Keith, the vocalist in the band was going out of town for a long weekend, so we instrumentalists thought we would get together and work on parts and arrangements, the more mundane things that would bore Keith, so we took advantage and man was that session productive. Again we didn’t roll. But we are thinking it’s time to finally move onto the recording, now that we have a lot of the bugs worked out – and Ron needs his recording rig back to record his band.
Archive for July, 2009
Tuesday July 21
Saturday, July 25th, 2009Tuesday July 14
Saturday, July 25th, 2009Dave is back from vacation and we rehearsed tonight. What a disaster night. We broke a pair of headphones, KC broke a string on his guitar twice, I was sore from being in a car wreck which involved the totaling of my car (not my fault) and we all seemed a little impatient that night. We played like crap. We didn’t roll on this night. Good thing.
Dave also brought another snare to try – his DW. I think this is going to do the trick. It cut’s through the mix nicely, has a good crack and just enough resonance to keep it lively sounding. It fact it was perfect to my ears. We’ll see how it sits in the mix next week when we roll some (virtual) tape.
Wednesday July 1
Saturday, July 25th, 2009I opened the files in Logic to do some listening of our session and some rough mixes. I didn’t spend a lot of time with the mixing, just added some preset EQ and compression to some of the tracks and some reverb and a little delay on the vocals as well, just to get a feel for how it could sound. Not bad at all. I think the first thing that stood out to me was even though the Bearing Edge snare was punchier and drier, meaning less resonant, it didn’t cut through with a nice crack as well as the Supraphonic did. We have to go back to square one and try to make the Supraphonic work. I may try to retune it or put different heads on it to see if that makes an improvement.
Another thing I noticed was how dynamic the vocal track was. I think next time we’ll be tracking through a compressor to knock to keep the levels more manageable for mixing in post. I don’t want to over do it though, just enough to keep the level workable for the mix. The goal is to try to keep the dynamics and energy but without clipping or working with ultra quiet levels.
So bottom line so far, the drums and the vocals are the hardest to mix. I knew drums would be a challenge. I am quite content with the guitar and bass sounds. I think I will experiment further with mic placement on my bass amp, to see if I can make it even better, but I am quite happy with what I am getting for now.
Song file (cover tune):