Audio Engineering Session 12

No theory this week, we jumped right into tracking Greg's band. I appoligise in advance for the picture quality as they were taken with my cell phone.

Our instructor, Greg, is in a 3 peice band and they have been preparing for their upcoming benefit gig, "Stop the Rain". This was an opportunity for them to rehearse and for us to apply our recently aquired knowledge to a real world situation.

<a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_KcCGgmBQFy4/SAj-kyXA-QI/AAAAAAAAAJg/bE2amwXn8Jc/s1600-h/IMG00070.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190678478491547906" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_KcCGgmBQFy4/SAj-kyXA-QI/AAAAAAAAAJg/bE2amwXn8Jc/s200/IMG00070.jpg" border="0" /></a>We started by setting up the drums for Vern in the main live room exactly as we have in the past. (Mic and positioning details are found in previous blogs so I won't go into detail again in this one). As we have experienced a few times now, the Ayotte kits are a PITA to setup. These Ayotte kits may be fully adjustable but without a doubt are one of the more complicated kits to setup.

The bass player was setup in the air lock off of of the control room. He (John) was play an awesome Ricky through a Sansamp so his setup<a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_KcCGgmBQFy4/SAj-uSXA-RI/AAAAAAAAAJo/fMyzYMRIgV8/s1600-h/IMG00073.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190678641700305170" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_KcCGgmBQFy4/SAj-uSXA-RI/AAAAAAAAAJo/fMyzYMRIgV8/s200/IMG00073.jpg" border="0" /></a> was fast and easy. Greg was in one of the other isolation rooms playing his Godin through a Roland BR-8 and into a Roland amp which we mic'd up with a SM57.

The next step was to create a decent headphone mix for them to monitor with. We began with the drums. Adjusting the levels for each one of the mics, one at a time. Then we introduced the bass guitar into the mix and once again adjusted the levels. Finally, we adjusted the levels for Greg's guitar/amp and the vocals. After about 45 minutes we had what we thought was a solid mix for them to monitor with but found that the output to the headphones was not loud enough. The output from the V-Studio on it's own simply didn't have enough power to be heard over the drum kit. We quickly inserted a headphone amp to increase the output to all the headphones. This gave us more than enough volume and we were ready to start recording.

The band played 4 songs and we tracked 2-3 virtual tracks of each song. By the time we finished tracking our session was over so we didn't have any time to review what we had recorded. We will do this next session.

***In case you missed them on the first go around, previous sessions blogs can always be found here http://www.imusicscene.com/the_london_project/blog.php***