The week after Spring break!

This week was an interesting one. It was an eye-opener for a lot of people, and an overall learning experience for everyone in the group. Monday was the day we got our midterms back. I had a feeling that I did well on it, I went in feeling comfortable with the information I knew. My grade turned out to be 96%. This was really nice to see! After reviewing the test and discussing the answers, we went into the control room to listen to each of the group’s mixes for the third recording assignment. The tracking process went well, and we hadn’t done much mixing because time was up and we had a more than decent sounding tracking session as it was. Apparently I was unaware that at the end of our final lab before the song was due, one of the group members spent the rest of the lab time doing some mixing while the others were cleaning up the studio and equipment. During the class listening, this new mix was pretty crappy. A guitar with a SansAmp digital plug-in was used for distortion, and a bad tone was chosen. Somehow, there was a fade on the bass track drawn in from start to finish, and by the time the end of the song came, the bass was out. A “too wet” reverb was put on the vocals, and the viola was mixed way too high. Had we all been in the studio when this was happening, I’m sure it would have gone differently, and slightly better.
Since the majority of the class didn’t do well on the test, our next lab we were required to physically review signal flow and routing a pre fade reverb to a vocalist’s headphones mix, so as to send the vocalist reverb and not hear the effect in the control room monitors. I was confident in knowing how to do it, and that I could do it, but I didn’t know that could do it rather quickly. I realized that I was having an easier time on the board, so I only practiced one time and allowed the others in the group to get more time that day. The process involved hooking up a headphones monitoring system in the MIDI lab, setting up an SM58 into channel 1. Different people went and tested the mic as a vocalist as we were routing everything, making sure they were getting signal, reverb and talkback.
Wednesday night was an extra night that we had booked to re-track the second recording assignment. We were starting from the ground up with tracking the instruments in the song, but it was a very productive night. We started out with drums, using a D112 on the kick inside, top and bottom snare drum with two e22’s. We used two 414’s with a cardioid setting for the overheads, and two MD421’s on the toms. Chris got the drums tracked in a couple takes. The next instrument was bass which we had done three takes of. We had hired Nick Reves this time, and he did an excellent job, especially for just reading off of the chart we had handed him 15 minutes before. We decided to go direct into the Millenia as we had done before. Next up was the acoustic guitar, which we used a 414 as well. We recorded that in the big room, and it came out sounding nice. We were then on to tracking piano, all in the same night. The vibe had been great the whole time, and we were really cranking stuff out. We used the 414’s on the piano, and only a few takes were needed to nail the piano parts.
The next morning we recorded electric guitar with a royer 121 back in the MIDI lab, with sonnex surrounding the guitar cab. We tracked and decided to make a few quick arrangement decisions for the better of the song, and everyone turned out liking it. Next we moved onto viola, the last instrument that needed to be tracked, besides vocals. Taylor managed to nail it in a couple takes, and we were finished tracking the music! In two days! I was super stoked because previously it had taken 3 weeks to get done what we did so quickly. Lately there has been some turmoil in our group, and clashing personalities and issues. Being late, and taking control of a situation were two main issues that needed to be addressed among the group. We got together with the group, while Drew facilitated a meeting to talk about our interpersonal issues that had come up, and other issues regarding progress in the group. Everyone had seemed to come to an understanding of what had been going on, and that it had to stop for the sake of the group. These next few weeks will hopefully show some group dynamic changes for us.