D8 Skills #34 & D9 | Unit E | Recording Band, Loft | Session #9

On Friday, during our #8th session, we decided with the band that we would come in on Monday and record vocal harmonies for 'Soul Pog', and vocals for 'Someday' (the JayTay song). We would also attempt to get the recording for my piano done, although on Sunday evening, the vocalist from Loft asked whether she could also record drums for their next song on Monday meaning it might be tight to get my piano done, as I want to have plenty of time to experiment (such as with mic placement) so that we get the best possible result. It might be that we have to come in another day to do piano, however hopefully at the least, we can experiment with different miking techniques so that we can come in next time knowing what to do. Maybe we could record some short samples of piano with different mic setups and listen later to choose what the best sounding one is.

Luckily we had finished the piano before the vocalist arrived. When she did, she said that she couldn't do vocals because she had a sore throat and that she could just do the drums, so we moved the drum kit from the booth into the main recording room and miked it up. I also got a Ludwig 400 snare because it sounds cleaner than the one already in the room (it also doesn't have a loose, rattling snare on the bottom). We used the Glyn John's method with the 2 over-heads, and you can see the rest below. We used 8 mics in total:

We set the room mics (Sontronics STC-2's) to omni in the attempt to make the room sound larger:

I also turned the 20dB pad on the CAD M179 remembering what happened last time (at the bottom).

The drummer wanted to listen to a track from Spotify to play along to, however, that meant we couldn't use talk-back. My first idea was to use a headphone splitter but I soon realised that I needed 2 male ends and one female end, and a headphone splitter is the other way round. I then decided to get a jack to dual jack cable and record the track from the drummer's phone into Pro Tools via the back on the mixing desk. This worked perfectly. This actually solved two things because the drummer also wanted a count in which we can do in Pro Tools. We found out the tempo of the song and set the project to that (163bpm). We then moved the recording so that it started 4 beats later than the start of the project, and created a click track so that she could have a count in.

We then went about recording. We did many takes (estimate: 6) creating a new playlist each time until we got one the drummer was happy with.

Equipment List:

• AKG D112
• CAD M179
• Shure SM57 x2
• AKG C1000S x2
• Sontronics STC-2 x2
• Headphone Extension Cable
• Jack to Dual Jack Cable
• XLR Cables
• Boom Stands