James Glenister's Multitrack Recording Blog

To start off, I made sure that all of the tracks had the same output, as the vocal track could not initially be heard, and so required its output to be changed. I then listened to the song once in its entirety, before listening through it a second time, soloing each channel one at a time as I listened.

I then began by working on the bass, to which I added a 7-band EQ and increased some of the low end and also some of the mid-range in the bass as I felt this gave a fuller sound, and used the same EQ for all of the Bass Tracks. In addition I also used an Aux Track for the Bass to add some reverb. I also increased the levels for the mic recordings, while leaving the D.I slightly lower due to the fact it was a fair bit louder.

For the drums, I increased the volume of the Kick, Snare and the Tom tracks, while slightly decreasing the overheads. I added EQ to the Kick, and removed some of the lower mids as it appeared to sound a little boxy. I also removed a lot of the mids from the Top Snare, as well as adding an expander gate to get rid of some unnecessary sound.

For the Electric Guitars, I added a little bit of reverb, but also significantly reduced the levels for all Electric Guitar tracks, as it was a bit overpowering compared to everything else.

For the vocals I added reverb in an aux track, as otherwise the vocals appear to sit on top of the rest of the track. In addition, I used EQ to slightly boost the mid range frequencies. I also felt that at certain points in the song, the vocals were too quiet and therefore somewhat inaudible, and so I went in and adjusted the volume at those specific points in the song.

Like the vocals, the Guitar Solo sounded as though it sat on top of the rest of the track, and so I also added reverb via aux to this, as well as using an expander gate and exploring the channel strip to remove some of what I felt was unwanted low-end.

For the acoustic guitar I just added some reverb via aux to give a softer sound. However I had always noticed when playing back that I felt the Acoustic was barely audible due to being overpowered by the electric. For this reason, I made the decision to pan the acoustic moderately left, while panning the electric (minus the solo) moderately to the right.

I mastered the track 3 times to hear what it sounded like as an MP3, listening to it on several devices and then tweaking it wherever I felt necessary until I was happy with my 3rd and final mastered version of the track.

This week Luke was showing us how to prepare to do the mix.

Alex and Ross took it in turns to use Pro-Tools this week as Luke was showing us how to prepare. One of the first things we were shown was colour-coding tracks, as well as grouping tracks, and so to demonstrate the drums, the bass and the electric guitar tracks were all individually grouped. This meant that you could select for example the bass group and then adjust all of the bass tracks levels at the same time. In addition, we were shown how to pan certain tracks to the left and right, as this is necessary if you have recorded, for example, left and right overheads. We were also shown how to eliminate popping between clips, which is done using a small cross-fade. Luke also showed us where you can enter comments on an individual track if you were preparing it for mixing engineers, however we obviously won’t be using this at the moment as we are doing our own mixes.

At the end of the session we were then able to copy the session onto our memory sticks to mix in our own time.

This week we recorded both Daniel playing the acoustic guitar and Alex playing the electric guitar solo for the track.

The solo was recorded first, and so Daniel was able to help James Woodliffe and Ross set up the mics for recording. An AKG 414 was used as a room mic, with an omni-directional polar pattern, while two Shure SM57 were used to record the amp, with one placed at the centre of the amp, giving a brighter sound, while the other was off to the side, giving a darker sound.

With Clementine on the Desk and Callum on Pro Tools, we recorded Alex performing the solo for the track. This recording took a number of attempts due to crackling which we believe was caused by the jack on his guitar. He attempted to resolve this by performing stood up, although this caused him to mess up a few times, however in the end we got a good recording with him sat down again, this time without crackle.

We then went on to record Daniel on the Acoustic Guitar, and so James Woodliffe and Ross set up the mics. Again, the AKG 414 was used as a room mic, however it was moved further back so that it was almost at the complete opposite end of the room to Dan. One of the Shure SM57s was placed near the fretboard of his acoustic guitar, while the other was placed near the sound hole.

 

Daniel had two ways of playing along to the track, one where he would constantly strum, and one where he would not. After hearing both, we decided to go with a constant strum as otherwise it was essentially replicating the electric guitar, and we overall agreed a constant strum sounded better. The actual recording was done very smoothly as I believe there were no slip-ups and it was done in his first attempt.

 

 

This week we were recording James Woodliffe performing the vocals for the track.

This week Alex and I were setting up the mics. For this week’s session, we wanted to test three different mics to see which was best suited for recording the vocals for the song, and so the mics we set up were the Shure SM57, which is an affordable dynamic mic and easily the budget option of the three, the Electro-Voice RE20 which is also a dynamic mic, however unlike the Shure it has no proximity effect, meaning James Woodliffe could move around a bit without it having a serious effect on the sound. In addition we also had an AKG 414 condenser mic set up in cardioid for the third mic.

James would then sing into each microphone individually and we would compare the sounds of the microphones to see which one was the best suited. Initially, many of us thought that the SM57 sounded the best in comparison to the RE-20, which many of us thought sounded too flat, however when combined with the rest of the song, the RE-20’s sound was better suited and just seemed to fit with the rest of the performance, and so we of course went with the RE-20.

Overall recording went fairly smoothly, however there were a few instances where the vocals seemed a little quiet, and there were one or two instances that required re-recording, but other than that recording the vocals appeared to go well.

This week we were recording Adam playing the Electric Guitar for the track.
Clementine and Alex were the sound engineers this week, and so they were in charge of setting up the mics in the live room where Adam would be recording.

The mics that were used this week were a sE2200aii, which was used as a room mic and therefore had its polar pattern set to Omni directional as this would fully capture the sound of the room, and two Shure SM57 mics were used to record the actual electric guitar amp, one of which was placed closer to the centre, which gave a brighter sound, while the other was placed closer to the edge which gives a darker sound.

When setting up the amp, it was initially set to give quite a heavy metal sound, which most of us felt would not go with the sound of the rest of the track, and so this setting was tweaked until we found a more appropriate setting.

I was in charge of Pro Tools this week, while Callum was in charge of the mixing desk, and so it was my job to add the tracks, colour code and name them, and I would then go on record Adam’s performance.

There were a few sections where we needed to re-record due to minor errors in Adam’s performance, but the re-records went pretty smoothly as I gave Adam around 8 seconds of pre-roll to make sure that he had time to get his bearings. Continue reading “Week 8 – Guitar Tracking”