On going progress with work

Unfortunately I set my soundcloud account to hide all the various versions of tracks that I uploaded and did not realise this. Here is the link to all the various stages of the mixes, all the mixes are dated with times, showing when they were uploaded. http://soundcloud.com/lukehitchen

Compleation of the tracks

All five tracks at this point are complete and the only additional alterations to them as of today will be simple mastering which will probably include a small amount of EQ just to even the mixes out.

All go.

From now till the 20th the focus will be on production. The tracks have been roughly mixed and are now being developed, so are having the treatment of Effects added if they are needed. And a focus on tightening the mixes up to improve their quality. The two main features of the Rock tracks are, Additional top end on the cymbals. De mudding of the mids and bussing a small amount bass, snare and kick to a highly compressed buss. The other three tracks have a focus on improving top end sparkle reducing boomy bass and any additional reverb.

A brief pause in work

Due to the dissertation hand in being imminent being very close little or no production will be done to the tracks. Till the 16th

Gangs and Elessar

The Same method was used as had been used with the classically based tracks, however the focus of these was to dirty the tracks up while maintain the clarity of them. for this I worked with the tracks solo'd to create the audio I was after then mixed it by either making room in the mix using EQ for the instrument or boosting the frequencies. The main problem I encountered the majority of the time with these tracks was de muddying the mixes. which is the main fault with Elessar still as it stands.

Georgia, Michael lynch and House Mixing

For the production aspect I grouped the tracks together so I did not work specifically on a single track and tire my ears out, so mixing was done between the tracks related closest to each other. The Process for mixing began with initally filtering the audio tracks as this helped remove and low end rumble and noise. The second stage was mixing with no additional affects, this then set the levels for the tracks. The focus was to mix the tracks so that they hovered around the 0dB level on the master track, so that the only additional compression on the final product would increase the level, rather than reduce the audio and affect the way in which the track sounded. After decent levels were achieved, the focus was defining the tracks, this began with drums if they were on the track and finished with vocals. A little compression was added to most of the tracks not to remove any performance aspects of the audio, but to reduce the range between the loudest audio on the track. Very little was used to bust the signal. Normalization was not used on the tracks as I had found with previous work, it increased Noise and often increased the amount of compression needed which was not what I intended as. I wanted to maintain performance aspects.

Post Production

All the tracks are now fully recorded and edited so april can be used to either continue post production or focus on this. Editing of Elessar and Gangs has alreadhy begun and the post production started. The house track is in the final leg of its production, and is the nearest to completion. georgia on my mind Michael Lynch has nad the audio edited but the post production is the main problem of post production.

Re Recording Elessar

The initial recordings of Elessar were to a good standard however there was trouble with the guitar tracks being out of time so, the decision was taken to do the track again. it began with recording a guide track to a click at 9 am for the 11 o clock session that was booked, however once in the studio the guitar parts were less than crisp, however the decision was taken to try again with them, after several takes no progress was being made, so the decision was taken as to rather than waste time and continue using a click track, a live recording would be done but in such a way that all the instruments had enough isolation that they could be mixed and edited if needs be later on, however I had confidence that the freedom with tempo would lead to a much smoother take. Luckily this was the case, the set up was as follows:
Guitar DI
Guitar 2 DI
Bass DI
Drums fully miked. this meant that the tracks could either be re-amped digitally or via a re amp box to a real amp. giving me enough freedom to sort out any timing issues etc.
The drum mic set up was as follows,
Kick - Shure PG52
Snare - 2x Shure SM57
Toms - 3x Shure PG56
Hi Hats - AKG c414/ Oktava MK-012
Overheads - 2x Neuuman U87
Cymbals - 2x AKG Perception 400
Splash/Spalsh China - Blue Baby Bottle
Ride Cymbal - Blue baby Bottle
The reason for the spot miking of the cymbals was so that each particular cymbal could be controlled in the mix rather than having just the overheads as in the track, an semi intricate rhythm is played on the ride which drives the track and would not have sat as well with just the overheads.

After the drum take was captured the bass guitar and guitar parts that had mistakes in the were re recorded however rather than cutting out the audio that was incorrect a new track was recorded to so that the two could be blended together rather than be disjointed because of the method of recording, it was a risk to record this way however it was much less of a risk due to the tightness of the band.

After all this had been done to a workable standard it merely involved recording a few vocal takes to the roughly mixed audio so they could be blended in. A Neuuman U87 was used for both the vocal lines.

Georgia on my mind update 2

The pianist missed his slot once again for recording the track, however he did say he would send a midi version of the track through if i sent him the bass and drums that I had recorded. I agreed and finally have the piano parts back. The string quartet i had been relying on to record, due to an unfortunate turn of events split up. This lead to midi strings being sequenced from looking atother midi versions of the song. This just leaves the vocals to be recorded, however the drums are not as good as i'd have hoped either so the snare drum is going to be sequenced.

Re-recording Michael Lynch

After the inital recording of Michael lynch i realised that due to the amount of bleed from track to track it was impossible to produce the tracks as a guitar and vocal track as the vocals were improved with the additional bass boost from the bleed of the guitar mic this led to poorer signal and less control over the mix.
for this recording we used four microphones rather than the previous two these were:
- AKG c414 x2 (left and right)
-Bblue Bottle x 2 (12th fret and Distant)
vocals - Neumann U87

The tracks were all recorded at the same time to maintain the tightness of the track.
This recording was a better session, however the studio next door were recording drums and there was a substantial amount of bleed from the studio next door. After talking to the studio users next door, they agreed to give us 5 minutes of silence every few mins to record

Drums for Elessar

As all the guitars and bass were recorded and mixed, it was just a case of recording the drums, however the recording session did not go at all well. Unfortunately even though a click track had been used at certain points the guitars fell out of time which when recorded knocked the second guitar and bass, which lead to the drum tracking going well until these particular points and due to the tempo of the songs even the minor slip ups were detrimental to the drummers performance as the click was on the beat and the guitars were slightly after. This lead to good drum takes with minor slip ups that sent small sections of the recording to drop further out of time, so this has lead to the decision to re record everything.

Re Amping the Guitars for Gangs

The re Amping of the guitars was completed with ease as once the amp and wiring was set up the re-recording was flown through. Up to this point they had been the best band to work with as the two band members were always punctual always eager to do the best job they could with in the allotted time knowing that severe time limits were in place due to recording times. In this session the recording was done in the blue room, the equipment used was
Amp: Blackstar 100 Series 1
Cab: Laney Cub 2 x 12

Mic1:Neumann TLM 103
Mic2:Rode Nt3

For this the guitarist sat in the recording room and set up the required tone, then we re-recorded all the parts which was a simple quick job that improved the sound quality substantially.

House track update 3

The editing of the track is pretty much finished. Now the only major focus is producing the track. The first thing to be done is set up three busses, one for reverb, one for a mophed type affect and one for delay. The various parts were then automated to the busses. some of the tracks had this affect on them, with several being left to have the affects only on the channels. The vocals were edited to alter their tempos to fit the track.

Recording the Drums for Gangs

The tracking of the drums was easily completed the drummer had a simple set up and the genre does not require overproduction so for this standard miking set ups were used:

Kick:AKG D112
Snare:Shure SM57 on top and Sm58 on the bottom
Hi-hat: Blue Baby Bottle
Tom:AKG C518m
Tom:AKG C518m
Glyn Johns overheads :2 x Akg C414s

The reason for the Glyn Johns method for the overheads, was it had been recommended by a fellow course mate and it was a technique that had not been used before.
The set up and level setting was easy for the drummer which allowed for plenty of takes of the track making sure that the recordings were a good quality and the performance was as near perfect as it could have been.

Band Unreliabilities

The studio was booked out for four hours to record the Drums for the Elessar track however the band called off last minute as the performer didnt know the parts, so we will be reorganizing that particular session.

Work outside of recording so far.

So far in the recording process after each recording session the audio files are take from the primary recording medium which is Pro Tools to logic as that is the format that I run at home enabling me to do much of the editing between sessions without having to keep taking time up in the studios.

This includes all the editing of the audio files, however for the finalised mixing I will do that on a range of speakers through a range of applications.

Begining of the post production

Due to popularity of the studios in Markeaton, and the time constraints being faced with I thought it best to bring the completed tracks home and do the majority of the editing fixing and mixing process at home then take it into the studios and finish it off there, to save time and to improve the work output.

This has enabled all the prep work to be done on the tracks while waiting for the parts to be finished which is a major time saver as rather than having five tracks that all need mixing each track just needs a smaller amount of time at the end.

Recording of the second band (Gangs)

The second band we recorded was a post-rock duo that had just started out midway through the second year and were in the process of looking for a bassist, however they had written some songs and wanted to get an EP organised and released so they could begin to get a following, so this was a good arrangement for both me and the band.

To begin with we recorded the guitars in in unusual turn of events as there songs were based on improvisations and the drummer worked of the guitarists knowledge of the songs to play them. Initially we just recorded the guitar by DI, the other alternative being, recording the band live however without a bass player it would have been a little unusual. The reason the guitar was DI'd was partially for us so that we could re amp the guitar parts but also due to that fact that it gave more creative freedom for the band to add effects to develop the sound that they were after. By the end of this session all the guitars were tracked and the bass had been completed.

Recording Bass

due to the nature of how we were recording the track this came next, however it wasnt as simple as it first appeared. The bass player said he like a lot of low end in the recording with more rumble than high end, which while recording presumed he meant he wanted it post production, however upon re listening to the track recorded I realized he'd knocked all the treble off by his pickup and tone set up. which although what he wanted it was unusable and barely a tone so, we recorded it with a cleaner set up and used this one instead while just adding some reamping.

Microphone set up

Recording of the metal band Elessar

Unusually when multi tracking recording of the guitars was undertaken first, due to the bands drummers work commitments and my availability. The recording was initially started in the biggest studio in Markeaton st with baffles used infront and behind the quitar cabinet, to reduce the chance of indirect reflected signals being recorded. The cab was a 4 X 12, so using multiple mics on either side of the cab was not an issue, which meant more room and more time could be taken setting them up. Initally the set up was a AKG 414 about 30 cms away from the centre of the driver on axis. A Neumman U87 next to the cab just off centre. A Shure SM57 off Axis on the driver and a Blue Baby Bottle off axis about 15 cms away from the driver. The desired tone was then found and the recording began.

For the purpose of continuity throughout the recordings the same tone and set up was used for both tracks. So the recording process meant that each guitar part was recording for one guitarist on both tracks.
Between these tracks Chris and I swapped seats as to who was at the control surface and recording each track so the work load was specific to the person.

After recording both tracks for one guitarist we then finished and moved rooms to a smaller room to continue recording the second guitarist, upon starting the recording, with only two mics the Rode NT3 and AKG we realised the tone we had and quality of recording was much better than that of the previous recording session. So we went about re recording both guitar parts and the extra guitar parts the band wanted changing the tone in between all of the different parts. By the end of this recording session all of the guitars were finished recording and edited to the different one channel parts, ready for mixing and the other Instruments.

House/progressive house/acid jazz track update 2

More progress has been made with this track as a natural style of house has been reoccurring throughout the process so far. it has more jazz influences than electronic music however simplifying the melodies and parts has lead to a better direction in terms of music design, and little bits of production and FX have helped move the piece from a bland composition to a development of ideas and timbres of instruments that are not to the norm, which gives the track an individuality while still maintaining some of the features of the genre.

A change to the tracks being recorded

Due to networking over the Christmas period I was able to swap one of the acoustic tracks to a multi tracked Metal band recording. The band had two songs that they wanted recording fro their EP so with the help of Chris Grace we recorded the band and would have one track each at the end of the recording process that we could then produce individually.