dennisprojectblog

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Analog Mastering

I attempted to master my live band recording mix with analog mastering. For the routing, I routed my channel to the Neve 33609N compressor and from the comp to the Neve 8804 EQ and out from the EQ back to the channel insert basically daisy chaining it.

I used a little bit of compression but mainly made it louder using the gain knob on the compressor and I boosted up some high around the 5-12kHz range for presence on the EQ.

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Analog mixing!

A small clip of me compressing a snare using the Klark KT-76 experimenting with the all four button mode with the ratio.

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Tracking a live band

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Tracking Drums

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Mastering my track

Today I attempted to master my track 'Far Away' at the studio. I had my final mix and loaded the file onto a new Protools session. This mix was completely done on headphones so before I master I wanted to check my mix by near-field monitoring using the PMCs at Studio two.

I started my mastering process by adding an EQ and listening to different frequency bands one at a time. I kept boosting the band and then cutting them off by 1dB or so and observing if adding it makes it better or attenuating it works better. The mix of this track had a more of a muddish sound due to heavy electric guitars and drums so in my EQ I ended up doing a small cut at the mid-range starting at around 300Hz gradually and ending at around 3KHz. This sounded much cleaner.

I then used compression. I used the LA 2A with a very slight compression. Now that my compression was sorted out I added my EQ curve after the compression followed by a vintage limiter on Ozone 9 to increase my loudness level.

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Mixing with a 76

I recently recorded a live band session at Studio One. It was a five-piece band having vocals, two acoustic guitars, bass & drums. The recording was a good session and I used the Audix drum mic set to record the drum kit. The kit was a Gretsch Catalina Club Jazz 18".

I tried mixing the kick and snare with analog gear using Studio Two. I first wanted to compress my kick to make the level of the recorded signal balanced and even as there were few loud transients. I ran the kick through the Klark Teknik 76 compressor which is a clone of the 1176 FET comp. It did a nice job of making the signal balanced and giving a slight distortion in its tone.

The green track shows the signal of the kick drum after compression by the Klark 76.

I tried the same with the snare this time and I tried pushing all four ratio buttons on the unit to see what happens. This gave an incredibly fast attack and release on the snare which I could observe on the VU meter. Apparently according to an article by Sweetwater, an unknown engineer discovered that pressing down all four ratio knobs gives you a slightly overdriven tone and it says that the ratio falls in between 12:1 to 20:1 and the bias points change in the circuit thus changing the attack and release time.

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Live Band Recording at the Studio

I recorded a 5 piece band for a two and a half minute track at studio one. The band consisted of a vocalist, drummer, two guitarists & bassist. We had a limitation on space as the room wasn't that big. I sketched a rough plan for the position of the instruments & the members. The major concern while recording a live band is getting too much of bleed into each instrument's microphone. My main concern was the drums so I used floating absorption panels to try and isolate the drums from the instruments and I tried to position all microphones off-axis from each other. The overall recording was quite good with each instrument being captured well however there was a lot of bleed from the drums into the guitar microphones and there were sometimes when musicians couldn't hear themselves well in the mix as the drums were too loud. I used the Neumann Km184s on both the guitars, the Audix drum mic set for the drum kit, a Shure SM7B for vocals & the Bass was tracked through DI. The recording was a success in the end If I didn't have much of a time constrain on my studio time I could've tried a better positioning & distancing of the ensemble in the space.

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Recording Drums!

Today was a successful session recording good drums for the track. The drum kit at the studio was a bit out of tune and since I was tracking drums for a hard rock track I wanted the kit to sound a bit more tighter than it was. Unfortunately, none of us had a tuning key but it was manageable except for the tom and snare. The only alternate option to fix this was to use some tape! We used pieces of paper and stuck multiple pieces of tape on the most resonating areas of the drum head. This kind of solved the problem to an extent but wasn't perfect. We had to get the drums recorded today so we went on with the recording and the kit now sounded decent enough.

For the mic setup, I used the Audix drum mic set and also set up a snare bottom mic as well using the i5. The D6 was kept a bit inside the kick to have a good attack from the beater. I used the ADX51s for the overheads and measured them equidistant from the snare to avoid phasing. In front of the kit I had set up an XY pair about 2-3mts away just as a room and this worked out really well making the kit sound much fuller and huge.

Drummer - Krishiv from creative music production

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Producing a new track!

I had the idea and the riff for this track laid down on my DAW weeks ago but never got the time to complete the structure. I finally completed the structure and made a rough track yesterday. I got to the studio and showed this to a couple of my batchmates, who agreed to work on the track. We started to track down the acoustic guitars for it. Purva a music producer & songwriter played guitars. Apart from the guitars I have electric guitars to be recorded using amp miking, pianos, bass & vocals which will be performed by Atharva an Indian classical vocalist & Audio engineer.

It was overall a productive day we ended up completing all the acoustic guitar parts for the project. We used the Neumann U87 as a spaced pair quite distant from the guitar and a KM184 close to the 12fret. Since this was more of open picking and dynamic playing we wanted to capture more of the room as well. It ended up sounding great. Although on one of the U87s, the direct out knob on the channel was completely hot almost up to 10dB. I didn't notice the knob was all the way up & this ended up giving us a weird cable noise (white noise) from the channel. I am still not quite sure if this was the cause for the noise it might have been just because of the connectors of the xlrs or maybe just a fault with the microphone. But a lesson learned when dealing with an analog desk unless you are loading a previously saved snapshot I think it's always wise to check knobs on the channels as the previous user would've tweaked knobs differently.

Here are some snaps & clips from the session.

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Recording day one

So yesterday I came up with a riff on the acoustic guitar which sounded pretty neat and I felt it had potential. I decided to track it at studio one today. I had booked a couple of mics such as the Neumann U87i which are one of my favorite mics and the Rode M5s.

I attempted to use a stereo miking technique and ended up using a Blumlein setup using the Neumann-matched pair. I ran the mics through the Neve Genesys desk at studio one & patched it through the 1968 Drawmer stereo comp. This sounded great immediately. It had a very rich and full sounding tone to the sound. The guitar I was using was the Sigma OOOMc-1E.