Studio Project - My Sky In Green

My Sky Is Green
MP3: http://www.box.net/shared/1tncu9vt3u

Recording log:
The recoding process was interesting for me because the band was comprised mostly of instruments I hadn't worked with in a recording format before. Also because it was comprised mostly of acoustic instruments it meant to achieve separation in the tracks most things had to be recorded separately. The first take was the Piano and Bass Guitar because the bass was just using his pre amp and a DI so there was no microphone involved. I placed two mics on the Piano close to the strings for a brighter sound. This later proved to be an issue as the sound of the dampener on the piano came through very loud after even light compression. There was another U87 set up about 3 meters from the Piano to capture the rooms sounds. The Vocals were recorded through a U87 and I did both the lead and the harmony vocal in separate takes. To achieve the sound I wanted for the acoustic guitar I put one SM57 close to the sound hole and a U87 further back at a point where there was a fair amount of reinforcement. The guitar had a very clear and sweet tone and I wanted to capture that the best I could. The drum was recorded with a C414 after trying a out a few mics that didn’t seem to capture the ‘poppy’ nature of the drum. The C414 captured this while also sounding warm as well. The Viola was recorded with a U87 placed about 30cm on average from the sound hole when the instrument was being played. Overall I think the recording process went well and I get the sounds I wanted from each instrument. The only issue that popped up was the piano mics being too close and picking up the dampener being used.

Production:
As with recording the track I enjoyed mixing this track because it contained many instruments I hadn’t mixed before and required me to think differently about the mix. The first mix I did was just a preliminary mix so the band had something to listen back to. I fixed the levels at a basic level and started the volume automation on the harmony track. After taking the track up to studio 1 to mix I started trying to bring the main level of everything up with some subtle compression. This worked quite well for most things keeping the ratio low and the threshold quite high. This however also brought to light my first issue with the recording with that any amount of compression brought up the dampener sound in the piano from having the mics placed too close to the beaters in the piano. In the end it seemed if I wanted to keep the piano level consistent with the guitar and drums I would have to live with it being there. I tried to mix the track so that the vocals were the most obvious part and added separate reverbs to the different sets of instrument to stop the mix getting too washy. At the beginning and end of the track I automated the Piano mics so the track started with the room mic and slid into the wider fuller sound of the two close mics. I found this acted like a fade in intro to the song without actually having to start from a zero level. In the mastering step I found controlling the background sounds even more difficult and ended up having two L3’s with relatively low thresholds on them worked better than a single one trying to do all the work.