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MPR5C001R~001 Studio Portfolio 1 & Log Book TEMPLATE

1500 words

Please use the sections below to evidence your personal contribution to the production for the portfolio. Please include details for all the tracks produced as a part of this portfolio.

Provide rationale for any of the production decisions that you made as a group. Include any multimedia (pictures, videos, audio recordings etc) evidence to the relevant sections.

Consider the following:

Pre-Production

• Rehearsals
• Track development
• Demo recording
• Arrangement decisions
• Session planning

Recording

• Microphone choices
• Room setup
• Musician management

Mixing

• Mix plan/concept
• Balance
• Pan
• Tone
• FX

Project Management

• Time management
• Planning
• Roles and responsibilities
• Structure and organisation

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Track 1 (Guitar-based band production)

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This song came about as we had been trying for weeks to try and find a guitar-based band that could make our weekly recording sessions, after a couple of false alarms, we decided it would be more time-efficient to write a song to the brief ourselves and record it for this assignment.

after listening to Deftones, my bloody valentine and Smashing Pumpkins as reference tracks, we recorded guitar, drums, synth bass and atmosphere on the Moog matriarch synthesizer. We were aiming for a big, thick bass and drum sound that was both punchy and gritty.

In the vocal session we decided to record whispered double tracks and send the lead vocals through pedals into an amp to thicken up the vocal and allow it to float around the stereo field contrasting the heavy guitars.

When mixing this song, I wanted it to sound messy and huge, while retaining the listener’s ability to hear all the parts. I intended for the vocals to feel dreamlike and vague, leaving the spotlight to riff in the guitars and bass.

Track 2 Live in the studio (jazz/folk ensemble)

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For this assignment we recorded Louise Muxworthy as part of a quintet with James Grey on Piano, Jonah Selwood on Bass, Oliver Sharpe on Drum kit and Nate Tozer-Loft on Soprano Saxophone.

As preparation for the recording, I assembled a mic list sorted into instruments with labelled channels so that we were ready in the session to place microphones, patch into the desk and plug cables into the right channels with minimal consultation for maximum efficiency as we only had 3 hours available to set up, record and pack down.

I communicated with the band a rough schedule so that everyone was in the right places at the right time:

Engineers arrive and begin setting up 14:00

Drummer arrives to arrange kit for engineers to mic 14:30

Remaining band members arrive 14:45

Start recording 15:00

Stop recording to pack down 16:30

End of session 17:00

In rehearsals I had discussed with the band whether they wanted to play to a click or not, and recorded a demo a few months earlier to identify the optimal position for baffling so that the musicians could see each other, with minimal spill. Initially we had arranged the song so that all band members performed a solo but this left not enough time for the remix or guitar-based song so we cut it down to just piano and saxophone.

To minimise mic bleed in this recording we placed the saxophonist in the booth, as this is the loudest instrument that would fit in there. we also covered the hole in the piano with the piano cover and made use of baffling to separate the bassist, singer, pianist and drummer. Despite

Many of the microphones we used had quite wide polar patterns and if we were to do this again i would try to use as many cardioid or hyper-cardioid microphones as possible, the microphones we used gave a high quality capture but with quite a bit of spill, It wasn’t necessarily a problem but did mean we had less control over shaping the sound. I would also suggest in future that we perhaps use gentle gating for lead instruments such as vocals or saxophone.

Before we began recording, we had spent some time listening to Bill Evans’ and Oscar Peterson’s live trio recordings, as they demonstrate well how to mix a dynamic jazz recording with traditional jazz instruments and analogue equipment. Many tracks of this era are hard-panned or drastically panned. Despite this, as the song we were recording was in more of a modern style, we maintained a more tame stereo image, pushing saxophone and bass slightly to the side, and hard panning the stereo pairs on the drum overheads and piano. The general style of the piece is more adjacent to that of 80s and 90s recordings of Pat Metheny or Kenny Wheeler, both of which often have a large reverb prominent in the mix, so we followed suit, using the Lexicon PCM92.

We compressed and EQ’d kick mics, snare mics, bass, overheads, vocals, sax and piano all separately with a wa-2a and Drawmer 241 before subgrouping the channels to busses for bus processing and the addition of reverb.

Once we were happy with the levels and mix, we ran it through the audient desks’ built-in bus compressor, being careful to only affect the audio gently to gain some control over the dynamics of the track.

Track 3 Remix track

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As a starting point for arranging this track, I found the tempo of the acappela and tempo synced a Korg Minilogue, beginning on a 303-style patch to try and find a bassline. I found and recorded this bassline and then after manipulating the envelope and resonance of the sound found I had made some minimal percussion, I took the transients from this audio clip and put my favourites in a drum rack so that I could sequence a drum groove with these sounds. I emphasised the clicks and pops of these sounds using a combination of Ableton’s drum saturator: ‘drum buss’ and an expander, to help the high end of this percussion really shine through.

I then created a patch and sequence utilising two oscillators pitched a 5th apart to provide some harmonic context for the song. I then used a gate side-chained to the synthesized percussion to add groove and modulation to this synth part.

I felt the acapella could end up in almost any genre of music so naturally wanted to explore as many grooves and styles as I could in this remix. I landed on House, Garage, Jungle and Old School Dubstep. After listening to references from throughout these genres I found that they all has a common ‘space’ that the songs were placed in through the mixing techniques. House and Garage often felt tight and punchy while Jungle and Dubstep sounded as if they were being played in a cave or warehouse. I found this contrast interesting and wanted to emphasise these extreme space changes in my remix.

To chop the break I separated each transient and dragged it into a drum rack so that I could sequence complex, glitchy rhythms with midi and Ableton’s midi generators and effects.

To add extra interest to the vocal part, I duplicated, moved and pitched down the lead vocal to create glitchy backing vocals, helping to shape each section of the track as well as emphasise the rises and falls of the track. I also used a combination of bit crushers with envelope followers mapped to sample rate and Ableton’s resonators on some BV’s providing an unintelligible texture that follows the same rhythm as the lead vocal.

One of the main challenges I faced while mixing this track was the 3 separate bass parts. I had sequenced an 808 style bass for the jungle section, acidic 303 style bass for the house and a bumpy synth bass for the garage. Combining these and finding a space for each of them in the song was very challenging from a melodic, rhythmic and spectral standpoint. I solved the issue through a combination of sidechain compression, high-pass filters and careful EQ notching.