MPR4C001R-001 Production Log Book
Method 1 – Live Band/Ensemble Capture
In regards to preproduction, things were largely simple: After being made aware of the assignment criteria, our initial plan was to acquire the aid of a jazz group to perform the live room recording, as–traditionally speaking–a jazz group lends itself quite well to a recording of that nature. To begin with, the idea was to utilise my connections on the jazz course (liaising with my friend Oliver Boothright, a year one jazz pianist and composer) to acquire aid from his quintet, and record around five to six minutes of them playing a standard of their choosing. As they are already well practiced, and I trust in the skill and experience of Boothright, this largely eliminated any need of our studio group to arrange and be present at any rehearsals, allowing us time to work on other projects.
The group was to be a quintet, consisting of:
- A pianist
- A vocalist
- A bassist
- A drummer
- A trumpeter
However, this initial idea did not quite go through as planned. We had planned to schedule a studio session with the group, aiming to book out studio 113 for a few hours after our Monday seminar (running 16:00 – 18:00) as that would allow us to have the studio mostly setup by the time the talent arrived, buying us more recording time as all we could need to do was make adjustments to accommodate the players’ specific needs.
This changed after Nate Tozer-Loft was assigned to our group. Nate is a Jazz saxophonist (primarily, though he is also a skilled pianist, and creative producer) studying a minor in production. With this change came new and more convenient connections, as he was able to acquire the aid of a band that he is a member of, bringing them into one of the Monday studio sessions so we did not have to further organise studio time among the rest of the group (which proved a little troublesome when it came to finding a time slot where all six production students, and all five of the original jazz performers were free).
This also came with the benefits that the group already has an established rapport, and and approximately four and a half minute long piece they wished to record, allowing us to get them, into the studio and recording with little further planning.
This all coalesced on a studio session the eighteenth of November.
Because of the somewhat sudden change of plans, many of the microphone performer placement decisions were made at the start of the session.
the drums were set up using the Glyn Johns technique, as it allowed for a full stereo image with the fewest amount of mics used, reducing the number if inputs which would need to be monitored, and fewer microphones to pick up on the room bleed. Elliot set up the majority of the microphones.
- Kick: AKG D112
- Snare: Shure SM57
- Overheads: Oktava MK-012 x2
Next, the piano was set up using a stereo pair of Neumann KM184s. Maisie and Nate were setting them up, but asked me for advice on microphone placement, which later had minor adjustments done by Nate once everything else had been setup. The piano was turned so that the lid would block some of the room bleed, while several of the panel screens were moved to help reduce that further.
The guitarist was also the vocalist. To minimise bleed, she was placed in the vocal booth. We used a Shure SM7B as the vocal mic, and an AKG C414 for the guitar. Maisie and myself helped get her setup and comfortable in the booth.
Finally, the cellist was placed in the studio for similar reasons to the guitar, setup with another C414, but also with the cellist’s own performance mic. Both of which were routed through the studio inputs and patched into microphone inputs. Leading to Flynn (who had set up the Protools sessions, and was assigning the I/O) to be monitoring the playback through headphones to not bleed onto the microphones in the room.
Overall, it only took a handful of takes to get one both the production students and jazz students were happy with.
Method 2 – Overdub Production
The overdub recording ran into a few complications, and ended up having two separate sessions, one on the twenty-fifth of November, and a second on the second of December.
The initial plan for this was to get a hold of a group, and individually record them, potentially over a handful of sessions. The first performer we got was a connection of Maisie’s, coming from Huddersfield to record the vocals, bass, and acoustic guitar tracks to a Beatles-esque pop song they had ready to record to fill out the remaining five or so minutes.
Like the live room recording before it, the session was set up and managed by Flynn Nicholson with assistance on the desk from Lucas and Elliot, while Maisie and I worked on getting the performer setup in the live room. As before, we used an SM7B for vocals (as it’s nature as a dynamic mic with its polar pattern helped minimise bleed from the guitar), and a C414 for the acoustic guitar. Afterwards, we brought them into the control room, and used a DI box to route it through the studio inputs, and patched it into a microphone input.
The plan was to use these elements to create a guide to be used for the other performers to build around in a later session. However, we ran into a technical issue as the project ended up being wiped from the desktop, and our only other backup save became corrupted while transferring the data, leading to us losing the useful components of the session. This was not noticed until the follow up session where we brought in a drummer to record percussion on the second of December.
At my suggestion, as we now had to restart the project, we started by having Nate perform around four and a half minutes of a jazz piano line over a rough groove track created by the drummer for the other elements to follow. Once that had been recorded, we had the drummer record a more fleshed-out take of their original groove track, then had Nate perform a final saxophone line over it all for that session. Afterwards, Nate, Maisie and I headed over to the synth studio, and recorded a synth bassline, lead synth, and a synthetic percussion element. And finally, on the eighth of December, Lucas recorded a rhythm guitar line in studio 104 before Flynn, Lucas, Elliot, and I worked on the balanced pass of the two prior recordings.
The drums were recorded using a more traditional studio microphone technique:
- Kick: AKG D112
- Snare Over: Shure SM57
- Snare Under: Shure SM57
- Rack Tom: Sennheiser MD421
- Floor Tom: Sennheiser MD421
- Overheads: Oktava MK-012 x2
The piano was then recorded with a spaced pair of C414s.
Due to the rushed, last minute nature of the recording, I forgot to take pictures of the saxophone microphone setup. We used one of the C414s from the pair used to record the piano track.
After this session, Nate had already booked time in a studio with hardware synthesisers, and asked if anyone would come along and help him record a few parts. Once we arrived we recorded a bass synth track, lead synth track, and percussive synth track. As it had been a long day, I somehow forgot that we could set all the project outputs to one and two, so we ended up recording the lines in Ableton by dropping the audio files from the studio session into the DAW to use as a guide, then exporting the three synth recordings out after to be imported to the mixing session which took place on the eighth of December.
Speaking of, Elliot booked us into studio 104 to record an electric guitar line, and to perform the final mixing passes.
As studio 104 has no guitar amps, I routed the electric guitar input through the interface, patching it through the Neve preamp to provide phantom power to the DI box we needed to record the track.
Once the recording was complete we moved onto the balance pass and minor editing we were allowed to do for the assignment. For the live room, all levels were panned and balanced to emulate the a live performance, and the overdub was panned and balanced to create what we hoped would simply sound pleasing.
The first three of the below images show some editing that Lucas performed to copy and loop part of the saxophone track to better fill to the end of the project. The next two show two instances of levels automation I performed to control (in the first image) part of the percussion track which was too loud, disrupting the track, and to control the levels (in the second of the two images) where a single transient was loud enough to cause peaking, and lowering the overall track levels would have led to the whole track feeling too quiet.
