to fit the drummer’s perspective (a matter of personal preference as a drummer myself). The drummer was getting all the right parts but was struggling to stay in time, so I kept suggesting we do more takes (perhaps inadvertently getting on peoples’ nerves sightly). As our studio time was coming to an end, we had recorded four full takes which we supposed would provide us with enough material to comp in post-production and the drummer was getting tired, which was becoming audible in his performances. Finally, after everyone else had gone home I was trusted with recording the vocals again. This was quite straightforward and not a difficult task to do alone, setting up the Warm Audio 251 in the same mixing room used for the guitar tracks. The vocalist gave a strong performance despite having a cold only a few days before and was very easy to work with as we had already done it once, so she knew what was expected. It only took an hour to record the whole songs’ vocal performance, until the both the singer and I were happy.
Mixing
To mix this project, I downloaded Pro Tools onto my personal MacBook and worked on it from home as I was the only one who could mix the full song after the vocals had been recorded. Mixing required a simple volume and pan although the drums required me to go through and time-adjust them manually with the Elastic audio function, I only did this as I felt it was necessary in order to have the drums play in time with the rest of the instruments. If not restricted by the assignment guidelines, I would have added reverb, delay, and compression to the instruments, especially vocals and drums, both of which in my opinion sound too dry. Despite the drums, mixing was quite easy and just a matter of small tasks, such as balancing the distorted guitar and third vocal line to not overshadow any other part of the performance but just to sit in the background, adding texture.
Project Management
Overall given the situation I feel as a group we utilised our time well to produce the track. Although our original track sounded better in my opinion, we made the most of the situation and managed the quick turn-around. For this track I also played a similar role to the jazz recording, and I feel I was a general project manager again, booking studios and organising two out of three performers. I also this time played the part of the mixing engineer due to the circumstances, The first recording was much more of a team effort, but it just happened to be my job with the re-recording process. This project taught us all a hard lesson about the organisation of our projects, I bought 1TB SSD to back everything up onto at the end of each session to make sure it was saved in more than just one place online. But now we will hopefully have learnt from this and won’t make the same mistake any time soon.
