Track 1: High And Dry (Emulation)

Track 2: Syrinx en Résonance (Stereo Recording)

Track 3: High And Dry (Remix)

Track 1: Emulation Track

For the emulation track, we chose the song High and Dry by Radiohead, from the 1995 album The Bends, which is a fairly typical Britpop track. The piece was written for vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass and drums. The drums have lots of reverb on them, making them sound as if they were recorded in a large room, however many of the tracks, like the acoustic guitar and vocals, have very little processing applied to them. The track uses panning on the electric guitar flourishes and double tracking on the vocals to create a wider stereo sound.

When recording our version of the track, we used a Rode K2 for vocals in place of the Neumann U-87 on the Radiohead recording, a Shure SM7B in place of the Neumann U-67 for the acoustic guitar and an SM-57 on the electric guitar, with the bass going in through a DI box, to match the original recording.

Parts were recorded across 2 different sessions, with the first being used to record vocals. Lots of small issues sprang up during this session, most notably, the group that was in before us hadn’t reset the mixing console properly, which led to lots of buttons being pressed down when they weren’t supposed to be that we had to find, wasting some of our time and wasting the patience of the vocalist, who had to sit in the vocal booth for a while as we figured everything out.

The second session was used to record the rest of the band. This went a lot smoother, with no massive technical issues other than a couple of dodgy cables and headphones, which were easily replaced. We began by recording the drums, acoustic guitar and bass parts simultaneously before going back and overdubbing the electric guitar flourishes to complete the track.

For this track, I was using logic, setting up tracks, making sure we had everything coming into and going out of logic as it should, making sure all tracks were named appropriately and pressing record when the time came.

Track 2: Stereo Recording

For the stereo recording, we recorded a flute trio playing Syrinx en Résonance by Claude Debussy. We used a pair of AKG 141s arranged in an XY pair positioned between the performers and another pair further away from the performers to capture the sound of the room.

The XY pair were panned in opposite directions, with the room mics being panned about half way in their respective directions. A limiter, multipressor and EQ were then added to the master track to achieve the final sound.

Track 3: Remix Track

My remix of the track was mainly inspired by The Chemical Brothers’ track Where Do I Begin, starting out with the simple repeated melody and acoustic guitar and gradually building up.The first thing I did on the track was sync up the vocals to the beat using the flex editor in Logic, as there were a couple of areas that didn’t quite match up. Once everything was lined up, I increased the project tempo 2 110 BPM, and then sped up the audio using alt+click and drag. I then created a new midi track with the chords to create a rough backing track for recording new instruments.The first recorded instrument I added to the remix was an acoustic guitar. I used an Audio Technica AT-2020 positioned close to the guitars soundhole. The guitar used also had a single coil pickup at the neck, so I plugged it into a DI box and sent it through to channel 2, which gave me 2 distinct tones for the same performance. I decided to use both of these recordings at once, with the microphone recording all the way on the left, and the DI all the way on the right, which creates a very wide sound. I also recorded a very simple bassline, consisting of just the root notes. I recorded the bass through a DI box and used an amp simulator plugin in Logic.

I also added a synthesizer. The synth I used was ES-2, which comes as stock in logic. I loaded up a basic square wave from the tutorial settings folder and started tweaking various settings, blended in a sine wave, added envelopes and LFOs to the filter until I got the sound I wanted. I added an arpeggiator and added the chords in a midi region halfway through the track.

For the drums, I used a couple of found sounds. The snare was originally the sound of a fizzy drink bottle being opened, captured on an Audio Technica AT-2020. I added some compression, reverb and delay to achieve the final sound. The sound I used for the kick is the sound of the door to my flat slamming shut, recorded on a zoom H5 Portable recorder. I added compression and a longer reverb to achieve the final sound. Then I created a new instrument track in logic, added DMD (Logic’s stock drum sampler), and dragged in my samples to the appropriate positions on the kit.

Recording vocals for High And Dry

The XY Pair for the flutes

Full room view of the stereo recording

Bibliography

Radiohead – High and Dry (from The Bends) (1995): https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7fv84nPfTH0

Chemical Brothers – Where Do I Begin (from Dig Your Own Hole) (1997): https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=_91HbYkguwk

The King Of Gear – Thom Yorke’s Microphones and Vocal Effects: https://thekingofgear.com/thom/microphones

Sound On Sound – Q. How Do I Copy Thom Yorke’s Vocal Sound: https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-how-do-copy-thom-yorkes-vocal-sound