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.