Recording places:Basement studio 1 ,
Piano rehearsal room second floor and studio alpha and 4 from Ealing Studios.
The most of the project was recorded in basement one approximately 16 hours and
we recorded there : vocals , harmonics , base guitar , electric guitar ,
acoustic guitar , drums and the rough part of the piano.
Some of the difficult parts we
encountered when we first came in contact with the studio were to set up all
the equipment and figure out how stuff is connected together.
We recorded the piano to have a lead
for the vocals , the main purpose for recording the vocals first was to give
some time to artists to rehearsal and to record the other instruments around
the vocal recordings.
The vocals and harmonics took almost
8 hours to record and we used a few recording techniques to figure out which
one will fit the best for our recording purpose. We used 3 microphones close
together and three different distance marked on the floor , we recorded 3 times
and choose the best distance and the best microphone , because the SEz3300 was
the best for our short distance and because we had a really tight space in the
live room we chosen to record the vocals , we also record the backing vocals
and the harmonics of the voice with the same microphone.Because we didn’t want
to have spill on vocals and to have a lead instrument we recorded the piano with a pair of c414 in
ortf recording technique to get the most of the piano.On our second session we
were supposed to record the drums mainly but the drummer was late and we
recorded the guitars , for the acoustic guitar we used a spaced cardioid pair
and following the 3 to 1 rule to reduce the phase cancelation we placed one mic
near the resonance box and one near the cords , the mic near the cords gave us
touch of the cords and some high frequencies. We used the same recording
technique for the overheads of the drum kit but instead of using condenser we
used a pair of Sennheiser MD421 microphones we initially thought that the
dynamic microphones wouldn’t not be as sensitive as condensers but we got the
sound that we wanted. For the base guitar we used a Sennheiser MD421 with the
amplifier against the wall and the microphone was placed between the centre and
the edge of the cone , we know that the low frequencies tends to build up near
the walls and the corners of the room but placing the amp near the wall we got
reed of the low frequency that bounced all over the room , for the electric
guitar we used the same technique but we add a condenser mic placed far away
and a bit off axis to get some ambiance an to get high frequencies we used the
u87 of axis to to reduce the sensibility of the microphone.
The drum kit was recorded with 5
microphones 2 Sennheiser MD421 for overheads we used a pair of Shure sm57 and a large
diaphragm for the kick we had a lot of problems with the drum recording because
the sound of the drums sound was poor and we had to tune them by ourselves and
to use a lot of clothes for the kick in order to make it sound good.
For the acoustic piano we went into a
rehearsal room which had a big piano and we used a pair of DA4011 cardioid placed
in ortf stereo recording technique , and we got a great stereo image of the
piano we also tried the blomline recording technique with a pair of C414 placed
one on top of each other recorded in figure of eight and for electric piano and
organ we used a korg triton .
As an overall , the recording was a
success and the best thing is that we learn lots of great new things like microphone
positioning using the audient console and making the most of an live room , we
meet great people and very good artist and in my opinion the most of a
recording is made by a good performer and a good instrument , we took care of
phase cancelation , spilling and stereo image overall I had a great experience
with my group.
