Tracking Vox and Drums

This week in our labs we spend our first chunk of lab re-tracking vocals with a new singer. As noted in earlier blogs, we had screwed up our production schedule by hiring a singer that wasn't fit for the job. We went ahead and tracked with this singer anyways, and of course, the tracks came out unusable. With a new singer ready to record, we set up the vocal booth in room 100. We put sonnex on the top of the booth as a sort of roof, and behind the singer was a thick blanket creating a third wall. Our vocal set up was triangular shaped, and the singer was going to sing directly into one of the corners of it. We decided to use two mics, just so we'd have the option to choose between which mic we liked best. The AKG 414 was our first choice, followed by the Royer 121. We routed the mics into the Neve preamp. Tracking the vocals ended up going really well, with only a few takes needed to capture what we were looking for. After finishing tracking we still had about 30 minutes of lab time, so we tried a few different harmonies over the melody. After bouncing and saving our session, we backed up or files. Some how the harmony tracks got corrupted, but the song was still great with the main melody.
Our second section of lab time was spent tracking drums for our new piano song. Early in the morning, we set up the kit as we normally do in room 100. We put 2 sides of the vocal booth on either side of the kit, and a sound panel behind the kit. The d112 on the kick, the Josephson e22 on the snare (top and bottom), two MD-421's for the toms, and two AKG 414's for the over heads. We also did mid-side miking a few feet away from the kit with the 4050's. 8 recording tracks for a 4 piece kit! After we got all set up and ready to track, we uploaded a scratch piano track that I had programmed at home on Logic and put it on an audio track that was sent to the headphones mix. Everyone was very helpful in the set up and take down of all the mics, mic stands, cables, patch cables, and the whole deal. It took a few times to get the drums down, and in the end the drummer was still stressing about how it could have been tracked better. Although this song is considered completely written, some are still wanting to add parts to the song that just dont seen to fit with the song. We all still need to discuss this and make sure that we are doing what is best for the song. I'm not trying to shit on anyone's ideas here, I encourage them. However if a part doesn't fit the song, it just doesn't fit the song.
This week in class we started going in depth about channel strips and the gadgets on them. The routing buttons at the top allow sends to the group bus. The mic/line inputs are the next thing down on the channel strip. Here, a gain stage at the mic pre happens. THere is a button for phantom power as well. Right below that is a four band EQ with high, high mids, low mids, and lows, and it has a low pass filter button. There are 8 aux sends, 4 mono and 2 stereo and can be switched between pre and post fader. This allows you to send effects through the board, affecting the signal before or after the fader. The mute button on the channel strip mutes the signal, making it inaudible until it would like to be heard again. A signal peak LED indicator shows when a signal is reaching between +10 to +18 dB.