I recently finished a two year ual certificate in music production and perofrmance and this past week I spent three days in a local private studio located in Lewes, East Sussex. I watched, studied and gave a helping hand alongside producer and engineer Dan. The band who came in spent three days there and wanted three tracks captured. The band’s music was very psych-fuelled, which was very enjoyable for me.
On day 1 the main focus was to capture the percuasion and bass parts for each songs. I arrived at the lock-up early Friday morning after a very muddy cycle ride across fields, courtesy of Google maps. 🙂 I had a quick tour of the studio facilities before cleaning up the live room (coiling xlrs and taking down microphones), in preparation for the band’s arrival. Once the band had arrived and we’d all introduced ourselves we immediately began setting up the drum kit and positioning the microphones.
*Notice the tape recorder hanging in front of the kit*
On the kit were a spaced pair of condenser microphones, sm57 on snare and hi tom, akg d112 on floor tom and a akg d12 vr on the kick. The toms had Evans Calftone ’56 skins fitted on them. They’re a 7-mil Mylar, which tune up nicely and embody that vintage bebop timbre. Suitable heads I thought for the type of music the band played. The akg d12 vr was placed inside the kick drum a little less than halfway and was pointed fairly dead on to where the beater slaps. Placing the microphone likes, rather than pushed up against the batter head, allows the microphone to capture more of the shell tone.
Dan told me that they had been experimenting with this Sony TCM-757 tape recorder earlier in the week. It was placed roughly just over a meter away from the snare drum and a meter above from the ground. The tape recorder captured a nice gritty and lo-fi tone. It added nice characteristic to the snare drum when blended into the mix. We didn’t have to tinker with the mic positioning on the drums too much once we’d begun sound check. All of the mics went through preamps before reaching the computer. A couple of the mics might have also been ran through a compressor, however I can’t remember exactly. The bass signal was sent through to an amp and di box. All of the guitar amps where in a separate room, which was great for sound isolation in the live room. The keys were di’d and the vocalist sang and played guitar from the control room. His performance was sent to the guys in the live room, whom all had their own headphone mix. Dan set up a click and the band set off and did their thing. I was surprised how quickly the band manged to capture the three songs. Very efficient! Like I said, Dan was only after the drums and bass in these takes so the keys and guitar/vocal performance wasn’t of great importance here. For one of the tracks we tinkered with the snare sound. Dan actually got out a different snare and used this technique called the “ripple snare tuning technique”. Dan chose to do this as he felt the tonal qualities of the previous snare didn’t serve the song as well as it could have. I agreed. The previous snare was too bright, whereas this technique allows you to get a nice mellow tone with a relatively flat resonance. I think later on in the day we started to record some guitar parts.
In the studio there was a couple of pedals and the one that really surprised me was the Prunes and Custard pedal by Crowther Audio. It’s features a fuzzy distortion and adds weird harmonics. It worked extremely well on one of the tracks – creating a very psyched out of your mind tone.
Day 1 was a big eye opener for me. It really showed me how important a producer is for the entire progress. A producer needs to have good ears and an understanding of music theory. Dan really helped sculpt the arrangements without taken any of the creativity away from the band.
Day 2 – I think was mostly keyboard and moog overdubs. Jo, who played keys, was very efficient and it didn’t take him long at all to record all of his parts. This allowed Dan to experiment with different sounds and preamps. He changed the preamp the keys were wired to originally as he thought it was too bright sounding. He was after more warmth. We also recorded vocals on day 2. Once recorded I mic’d up a Fender Blues Jr with a SM57 placed at the middle of the cone and Dan played the vocal takes through it and captured them. This captured a really warm lo-fi sound. We also did some guitar and bass overdubs during the evening.
Day 3 – This was a shorter day for myself, however day 3 mostly consisted of vocal, backing vocals, harmony and some extra percussion recording.
Throughout the three days there were some mixing things Dan showed me and one of them that really interested me was something parameter modulation, with I believe is a feature only Reaper has. This sound on sound article will explain it better than I ever could. http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/parameter-modulation It is something I will definitely start experimenting with and applying to my drum mixes in particular. I really liked how Dan used it on the snare drum. On each snare drum hit it triggered the eg to automatically ride on the knob. This obviously helps with reducing bleed from boosting higher frequencies etc.
Unfortunately there are lots of details I’m unable to recall accurately but overall the three day experience was very eye-opening and beneficial for me. I feel like I’ve learnt lots about the people skills involved withe being a producer and the daily tasks of working in a working studio. I hope to go back at some point to work with Dan again. I plan from now until September 2018 to gain as much work experience as I possibly can.
george paul brown music labyrinth 