Portfolio and Log

Task 1 – WAV Mixes

Recreation

Remix

Stereo Array Recording

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“Here’s Where the Story Ends” – The Sundays (Track Recreation)

Pre-Production:

The track was selected from a pool due to it’s ease of performance, re-production, and its length.

Once chosen, the track was warped in Ableton to quantise it to a click, making it simpler for the overdubbed performances to line up. It was then moved into Logic, and run through a stem splitter so that we could more critically listen to the individual elements. Afterwards, we decided that the drums were likely MIDI as they sounded too precise and mechanical, and that that guitar used was likely not a standard acoustic, and was either a resonator or a twelve-string.

Vox (10.02.25)

The vocalist was acquired by Nate, Lucas and Flynn asking around the Cafe Bar if any performers were free before a studio lesson. In a stroke of luck, the first vocalist they found claimed to know the song very well, and was able to almost perfectly recreate the vocal line with only a single warmup take.

Initially, Flynn had grabbed an SM7B for the recording, but it was quickly apparent that a dynamic mic was not suitable for the performance. At Nate’s behest, we ended up using a Rode K2 microphone as he felt it would give us a clearer, warmer tone.

Bass (10.02.25)

The bassist was with the singer at the time that they were recruited, and posited that they could perform the bass parts do to how incredibly simple they were. While the singer was setting up and running through the song, they practiced the parts, and we later recorded the bass through a DI in the control room.

Guitar (17.02.25)

Nate leveraged a personal acquaintance to acquire a guitarist. We recorded them in room 116c, using a spaced pair of KM184s. Unfortunately, they had to leave after only an hour, as a result the strumming rhythm was not perfect, and the solo was left unfinished.

Drums (24.02.25)

Flynn acquired his friend Anthony’s help in playing the drum and tambourine parts. An AKG D112 was used for the Kick-In, and Audix D6 was used for Kick-Out, An MD441 was used for Snare-Over, an SM57 was used for the Snare-Under, MC112s were used for the hats, and CM5Us were used for overheads and the tambourine. The snare was also muted with tissue paper and a mic stand.

Post-Production and Mixing:

To clean the track up, we gated out any noise on the individual drum mics and vocals, cut the unfinished guitar solo up so it could be looped (with a copied octave applied to make it sound like a twelve-string), and tracked some midi drums to trigger along with the ones recorded to replicate the mechanical sound of the original. A subtle Formant was applied to the vocals to help the tone more closely resemble the original’s.

Afterwards, there was a standard EQ’d and Compression pass.

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“Here’s Where the Story Ends” (Remix)

When I started the remix, my initial intent was to veer as far away from the original as I could. I wanted to take the track, transpose it from G Major into G Minor and make something with a low tempo, pulpy “orchestral trailer music” vibe to get away from the original. I started by running the vocals into Melodyne, but quickly found that using it to transpose the note data into a Minor key would stretch some of the vocal accents from a semitone, to a full tone which sounded unpleasant.

So I restarted to project, made sure the vocals were tracked to the click, and composed a new chord sequence for the track.

A large chunk of the original song moved between Gmaj7 and Gmaj7/C, only adding in a Cmaj7 as the track progresses. G – C – Am9 – Em – G – Em – Am9 – D became the core progression, as shown from bar eight above. The transcription was provided to the pianist (Oliver Boothright) for recording.

Recording:

A pair of KM184s were used to record the upright piano in Studio 422, the left most microphone pointed at G2, and the right most pointed at G5 with enough distance to give the recording a little air. I then set up some of the acoustic panels to block out as much of the drums directly behind the piano as I could. I went with KM184s because I am familiar with them, and their frequency response is clear and simple enough to allow me to do any post processing I might need to to adjust their tone.

Afterwards, I provided Flynn Nicholson with a bass guitar tab just playing the root notes, and recorded bass with both and SM57 and an SM7B so that I could compare their tones. I ended up settling on the warmer, fuller sound that the SM7B provided.

These two recordings, combined with the vocals provided the building blocks that I used for the remix.

Synthesis:

Four synth instruments were created for this project using Vital.

Pads

A simple saw pad was used throughout, later layering in with a second pad for a fuller sound once the vocals drop out.

Pad Layer

Mallet

I created a simple mallet for the latter half of the track which follows the melody performed by the guitar lead section of the original recreation.

Bass

The bass is incredibly simple, and it there largely just to be layered in with the percussion.

Sampling:

Percussion

I created a rudimentary drum machine using Impact which consisted of a kick (by layering the sounds of an acoustic panel being struck and the wood behind the drums in studio 113 being struck), and woodblock hit (a wooden door stop being dropped onto hard flooring) made to sound almost like a clap. I then used the amp and filters to adjust the sounds to fit the track.

Vocal Sampler

After that, I created a textural layer by running the vocals through a vocoder and autofilter, then resampling the sound into Sample one.

After those key elements of the assignment were complete, I filled out some space with East West Trumpets and French Horns, and brought the track to a close with a contrafact the pianist performed over the chord progression I had set. Then I ran a simple suite of compression and EQ to adjust the dynamics, applied a gate to the vocals to cut some faint background noise, and set a limiter to bring things closer together dynamically.

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“Original Jazz Composition” (Stereo Array Recording)

In regards to the pre-production and management of this project, I used my own contacts to procure the help of a jazz quartet. I discussed with them what we needed: I explained that I wanted a performance of around three minutes, expecting them to have something around that in their existing repertoire (or that they might be able to adjust something to fit). However, they arrived having practiced an original piece that came in at 03:22.

Which leads to the question: why 104? The answer to that will be similar to the reasoning behind microphone choices: there were no other studios available at that time, on that date. Even logging onto room booker at midnight the week before, I found that the more suitable studios of 113, and 422 had been booked. I did not wish to risk attempting to book another time, and lead to the performers not being available as that would have left us back at square one.

Once booked, the group was notified of the date and time, but only Flynn and I were able to make the session.

Microphone Choice and Placement:

Due to the day being very busy, a lot of the microphones I had wanted to use had been booked out, so we had to get creative.

Post-Production: The first thing we noticed, due to a few factors (the drummer playing harder than they meant to, the size of the room, and mic positions) lead to a build up on kick hits. We fixed this by lightly EQing several tracks to make the kick sound less “boomy.” Gating and simple compression was applied to the rest of the tracks to cut bleed.

There were two main issues beyond a few performance foibles, and the ones caused by room size: The first was that, during the setup of the ProTools tracks, I missed that I hadn’t set the Figure-Eight C414 to stereo. This was fixed by duplicating the mono track, and inverting the phase. The second issue was that we all missed that we hadn’t balanced each instrument in the stereo field, leaving each Left mic panned hard left, and vice versa for the Right.

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