Studio Project - May

May
Mp3: http://www.box.net/shared/ftbxto8fky

Recording Log:
I found recording the instruments for this song very different from that of recoding My Sky Is Green. Although the song starts off with just a lone voice and Piano getting a drum kit sound that would fit well with it was quite difficult. The whole process also had a number of setbacks the largest being the completion of Piano and drums takes on the first night that were lost due to my failure to back them up. The Piano had two U87’s placed in figure 8 around the strings that were being played as the song didn’t use a very large range on the piano. The drums in the end used the NT5 stereo mic as and over head and also two U87’s one on each side of a baffle in a binaural technique. The kick and snare were closed mics but also added into the mix was the mic being used by Jake as a talkback mic. It had swung around and face the window behind him and this provided some nice room sound to the cymbals which worked quite well in the mix. The guitar ended up being recorded through a DI into an MBOX in the audio lab as there was no studio time left in which Ben could play on it. The sound worked alright after some tweaking but the sound of Amplitube is still there so that was a little disappointing. Vocals were recorded in the dead room into studio 2. Many takes were needed to get something passable... eventually switching between the doubled take lower in the mix and the original seemed to work alright. Overall the recording process didn’t really go well between losing original takes and being unable to record live guitar I feel the recording did suffer. However in the end I think the performers made the most of what we had and came out with a fairly reasonable result.

Production Log:
Mixing May was an interesting thing, getting most of the sounds that I wanted was easy but some things caused me some trouble. The vocal take for exapmle was not really the kind of quailty it needed to be so making it fit in the mix and actually sound reasonable was prety hard. I used a doubling take to make is sound thicker and auto tune to try and fix up the pitch. Mixing the drums was quite easy and I reversed the phase of the Binarual mics as I could hear something funny going on with the ride. In the mastering setup I used a small amount of EQ but as there weren’t really any noise issuses in any of the tracks so I worked mostly on making it sound louder without ruining the mix. I added in a spot effect to the guitar coming into the second chorus using one of the waves delay units. It worked out quite well but maybe could’ve been made a little more sublty. Overall I added differnet reverbs to the different groups of tracks and a long delay to the guitar to add some space to the mix. In the master track I used the S1 Imager to widen the stero image as with only one guitar track it was pretty much only the drums provding anything hard left and right.