My name is Alice Asbury and I have been asked to create a blog recording the process of our 2nd assessment for the module Multitrack recording and music production. I will be posting weekly on what we have done in the studio and things like what equipment we have used, channel listing, how we set it up, Pro Tools etc.
This week we started our first step to recording our own version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’, so we set of recording the drums. The first step was setting up the microphones; this included x2 AKG Condenser microphones for the left and right overheads –going into channels 17 for the left and 18 for the right. We also had 1 AKG D112 microphone for the kick drum set to channel 19. Then x2 SM57 Dynamic Microphones for above and below the snare –the mic above went into channel 20 and the bottom went into channel 21. As for Tom’s 1&2 we used 2 BeyerDynamic microphones using tracks 22 and 23. We also considered using a sEX1 condenser microphone for the hi-hat however after hearing the overall sound we confirmed that we didn’t need it.
After soloing each channel whilst Sid was playing the drums and setting the levels to roughly 0dB we listened to it on Mix A and decided to make a few changes, for example for the left and right overhead and Toms we added pans left and right – more so on the overhead microphones. We also flipped the Phase on the bottom snare microphone to prevent some of the phase cancellation; this created a fuller sound as it then included all of the lower frequencies.
We also recorded a rough copy of the bass line using input 16 through the DI Front output, this was to help the drummer with the layout of the piece, we were also planning on using a guitar as well however difficulties with tuning meant that we couldn’t.
We came across a couple of problems whilst recording one being the Left Overhead microphone stand falling over during and also we discovered the lead used for this was broken. We also didn’t realise until after we had finished that we had only set the panning on Mix A and had forgotten to set it on Mix B so therefore the initial pan we had planned was not on the recording. Apart from this overall the recording sounded really good and we were all pleased with the outcome.