Monday 1st February

Monday 1^st February

Prior to today’s studio session, I done some research on different types of microphone placements and microphones that I could use for recording. I considered loads of different placements and microphones. My initial idea was to use a single SM57 placed at the sound hole, but I decided not to go with this, as it wouldn’t capture the sounds that I wanted, the SM57 gave a warm flat sound, I decided this wouldn’t suit the mix. As I was after something more bright and crispy, which was more possible to capture with a condenser microphone, so I decided to use 2 AKG C451, to capture a stereo recording one placed at the sound hole and one half way down the fret. So that they captured both the main sound and the sound of the fingers brushing back a forth whilst playing the notes.

Today’s studio session was quite hectic all 3 of us made use of having the guitarist in the studio, first I recorded, and had Ruben and Dom as my sound engineers, and we alternated when it was each other’s turn to record.

Me and Ruben both used an acoustic guitar and went for a similar set up. In the live room we created a kind of isolation chamber, in case the drum kit in the room affected the natural reverb.

The recording process for mine didn’t take too long; Dan had thought of two ideas for the composition, a rhythm section and lead guitar section, I recorded full 56 bars for the lead guitar, so that a had a lot of audio to select from when it came to the arrangement process.

Ruben already had a guitar section laid out in midi, which he wanted Dan to recreate.

Dom wanted to record an electric guitar, this involved us changing the studio set up that we had, we kept the isolation chamber and closed mic’d a guitar amp with an SM57 microphone

I will post some images soon of each of these set ups.

Monday 25th January

Monday 25^th January

This week’s studio session, I assigned the role of a studio engineer for Rubens recording. He wanted to record live drums on a piece he had previously composed, as a studio engineer it was my role alongside the over studio engineers to prepare the live room, i.e. task such as assembling the kit to the players requirements, getting the microphones and stands to the correct positioning, as it was Rubens project he selected the microphones that he wanted to use, for the kick drum we used the AKG D112, for the snare we used the Shure SM57, for the hi hat an AKG CI000, and for the overheads we used the AKG C451.

Along the way we had some minor problems with the XLR cable on the right overhead, the faulty cable was causing the signal to peak, to solve this we changed the cable

Monday 18th January

Monday 18^th January

Midi Comp

Due to the change of plan for my FMP I used today’s studio sessions to go in the midi suite and finish one of my composition. I already had an idea of the kind of song that I wanted to compose; with some help from Stevie I managed to finish off the composition by the end of the day.

I already had a few ideas of the instruments I could have recorded on it. I decided that rather than taking the midi parts away from the composition, and replacing them with recorded instruments, I would rather add something else to the piece that wasn’t there in the midi composition.

I chose to have a live acoustic guitar recorded on the track; I selected a guitarist from our studio group called Dan Twining, as he could play a wide range of styles, and he was able to compose a guitar section, with the ideas I had given him. This was very helpful, as I don’t play guitar.

In order to let the guitarist get familiar with the song I supplied him with a bounced .mp3, and set a date for recording.

This gave me time to research the best ways record acoustic guitar and think about my microphone selection and recording techniques and to do any over preparation that was needed.

Monday 11th January

Monday 11^th January

Absent

Monday 4th January

Monday 4^th January

I have reconsidered my first idea, and have decided to go with a different one, as this idea would be rather hard to execute with the timescale I’ve been given. Instead of this I have decided to stick with the same idea of making a 3 song EP but of a different genre. Still showcasing the same skills as the first idea.