Recording Foley & Side Project

I booked a studio last Saturday in the C24 to record some foley for a short 10 second animation. I had most of the sounds already I just needed a few hammer noises and a drill noise.

I don't actually own a drill so I used the renovator my brother had, very similar sound but a faster rotation rate.

I used an AKG C414 because I also wanted to record my vocals for my side project, but more on that later. The drill was fairly simple to record, just a few quick bursts because it's such a short clip. The hammer noises needed to be metal on metal, so I brought in a hammer and a piece of metal from home. The sound was a little off but luckily I found a frying pan in the foley box and mixed that in as well and it sounded pretty nice.

The ambience I reused from another game project which was a mixture of band passed pink noise and filtered noise from outdoors. I ran this through a very wet reverb.

The welding tool I made from recycling a bug zapper sound I made a few years ago, but with a noise gate and a bit of Eq, compression and distortion.

In the same studio session I wanted to record my vocals and guitar for my side project. Using the AKG 414 and an --(to be updated when i remember what mic mel gave me a suggestion)--. For my vocals I set them almost touching each other as close as i could get, I didn't want any phasing issues. The akg gave a good midrange to my voice but I included the small diaphragm mic just to distort in parallel. I actually wanted to record this in the C24 because the room has a bit of natural reverb to it instead of the toneless recording booths. I set the C414 to a figure 8 pattern and stood in the doorway of the recording booth facing inwards and left the door open behind me so that I could hopefully pick up some of that in the recording.

The recordings turned out well, I managed to re-record the first song and record the second song guitars and vocals. As I mentioned before I balanced both the vocals to give a nice clear high presence, distorting the small diaphragm and sending it to a reverb.

I also recorded another guitar, a different guitar from the previous session, I want the guitars to be the focus of the song, but the vocals are taking centre stage. So I've done some panning to get a nice stereo field.

The guitars recorded in the previous session are on the right of aux 1 and are being sent to aux 1 for EQ, panning and what was originally planned was a pitch shift, however I'm preferring this song to sound a bit more natural and almost cliche. I recorded the first session with a fender acoustic, it has a nice bright tone to it, which i've panned over to the right, the second guitar was a Takamine P1NC which had a much warmer tone to it, and I've panned that only slightly to the left, leaving enough room for the shaker to the left of it.

In the end really I'm happy with the vocals I got and the guitars and i'll be looking for feedback shortly.