In The Studio: 1/28-1/29

This weekend I had a great opportunity to do a two day recording and mixing session with a local band. Saturday, we spent around six hours laying down two tracks including a good amount of vocal, guitar and percussion overdubs. It was so amazing to see how much time and effort had been put into these songs as they were developed with enough detail and thought to really benefit from being in a studio environment.

Here are a few photos I took of the Session set up:

Now having some experience in this live room at The Studio I Portland, I am beginning to find a few different set ups that work really well while recording a full band. As you can see from the pictures, I use a few partitions to separate the acoustic sound sources. I use the larger V-shaped partition to remove any drum bleed from the vocal mic and the smaller rectangular partition (near the back in the right picture) to separate the grand piano. This orientation has proven multiple times now to be an effective method to reduce bleed in this environment. It is also important to note that I used direct inputs for the guitar and bass which helped dramatically in reducing instrumental bleed, it also gave the group more options to produce their desired sound in the mixing process.

We went into Sunday's session with the raw tracks from the recording the day before. We had the intent to get some basic mixing done so that the group would be able to leave the day with two completed tracks. One of the tracks incorporated a lot of Audiosuite processing and ended up sounding amazingly unique, flowing from each originally composed transition.

This was one of my first times mixing with the band present and only having a limited amount of time I found myself having to find a new level of focus. After a few hours of mixing my ears had definitely began to fatigue. However, even with these minor difficulties the mixes came out pretty clean and It seemed the group felt represented by the work that had been accomplished. I would say that the weekend was quite successful

Image by François Gagné {Website http://www.francoisgagne.com}

To conclude I am very grateful I got the opportunity to be the engineer in recording these songs for this group. They were truly a talented band and pleasure to work with. I hope to hear more work from them in the future! As always thanks to The Studio for providing such a great venue.