Multitrack Recording and Music Production Blog – A

This was my first time a doing anything like this so I was quite nervous on whether I would actually be able to do it; however I feel that I did it quite well, and was able to put some different elements into mine that your might not hear in other peoples. So first, I started the Pre-mix; I spent quite a lot of time on this just to make the whole quality of my piece sound better. I started off with grouping and colour coding just to make the process easier and then moved on to setting some rough levels. I started with the drums and slowly added more and more; however some problems I came across was the Overhead Left mic and DI bass were peaking at quite a low level, I fixed this through using automation, but only slightly as I just wanted them to stop peaking. Here is what my levels looked like at the end of my mix:

I obviously wanted the vocals to sit on top of the piece so had them quite high. I also felt the guitars were quite overpowering so I made them quite quiet. As for instruments I did not use, there are 4 parts I chose not to keep in. For the guitars I cut both of the sm57’s which were positioned off centre, just because I felt the guitars already had enough depth with just the 4 microphones (in the two different parts). I also cut the ukulele as I felt I didn’t need it as I wanted to make the saxophones quite prominent and they were all playing the same part of the song. And finally I also cut one of the saxophones room microphones again just because I thought it wasn’t really needed. I then went on to set the panning I started with the drums panning the OVL and OVR in different directions fully – I also did this with the two Toms as well because they did not do a lot and I wanted to make it clear when they were being played. I also panned the snare bottom and top by a small amount along with the two saxophone parts. For the two different guitar parts, I panned them in different directions so you could hear the different parts – which I think created a really good effect.

I then went on to signal processing. I ended up putting EQ on almost everything, even if it was just a little bit; this was to ensure I got the perfect sound I wanted. Again with this I started off with the drums, bass and vocals and then continued with the rest. Here are some examples of some of the EQ’s I used (most of my EQ’s were done with an EQ3 7-Band):

This is what I used for the Overhead Right Microphone on the drums, I boosted the higher frequencies by quite a lot to ensure that the symbols were making the right sound I wanted for the piece. This was one of my first attempts at putting EQ into practise so I messed around with it for quite a while before I got a sound I liked.

This was a picture of the EQ I put on for the vocal part, in which for the main vocals I raised some of the HMF and for the second vocals I raised some of the LMF. I did this so that there was a more distinguishable difference between the two vocal parts – making the second vocals a little bit more of a softer sound. I also then continued to compress both of these so that the Thresh for both was -25.2dB. I then went on and also compressed the Bass guitar and kick drum as well.

I then continued to add some effects into the piece. I think the most stand out effect I used was on the Saxophones. After fiddling around with the Saxophones Sm57 microphone I mistakenly came across an effect in D-Verb reverb; I was really unsure about it to start with as it was quite different but once I heard it in the full piece I thought it gave the piece more of an older live vibe – kind of like something you might here on an actual Stevie Wonder track. Here is a picture of the effect I used, the preset I used was called short room 2:

On the guitars two 57 centre microphones I put a small amount of distortion on them to create a more crisp sound to help fill out the song. On the clav part I added a small amount of reverb just to make it sound a bit more real and less electronic. I also attempted putting some reverb on the vocals, but decided not to in the end as I couldn’t get a sound I liked. Other things I did to the piece was cutting out any empty space picked up by the microphones – the ones that took the most chopping apart were the Toms and the vocals. I also smoothed out any ‘drop ins’ we made, by cross fading. Then finally I added an end fade to the master fader so that the song would just fade out naturally. All in all I was happy with my first ever mix and felt it went quite well. It helped me reaffirm quite a lot of knowledge learnt in the past semester and I feel I will continue to improve as the year goes on.

This was our final week tracking so all we had left to be done was the saxophone part. This was done by Daz who was a friend of one of the group members. So like usual, we started by setting up the microphones. It was not too dissimilar to the guitar set up; we used an Sm57 with was right next to the saxophone, this gave us a more direct sound, and then we also used an AKG 414 which was set about 1 ½ metre’s away from the musician to get the room sound of the instrument. We also discussed the level difference of the instrument, as the saxophone can actually be very loud dependent on where you are stood. After this we then continued into the studio in which we had to reassign the inputs and outputs on pro tools as our session was now beginning to look quite full up. We then proceeded to record one him playing, we made a couple of drop ins but then carried on to double track the saxophone as it is no doubt one of the most important parts of the song so was important to get as much to work with as possible. At the end of this session I re-recorded my clav part due to us finding some nasty click noises in the first version, we realised that the volume on the electric piano needed to be quite low to avoid this. This was a simple job and only took about 10 minutes. This brought our tracking process to an end which meant the only thing left to do was to mix it …

This week we did the vocals to our track sung by Luke.  We also recorded the clav part on the electric piano which was performed by myself.

For the microphone set up we used a Neumann U87 for the vocals with a pop shield. Our first job was to make the singer comfortable so he would be more likely to sing better, then we moved on to setting the level with the headphones. To start with we struggled to get the right level for the headphones as it was either to quiet or loud and crackly, eventually we realised that the main volume wasn’t turned up enough on the headphone box in the studio so that mostly resolved that problem. When recording the vocals we recorded it twice so we could pick and choose which part of the vocals were best and then we tried double tracking; however the problem we discovered with double tracking the vocals is that the singer sung parts of it differently, so it would be hard to double track the whole of the song but undoubtedly there would be some parts we could still use. We then moved onto the clav part, which was pretty straight forward. We used the DI box to record the electric piano, and used a clav sound on the piano. We did two recordings of this; one in the octave below middle C and the over the octave below that, so we could choose which one to use, we also did some dropping in for both the recordings due to minor mistakes on my behalf.

This week we aimed to record the Guitars for our project. Originally in Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’ there are no guitars, however we wanted to get as much usable material as possible.

We started by setting up a 2 Shure SM57 close to the centre of the speaker and one on the outside of the cone. We also set up an AKG 414 setting it to an omnidirectional polar pattern, 0dB and a roll of at 80Hz, we placed this about a metre and a half away from the amp – we used this microphone so we could get a good representation of what the room sounded like. We also placed the guitarist –Robin – behind a board so the mic’s wouldn’t pick up the sound of him actually playing. We proceeded to set the headphone levels, tried phasing but the mic’s were already in sync with each other, we flipped the phase of the 414 as it sounded a lot more natural, and then panned the SM57’s. For the overall sound of the guitar we went for a bit more gain to give us a more crunchy sound, we also tried to take some of the middle out. We started the recording; and decided it may sound better with the guitar playing the same throughout and not changing to the brass melody, this also acted as double tracking which made the overall sound richer. We then proceeded to record a Ukulele playing the brass melody, which actually sounded quite good.

This week our aim was to record and replace the guide Bass part recorded last week. This again was a pretty painless task due to skill of the Bass player.

We started by letting the Bass player set up his amp, then we proceeded to set the level on the amp, desk and via pro tools. We started with 2 microphones and a DI box. We used the AKG D112 again for the top speaker and a Beyer Dynamic 201TG for the bottom speaker, heading into lines 14, 13 and the DI box into 15. We then went on to find the best sound on the desk, we tried flipping the phase with a different mixture and decided to ditch the BD201 completely and just use the D112 and DI box. We then went on to compress the DI box through a Drawmer 251 compressor using a 5:1 ratio. We also used the Drop-in tool to correct a few minor mistakes by the bass player, making sure we set a pre-roll and a post roll.

Originally the Bass part by Stevie Wonder Superstition is played on a keyboard but for ease and maybe an overall better sound we went with the Bass. However we may choose to record me playing the Bass on the keyboard at a later date dependent on time we have.