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.