Electric Blues in Relfection
The first studio session was booked for the audient and was for setting down the guitars for all 3 tracks. They were recorded with an NTK and Nt5 pair, with the NTK set a little back for room ambience and the Nt5 in a close mic of the strings and on the body.
Studio Troubles:
It started out as quite a productive session, but listening back i had recorded the guitars a little too fast. So some minor tempo mapping from 131 - 125 bpm was done and the song was sounding good again. The next step was the vocal recording and so i laid down the vocals to the first song, but it must have been a long day because i just didn't get the vocal take i was looking for.
I rebooked another session in the S6 to finish off the vocals, but wasn't able to get the live room so i had to improvise, using the tb mic input I swapped out the TB mic for the NTK and set about recording the vocals. This is when the real troubles started.
The recording had a very high noise floor, guitar spill, and pops all throughout. So i spent maybe 3 hours doing some research on how to get rid of pops and then fixing it, I cut the lows and added a de-esser which got most of the pops and plosives out of the recording. But the noise floor was still a problem. Using the patch bay i patched into the avalon directly from the tb, this is where i realised the NTK might have been a bad choice because it was LOUD, and the only thing I could think of doing is turning the preamp down like -20 which is something you shouldn't do, then having cranked it through the compressor in the avalon.
Some big lessons were learned that day.
1. Always use a pop filter
2. Never record straight out of a compressor. Always record 2 tracks one wet and one dry
According to Plan:
The plan was to record the vocals cleanly and then clip distort them to my liking, but because of the noise floor I had to add some sort of fuzz so it didn't sound off when the vocals came in. I found a radio interference preset in sculpture, and created an eery atmosphere which not only masks the noise floor but also adds to the tone of the song overall. Though it increased the total distortion in the song, and as Pete said, was a bit loud in some areas.
Though additional studio sessions will need to take place, this was all accounted for in the plan and will not hinder the scope of the project.
being my own performer and producer is a tough job, but one thing that is a benefit is that I know when the take i do isn't what I'm looking for. For example in the first session it was at the end of a long recording session, my fingers were tired from playing guitar and I didn't have the performance that I was looking for. I knew this was the case so I booked a second session and really pushed myself to give the correct performance.
Guitar:
There are 2 guitars in this recording, a nylon and a steel string. I loved the sound of the clicky nylon strings in my original very basic proof of concept recording. I wanted to include them somehow, so once i had recorded the steel string I decided to spit the tones of the guitars. Having the warm, slightly distorted and chorused steel string guitar and the brighter nylon panned right and left respectively made for a nice stereo image.
During the song however i wanted the cut the guitars down to just the warm guitar and vocals, but it sounded to abrupt with the panning just having the guitar disappear so I added a stereo delay to the left side just to even out the space.
Drums:
Initially I had recorded some acoustic guitar drumming sounds which I was going to put into the song, but after listening back to them I realised that it just wasn't boomy enough and the song lacked that low end that I really wanted. Basically it needed a full drum kit.
So I've used a combination of 2 drum kits in logic. Firstly the roots kit which had the best sounding kick drum, I eq'd the drum to boom a bit more in that 70hz region. Secondly I used the Socal drum kit, because of the tone of the toms and snare, it had more of a "tong" sound to it than the roots kit alone, so I've mixed these two kits together to create a kit that I'm happy with.
After listening to Pete's advice, I've considered getting a real drummer in to play along, this will make the song sound a little bit more real but will add a lot of extra work to the scope which at this stage I will not be changing.
Vocal Effects:
I knew I wanted a specific verb on the vocals, one that i have used before and i know suits my voice well. So i went for 1.5s decay and adjusted the size of the room to make a larger sound. During the editing and mixing stages I was wondering how I could make the chorus a bit more punchier and fuller in comparison. I figured it was lacking a bit of bass, but i didn't want the bass in the vocal track so I sent the track pre-fader to a sub bass plugin to an echo then to a compressor and finally to a reverb. I really liked the tone I got from the sub bass plugin but it was missing something, so I sent the effects bus to a stereo delay and panned it left and mixed it in.
The channels look like this:
I'm quite happy with the overall product, but i will continue to re-mix it by the end of the trimester. The end goal is still a 3 track album of blues songs and it's looking right on track for the end of tri.
