Jazz Session:

The first thing we organised as a group was the idea to have the double bass player in the vocal booth, as we wanted to set up a direct line of sight between the engineers and the double bass player as it would be easier to give commands out to every musician individually, This will be elaborated on further with the other images. The bass player was going into the DI box out of the piezo pickups in the double bass, which gave us complete control of what sonic quality we wanted out of the bass without any bleed from any other sources. We also had headphones for each musician so they could hear eachother and us the engineers, we also created two headphone mixes as a couple of the musicians wanted to boost or quieten different instruments.

In this photo we can see that we opted for stereo overheads, a kick mic and a mic for each tom. The stereo overheads were a good choice a we were aiming for a very nice stereo image that allowed all the other instruments to sit neatly in the mix without much issue. For the kick drum I voted for a mix between the regular ‘boomy’ sound and the more natural clicky sound you hear from the beater so I angled it up slightly towards the beater in order to capture more of that clicky sound. As for the snare that was pointed towards the middle of the snare for less of a bright sound and more of a dark and mellow sound, and as for the toms that was aimed at more of the rim for a brighter and ringy sound.

As you can see here we opted for stereo mic placement again for keys using condensers, which also lent itself nicely for the overall stereo image. They were placed quite deep inside the piano which resulted in us being able to hear quite a lot of the percussive mallets which lent itself to the aesthetic of jazz which prioritised the more natural sound due to the recording techniques available in the 50s and 60s. We tried to prioritise this for most of our microphone placements and microphone choices.

In this photo here you could see we put up dividers, this was to mitigate bleed slightly but not kill the bleed, as the genre calls for quite an open and natural sound (as previously mentioned) which meant that as long as we got the microphone placements right, a slight amount of bleed and room sound naturally would lend itself to this genre and naturally act as more of a glue.

Here in this image you can see that for vocals we used an Aston Spirit, and the Beyerdynamic MD 160. We decided to use this combo as we couldn’t necessarily agree on whether we thought we should use a condenser microphone (spirit) or a ribbon microphone (MD 160) so we ended up using both and mixing in the amount of each that we preferred. As you can see in this image we also had the singer in the control room with us, this was to make sure that she was comfortable as we didn’t want to put her in the vocal booth as she could only see the engineers and could potentially feel isolated which often makes singers nervous, so we opted to put her in the control room to mitigate this. This gave the session a collaborative atmosphere that lent itself to the final product as we couldn’t do any overdubs. Due to the mic placement we also did not notice that the microphones were out of phase so we had to employ the phase flip.

Lastly, we also had the idea to employ the use of an omnidirectional room mic in the room with drums and keys. This final addition really ‘glued’ the recording together and gave the final recording a very roomy sound which meant if we were to do any further FX processing on this track, we would likely not have to add much if any reverb to the drums or keys.

Pop Session:

For the Pop overdub sessions, I was only present for the recording of the guitar track, as I had to travel soon after.

As you can see in this image we gave the guitar player headphones in order to hear the engineers talking back to him. As he was the only player during this session we also gave him a talkback microphone (C414) in order to make making changes and suggestions and any of his requests as speedy as possible ensuring we could get through the recording efficiently and easily.

In this photo we decided to use a ribbon microphone for the front speaker, with it positioned slightly off to the right in order to have a more pronounced midrange. We chose the ribbon mic as we knew we would have to boost the level of the amp for later on in the song in order for more of an overdriven sound, and we knew the ribbon mic would hold up to do its tolerance for really loud sound sources.

In this image you can see that we used another microphone for the back of the amplifier, which had a much warmer sound, so in tandem with the biting and bright front end of the amplifier it had a really nice and really well-rounded tone that sat in the mix very well. We also had to invert the phase on this track as the back mic would be picking up the speaker movement in the opposite direction to the front mic.