Track 1 (Guitar-based band production)
This track is an original song written and performed by Char and her band.
Pre Production
Rhys contacted Char, a singer-songwriter who he has been working with, and she brought an original song with her that she had already fully written performed live, so the the band all knew their parts to begin with.
We looked at reference tracks Char had given, such as The Rope by Wunderhorse, to figure out what sort of instruments would be used and how we wanted to record them.
The guide track was recorded in Studio 104 on the 16th of October, which was only guitars. This gave us the structure for the song.
Recording
Session 1 – 21st November, Studio 104
We used this session to get the drums and bass fully recorded, as well as getting a scratch vocal. The drums and bass were played live together, although the bass was recorded through a DI in the control room, with the drums recorded in the live room.
On the drum kit, we made the decision to use an over shoulder mic upon Rhys’ advice, as we found it helped in gluing together and boosting the volume of the kit.
The parallel compression on the drum kit was recorded alongside the drums themselves.
We used Xaudia Beebs as our room microphones and placed them in the far corner, in a Blumlein pair, as the Beeb microphones gave a large amount of clarity to the sound of the room.
Session 2 – 26th November, Studio 109
All the guitars were recorded in this session. We brought Will in first and then Rowan later in order to be single minded in our approach to recording.
Initially Rowan was going to play a 12 string guitar but due to a broken instrument we instead opted to record doubles played an octave up to achieve a similar sound.
Session 3 – 29th November, Studio 422
In the final recording session all that we recorded was vocals.
Mixing
Mixing was all done independently, however we comped the takes and decided on our drum samples in a studio seminar together. We also applied some outboard effects such as compression, gating and EQ through the desk. Sends such as reverb and slapback delay were also recorded alongside the guitar.
Post Production
The mastering of this song was done in Cubase and was minimal. Compression and a maximiser were used followed by some EQ to boost the high-mids and bass end of the song, bringing it to -14.5 integrated LUFS .
Track 2 Live in the studio (jazz/folk ensemble)
We chose track 2 for our outboard mix, a decision we made because of the smaller number of instruments and parts, meaning we would have to bounce or bus audio less and have more control over individual parts in the mix.
The track is a performance of Solar, performed by a jazz trio of a drummer, a bassist, and a pianist.
Pre Production
I contacted Edson, a jazz drummer who I knew performed with a band, and arranged a jazz quartet for us to record. The band were already well rehearsed with each other, which made the process of organising a lot easier. Despite this, we faced an organisation issue in that the saxophone player dropped out last minute, meaning we had one less performer than intended, however the musicians adapted around this.
We recorded the entire track in one session in Studio 113 on November 5th. We gave ourselves 1 hour before the band arrived with which to do the basic setup for the session. Leon and I set up the microphones and the DI on the keyboard in the live room whilst Rhys and Raff set up the logic session, desk and outboard effects. We found this to be very effective in quickly getting set up, as it evenly divided the workload.
Recording
Whilst we were aiming for a “live” sound, we were also aware that mixing the track entirely with outboard equipment would reduce the level of control we had over the recorded audio. This informed our decision to use a keyboard and a DI on the bass, allowing us to avoid unwanted bleed entirely. On the recommendation of the bassist, we also decided to use a Neumann KM182, attached directly to the bass, which gave us less bleed and recorded the resonance of the bass rather than the percussive elements.
We chose to use the Blumlein technique for our room mics, although the use of a keyboard meant that the room mic did not have the desired effect of picking up all the instruments. It was placed in the centre of the room, picking up the drums in the back half of the room and the bass in the corner to the right of the control room.
We decided to apply some minor effects during recording, as it would help us with the mix later down the line. These effects were specifically compression, used on the kick and snare, overheads and bass. The specific modules we used for this are listed on the mic list. This helped in taming the sound of the kick and bass significantly.
Mixing
The mixing process for this track was done over 3 main sessions. Raff and Leon had to leave the recording session early, so Rhys and I began the mix, finding a general balance and summing tracks to allow everything to fit on the desk. We also created sends for reverb and parallel drum compression.
The rest of the mixing was done over 2 sessions in Studio 104. Our reference tracks for the mix were other similar performances of Solar, as well as some other jazz standards that had been recorded recently in a manner similar to ours. We tried to make the effects we used as minimal as possible, in order to preserve the live performance sound and to not overcomplicate the outboard element of the mix. Panning was done in order to make the instruments feel as close as possible to the room sound, with the drums and keyboard in particular crossing the entire stereo field, as we felt this supported the live sound.
We experienced issues with bleed on both bass microphones, which picked up far too much of the drums, leading us to mainly use the DI signal instead.
FX we used were as minimal as possible, only using a room reverb to glue together the 3 instruments, in particular the keyboard, which wasn’t picked up at all by the room mics.
In terms of mastering all we used was the desk’s bus compressor and some light EQ.
Track 3 Remix track
I chose to do the remix track in a funk/house style. My recorded instruments were a bass and an electric guitar. Both of these instruments were recorded through an interface directly into a DAW.
The electric guitars were processed with a compressor, an amp simulator, as well as light chorus and delay to create the funk tone. The left and right panned guitars were left clean, with a tube screamer pedal on the centre guitar.
The bass guitar was run through an EQ, then compressed through an LA-2A plugin, and the put through another EQ to tame the frequencies, in order to allow the bass to cut through. The bass parts were also doubled in the chorus with a synth bass, to help widen the bass end in louder sections.
The keyboards were a Halion Sonic instrument with delay, reverb and a 3 band EQ applied to them to cut the low end and boost the highs. The drums were from a Cubase House sample pack.
The chorus also had two synth parts playing the bassline in a higher octave. These were both created on Serum. One is an airy bass sound with a longer release and 14 voices, whilst the other is an abrasive bass sound inspired by Breathe by the Prodigy. This uses a cutoff filter to create a percussive sound and the waves are much more complex.
While remixing the song I encountered a lot of issues with the vocals, which had to be retuned and time stretched significantly. Because of this I was not fully happy with the timing of many of the lines in the song, which I felt dragged slightly behind the beat. The vocals were also cut into separate lines before processing was applied, and this hid many discrepancies in the cutting. When I came to compress the vocals, I found that many of my cuts had fallen on the vocalist breathing in, and the compression loudly highlighted these breaths and cuts, especially in quieter sections of the song.
The vocals were first ran through a compressor, and then a de-esser afterwards to tame some of the breaths that had been brought out by the heavy compression. From there the vocals were sent to a ping-pong delay and a reverb to create a sense of space.
The mastering of this song was minimal. All that was applied was a maximiser, light EQ and a brickwall limiter at -3.0db. The song was mastered to -15.3LUFS with a short term max of -12.7LUFS.
Overall I think the track went well, although I feel there is significant room for improvement in the structure, which I felt began to lack variation very quickly and became repetitive despite variations on the verses and vocal takes used, and I especially found a weakness in the vocals which could have been processed and comped much more thoroughly than they were had I managed my time better.
