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D8 Skills #105 & D9 | Unit E | Andy Ford | Session #4

D8 Skills #105 & D9 | Unit E | Andy Ford | Session #4

Today was my first day out from isolation and was a busy one. Before and after my meeting with the CEO of Hot Radio, I worked with Andy Ford on two songs.

Andy wasn't happy with his own bass line we recorded in Session #2, so we recorded another bass player this morning.

I used an Audix D6 off-axis in the centre of the bass amp, and a Radial J48 DI box.

While Andy listened back to the recording afterwards, he noticed the sound design I'd done. He loved it, however, he pointed out a couple of things that he wanted to be removed.

I comped the bass takes when I got home:

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Ground Floor (again) | Demo
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/4:29

At around 14:40 I returned to college and we recorded the piano for a new song, 'The Joy That Slowly Died'.

We chose to record MIDI into a virtual instrument made by sampling real grand pianos. The plugin is called Addictive Keys... they've even sampled the 'whoosh' of the sustain pedal! We cycled through all the pianos until we landed on Andy's favourite one:

I made use of my new Focusrite Clarett+ 8Pre for the MIDI:

Andy wanted to layer the recording with a Wurlitzer sounding electric piano. We cycled through a load of different ones until we landed on one Andy was happy with:

The majority of the track was recorded to a 3/4 click, however, we recorded the last section separately because there's a ritardando, and then lined them up:

I quantized the MIDI to 75% to leave some 'humanness' in the sound, yet get it sounding tight:

Since Andy refers to sections of the song a lot while recording, and I'm not too familiar with where they are, we went through and noted them at the top of the project together so our recording process can be more efficient:

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The Joy That Slowly Died | Demo
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Lastly, we recorded a demo vocal line just for me to get some context while working on the track. A third of the way through, Andy stopped to say that he thinks we shouldn't do it now after noticing that he wants some rubato in the piano. We then decided that we'd work on that together at later date (maybe tomorrow).


As ALWAYS, when I got home I backed up the projects I worked on today to a hard drive that doesn't leave my room: