Finished tracking the final song!

This week in labs we wrapped up the tracking for out third and final song of the semester. Vocals and guitars were the goal this week. Amber came back down to Monterey to record to the second section of our song, which is the only place we decided to have vocals partly because the music is more technical throughout, and is more of an instrumental tune to begin with. The previous night was spent doing some preproduction work in chunking out melodies and lyrics for the song. We used an AKG 414 that we had set up in room 185, and sent the signal through the Neve preamp. Some ideas for vocal harmonies were brought, and we came up with some decent on the spot harmonies that some of us seemed to be hearing in our heads. We tracked some acoustic guitar next, for the third section of the song. This whole section is 5/4, and some people aren’t as comfortable playing in this time signature, so practice and preparation was necessary. The strings on the guitar probably needed changing, because we had some problems staying in tune, and had to re-tune every other take. After trying to get a decent take down, we decided to call it a day and shoot for it again on Thursday. Thursday morning went a lot better and we got some good takes down fairly quickly. We used the rest of out lab time to try some mixing out of the box, which is what we have been doing for the past week or so now.
For mixing out of the box, we bypass 2track and come right out of the board. We assigned specific channel outputs in protols corresponding to the patchbay. Using the patch bay, go out of PT into line 1 inputs on the channels closest to the center of the console (23, 24, 25). Make sure the mix bus and Line 1 buttons on the channel strip are on, and the aux master mix bus buttons and 2trk are off. Fader at unity gain. To send an outboard reverb to a channel, patch out auxsends into the effects processor, and out the effect into echo returns. Echo faders 1 2 at unity gain, panned hard left and right. Push in the prefader button in the aux section of the board. Be sure that you’ve turned up the aux1 knob on the instrument channel strip. The channel being mixed on is set to prefader and unity gain. For more editing tips in protocols, trim all the tails and empty space in all regions, for a quick mix, make sure automation is off and you have a basic stereo of the song.