In the Studio Day 1: Tracking Guitars
University of West London, Basement Studio 1. The time to record has finally come and we both managed to get out of bed, dressed and get the keys to the studio at 9pm, Immediately we set about powering all of the equipment on and removing any excess equipment from the live room into the hall way outside, which included a full drum kit, mic stands, etc. The MRC annoyingly didn't supply us with the cable kit for like we asked and so once we were able to grab that we could begin.
As I mentioned in the previous post that we were doing Out of the Black by Royal Blood, we wanted a massive rock sound but at the same time didn't have a great live room to record within (The live Room is very small and acoustically dead). We had a great selection of amps to choose from a Marshall solid state amp (AVT 100x) or the same amp in purple haha (purple is the color of grapes and grapes are sweet=sweet tone duhh). Provided in the studio was both a Condenser and Dynamic Mic kit from which we chose a Shure SM57 for the close mic, and a blumlein pair of AKG C414′s which are switched to the figure of 8 pattern. (More information on the Blumlein recording technique is widely available online).
The Blumlein technique was originally used in film production in order to replicate stereo imaging however for this purpose we used it to enhance the SM57 by picking up any ambience in the room. The Shure SM57 was used as close mic and positioned off axis from the speaker cone. The SM57 is a small diaphragm condenser and probably considered the most popular microphone for guitar cabinets, Snare Drums, Etc (A good write up can be seen on British Publication Sound on Sound for the SM57 and mic’ing guitar cabs).
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug07/articles/guitaramprecording.htm
After all the mic’s were setup we labeled were the inputs were going into the Live Room Mic ties. From there we patched the outputs from there into the Line inputs of the Audient Desk. Once we had Signal coming through we were able to monitor it within the control room. We setup 3 mono audio tracks in Pro Tools and set about recording the guitar alongside the backing track which was sent out via the Rednet output to the Headphone amp in the Live Room. After a few hours of recording we finished with three takes of out session.
Now here is what gave us troubles....
The MRC didn't supply us with all the equipment we needed so that wasted some of our studio time.
Patching the Audio backing track to play through the headphones within the live room.
Once we did sort out the headphone backing track, it was still pretty quiet even when turned up fully on the headphone amp.
The Bloody click track kept fluctuating between 4/4 and 7/4 count ins, which threw us both off playing.
And we should have rehearsed the guitar parts more beforehand. Especially when playing the riffs after the second chorus towards the end of the song.
The MRC guy.
All in all, it was a pretty successful day and we hope to get just as much done on the drum at EFS tomorrow.
-LB