As Seen Above, the First Recording Session

The First Band I worked with was called “As Seen Above”, I did 6 songs. One was released as a single and the rest were done together as an album. The entire recording was done in the Plymouth of University’s Recording Studio, with their equipment.

The First day was spent doing the drums, I put my own drums in, tuned them and set up all the microphones in advance. The studio is decently small but just big enough to sort out some room microphones. During the drum recording, I used a good selection of microphones, ones that I personally like the sound of.

Microphone List:

• Kick In - Shure Beta 91A

• Kick Out - AKG D112

• Snare Top - Shure SM57

• Snare Bottom - Shure SM58

• High-Hat - AKG C1000S

• Tom 1 - Shure SM57

• Tom 2 - Shure SM57

• Tom 3 - Shure SM57

• OH L/R - AKG 414

• Room Mic L/R - Neumann U87
  

The Photo above was taken after the recording session, but represents how I set it up.

These are what I had access to and used, sadly at the time of recording, I did not have access to a matched pair of U87’s. But regardless the sound is good, if the room was a bit larger and sounded a bit better I would’ve used the room microphones more and focused on those, but instead, the overheads and the close microphones were of better quality.

At the start, it was a bit difficult getting the scratch tracks done as everyone was playing at the same time, freeing up channels, recording as well and getting a balanced mix to everyone was a good challenge for me to overcome. Once I had sorted it all out from there it was up to the band to play and try and get it as close to the click as possible, the drummer had not played to a click often so it took a bit longer to sort out but regardless it worked out. There were temporary vocals put on the tracks to help with the guide tracks for the drummer so that he could know where he was.

Drums took a couple of hours to sort out, the drummer (Ryan) was trying his best to play on the beat, and looking back we could have put the BPM higher and that would have probably suited him better, especially after seeing them play live it seems the tracks are recorded slower than intended which is a huge pain to fix now as by the time of writing 95% of everything is recorded and half mixed so that the mastering can be done soon for the album release.

The last thing done that day was the bass, which was done in almost one take for each song as the bassist seemed to have practiced a lot in his own time, the recording for Bass was nice and simple. Bass went into the Kemper which did a straight DI out into the desk as well as doing a clean DI out just in case the original tone did not work.

Looking back after that day, there were slight errors done in the recording process that cannot be fixed afterwards, but fortunately, the issues I have had I do not need to fix as they do not matter to this album, but is something I’m more careful of for future reference. One of the major issues being the High pass filter was turned on one of the tracks, as the previous user did not reset the entire desk back to 0. I thought I had made sure it was all back to normal and set up for what I was using it for, but must have missed the one button. In the end this is no issue as I did not end up using that particular microphone in the mixing process due to it being too much.

Final notes on the matter. It was a huge learning curve that gave me a lot to learn and take away from, I was left with a good recording that sounds great but also knowledge for future endeavours of recording in a studio. It was hugely enjoyable to as talking to the artists, listening to their songs and getting to do something I enjoy most really made that day an incredibly memorable one. It has made me think about future opportunities for recording with bands along with the prospect of looking at recording full time, this will only be possible if I build my own studio or get hired in a local one and both are going to be hard to achieve on their own.