Jessica's Rock School

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Studio Sound Recording

We had for audios of the drum kit: the kick, snare, left overhead and right overhead. In my opinion I thought it would be better if we had the two overheads muted for the verse of my section and keep the kick and snare in, then have the overheads come in into the chorus.

Oliver and Enoch agreed to that suggestion and we muted out the overheads.

We moved to the other section of the song which was the middle 8, where the song breaks down and either the  piano wasn't in time or the drums. Oliver then pointed out that we had made another official recording after the other drum, and he stated that Carol said to have symbols be played on the first half of the middle 8. So we then had to mute the previous recording of the drums and keep the symbols and the middle 8 sounded correct.

We went through to the chrous and decied to flex or drums.

As we flexed the audio for the drum kit, the rest of the class now heard the difference that I pointed out. It took a long time to flex them, we had to flex each section of the drums until we had it on the right marker.

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Studio Sound Recording.

In our studio session we listened to our track to see if there was anything in need of editing, so we checked the tracks one by one and then played it altogether. I pointed out the the drums that Gideon had played for us was played to fast on the verse for my vocal because I rapped slowly, and a bit on Peter's vocal also. So I then suggested if we could edit the drums, or they could do with a re-doing.

But that was only my personal view, everyone else thought it was in time and played well. Another suggestion was given, that we should flex the drum audio so we could move ech drum hit and put it on the correct marking point of the grid in logic so it could fall in time. We all then went for this suggestion.

We picked up the good section of the drums that was satisfying to our ears (as other parts had either a pause, not played on time or flopped) and we copied and pasted it to other parts of the song.

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Pre-Production Meeting.

My group and I will be discussing what audio tracks will be tidied up, changed and need getting rid of, as we need to have our song wrapped up and ready for the end of next week.

We will need to have the drums sorted out as we've found a problem with the timing of it. It seems that the audio drums have been have been moved from its original position.

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Pre-Production of 'Pull The Plug'

The aim of this task is to complete a multi-task track written by Enoch my colleague within a specific time given.

The purpose of the recording process is for my ‘Studio Sound Recording’ unit where I have been given the objectives to demonstrate how to plan and run a studio recording session, showing my skills and techniques as a sound engineer. And to use it for my own relevancy for my portfolio as a Sound Engineer, 1 part of my music career choices.

This will only be a demo recording with the following requirements:

A 3 minute track minimum

At least 12 Audio tracks minimum

Recorded instruments in stages to a click track

The used of different microphones/DIs for different applications, and using Phantom Power

The use of different microphone techniques

And use of effects.

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Sound Recording Session.

Today was our official Recording session for our ‘Studio Sound Recording’ unit and we had to take turns in recording 4 songs for our singer Vicktorija as part of her ‘Collaboration’ unit. We have been given a 3 hour time frame to do the recording so we did 40 minutes for each track that we had to record.

The first track Enoch had to record Vicktorija, the second track was Oliver, the third track was me and the fourth was Enoch with Peter’s assistance.

My role was to record Vicktorija’s vocals on her Dubstep track and that session went sort of slow. I could have improved my communication skills with the artist because I was focused on checking the levels of her vocals. There were other problems such as not understanding clearly what the vocal coach was saying to me as she wasn’t speaking to the microphone. I had to make sure that I was getting what the artist wanted from me, so I had to clarify again to make sure the I myself understood what she wanted. Vicktorija did feel a bit moody because I wasn’t paying attention to her but in the end it settled and I managed her emotions by being really patient throughout my role as the sound engineer.

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Sound Recording Session. 'Pull The Plug' track.

On Thursday me & my class were working on our collaboration track 'Pull The Plug' in the studio, and we discussed that we needed a guitar recorded on the middle-8 section. We got someone to record on our first session which was the other Thursday, Gideon kindly agreed to play the Bass Guitar for us. The session went extremely well, he played perfectly. On this Thursday we had Nainesh play the Electric Guitar for us and the track was sounding really cool. The first section that Nainesh played sounded really nice and strumming, but the second section to it was warm and had too much bottom end to it. He then did another take and the first part of that had too much bottom end to that, while the last section of it was sounding great and very electric. We used an Ambient microphone technique for the Electric guitar and we did a double mic technique. One was a close up technique with the SM57 mic as the SM58 wasn't working, so it had to be replaced. And a distant mic technique with the NT2A Condenser. Reflecting on this session today, I found that the recordings of the electric guitar went really well, it has been suggested that we could take the second section of the 1st recording and 1st section of the 2nd recording as the proper take for the guitar and get rid of the rest.

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Studio Sound Recording Unit. 'Pre-Production Meeting'

Last week Tuesday my class discussed meeting the aims & objectives of our track 'Pull The Plug'. We planned our time schedule for preparing the session & established our instruments that we would record live, and the equipment needed for this.

We started by planning out what instruments we would record first, the mic techniques and the time needed. Which were:

Instr:        Mic Tech:            Placement of mics:               Time needed to setup:

Drums       Space Pair           1 overhead, 1 snare, 1 kick     5 - 10 mins

5 mins to do a sound check for the right levels.

Instr:       Mic Tech:           Placement of mics:                           Time:

Piano       Space Pair           2 overheads on mid-low and mid-high  3 minutes

10 mins to do sound check for the piano.

Instr:      Mic Needed:        People Needed:

Vocals   NT2A Condenser    3 - Jessica: Rapper

                                          Peter: Rapper

                                         Vicktorija: Singer

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Automation on my 'Dark and Heavy' guitar riff

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Music Sequencing & Production.

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Studio Sound Recording.

On Tuesday our group had another meeting preparing for our studio session for the afternoon. We had a conversation on studio etiquette and creating a mission statement.

In the afternoon it was our turn (the students) to run the studio by ourselves without any help from our tutors.

I set up the microphones for the instruments we were using, piano, vocal and drums and i did some engineering too.

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Studio Sound Recording.

After the meeting we went to the Black Box (studio) to record my vocal of rap. I had difficulties rapping the word 'The lack space is killing me, you're leaving me, no room to breathe' so I had to recite the words over and over again.

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Collaboration Unit/Creative Process.

In today’s session we had a meeting on the track we are collaborating on. We had a discussion on making the track shorter as it was too long for an average song. There were suggestions on adding more lyrics on the 1st verse, but there was a misunderstanding on what I was explaining, as I said there was no need to add another 8 bar for the verse. I negotiated with my classmate Enoch on taking his verse of the 1st verse and removing the other 8 bars that we didn’t need.

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Remixing Unit.

Yesterday I was continuing with my remix task, where I had been given a Rihanna song "Diamond"  and make it into my own production. I have to keep the characteristics of the song but make it into my own personal genre that represented me.

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This is the 1st technique, the space pair where we divided the drum kit in twos for each condensor microphone to pick up.

I thought that this overhead set up didn't have a rich sound as the microphones were high up and far, I preferred the Glyn Jones microphone technique. 

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Last week I tried out 2 different mike techniques fo miking up a drum kit. The 1st one was the overheads left and right technique, where we put 1 microphone on 1 side of the drum kit and the other mike on the other side of the kit - 1 mic would pick up the hi-hat, kick, snare and mid tom. The other mic would pick up the kick, low tom and  the symbol.

The 2nd technique was the Glyn Jones technique, where we had 8 microphones to get the  exact sound of the part we set the mikes on.