I sat down with Cormac Donelly today in the SSL and presented my idea for the recording 3 assignment. A 30 minutes slot sounds like a reasonable time frame to discuss a simple idea, but when you get into details regarding any subject, time simply flies. And today was no exception.
In order to understand my recording 3 assignment, I will have to go back in time to May this year, where I recorded a small demo album with Sketchline, a Mancunian band, which I am a member of. The demo consisted of 10 tracks with drums recorded in our rehearsal space, bass in the Neve, guitars in a livingroom with a Line6 Pod and the vocals in a hall of my flat. Then it was mixed both in the SSL and the Neve. Considering I didn’t have good monitoring while tracking, except for the bass session in the Neve, the raw recordings of the drums came out ok. The one thing that let it all down was the vocal recordings, which was myself recording myself – not a good idea. But the inconsistency between recording spaces and various different monitoring from HD-25 headphones to the hand made speaker cones of the Dynaudios in The Neve, made me loose sight of where I was going with the project.
After having listened to the album during the summer on various different speakers and enviroments, I can hear that my raw recordings sound better then my mixes and mastered versions. I managed to reduce clarity and essentially quality during those stages, which brings me back to where I started this post. I discussed this whole project with Cormac and mentioned the problem I had along the way. He listened to ”Before We Sleep” and we discussed the mix of the song. I pointed out some obvious problems areas that he agreed to and he gave me some pointers on how to attack those mistakes.
So because of this process and the fact that the outcome did not reach my expectations, I have decided to rerecord two of the tracks from the album or the pre production as it eventually came to be. Having made the mistakes I will try different workflows and microphone techniques to better suit the material. I am aiming to do my tracking in the same enviroment in order to maintain consistancy in my monitoring. I have booked studio time and arranged for the drummer to lay down the the foundation in a weeks time. I would have prefered to track the drums with the bass in the same session, but due to the bassists unavailability that week, I cannot achive this.
I have booked another tutorial next week.
- enough writing.. on to doing stuff!
