Recording an Album

In the last three days I have done a bit of everything.

Friday - Editing
Saturday - Mixing
Sunday - Recording

Actually, by saying i was mixing on Friday was a bit of a lie. Editing has been going on pretty much 24/7 for the last two weeks now. Thereport on editing is that it is both time consuming, and tedious at the same time. about halfof the tracks are now nearly edited. It is going to be a long couple of weeks.

Saturday (yesterday) marked the commencement of Mixing. This was mixing the tracks i had edited a couple of weeks back. Now mixing i have found a completely different ball park. Again it is time consuming, but it is quite good fun. It certainly helps the development of the ears that is for sure. 2 Tracks are down, 10 remain.

Today some more recording was done. Seems a bit backwards to be recording after starting mixing some stuff, but that is how it has panned out! Being corded was the "choir". Choir in tis case means the entire band (minus drummer due to work commitments and being at the otehr end of the country) standing at the front of the church where the studio is, running a 50m multicore back to the studio and recording them all sing together parts that needed more vocal emphasis. The picture at the top is of the punks in action!

Technocally they each had their own mircophone, pop shield and pari of headphones. This will gice the outright clarity of the singers. But for ambience i put two large diargram mics up in front of them, crossing each other to give a stereo image. A skill i learned from i live recording i was involved in a few years ago. I had in my head that i may get a nasty delay if i just put the signers in a line, so i arranged them in a semi circle around the two ambience mics, using anotehr mic lead to measure that all the distances were the same. Listening to the raw capured sound i have to say i am very happy with the results.

Over the next two days the final recordings will be completed.

Tomorrow - In the day i am giving my ears a rest after a tough few days and concentrating on other projects (well dissertation), but in the evening a Sax player iss coming in to part a part down to a track. Should sound very impressive, really looking forward to it.

Tuesday - A few keyboard overdubs. Not much, just odd notes here and there. At the end of the day we will be able to declare the recording complete! Bring it on.

Let the good/mixing times roll!