Nov 12, 2021 2 min read Loft

D8 Skills #31 & D9 | Unit E | Recording Band, Loft | Session #8

Today, the vocalist attended the session and all that needed recording was the vocals, so that's what we did. The vocals are dynamic in this particular song so we thought we would recreate the recording technique used in David Bowie's 'Heroes' which we had already had a go setting up a little while before, explained [here].

We used a Neumann U-87 as the near mic, and two Avantone CK-6 as the mid and far mics.

When I went into the control room after set-up to turn on phantom power and check whether we were getting a clean signal through all the mics, I noticed that there was a buzzing sound coming through input one (Neumann U-87). To troubleshoot this issue, I swapped the input to a different one however the buzz was still there. We then changed the cable and it was sorted.

In Pro Tools, we had 6 tracks. We recorded the verses and choruses separately so that we could have the optimum gain set on the Neumann U-87 throughout all sections. The tracks were named [Vocal Near Verse], [Vocal Mid Verse], [Vocal Far Verse], [Vocal Near Chorus], [Vocal Mid Chrous], and [Vocal Far Chorus]. The reason why we separated verses and choruses onto different tracks was so that we could comp them together later, accurately choosing the location of that seam.

We encountered a very strange problem at the beginning of the session... the lead guitar track had a duplicate of the rhythm guitar track on it instead of the lead. This is extremely strange because the lead guitar was on the bounce that I had made right before saving and closing the project at the end of our last session. I had a backup of the project on my memory stick, so we opened that one and it was the same. We don't know how this happened, but we can see 'lead' audio files in the 'audio' folder so we will import these into the project to see whether these are the correct files.