Recording Sessions

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.