Audio Arts – Major Project Semester One, 2008
Part 1 – The Shaolin AfroNaughts:
It needs more CowBell...The first of my recordings went relatively smoothly. I was a little rusty and hadn’t given myself sufficient time to set up, but it caused no major loss to our recording period. The first issue to arise was a ring in the snare, which sent alarm bells off for me immediately, as I remember how I struggled (and largely failed) to remove such a ring from last year’s effort. A couple of sheets over the snare fixed that, and set me up for a long session of equalising to breathe life into its newfound dullness that would stop just short of killing me. Nevertheless, all other instruments captured very well, the band sounds great and I’m sure they’ll appreciate my efforts.
Click here to link to online folder containing pre/post production and recording documentation, extra photos for this session and MP3’s of the mastered tracks.
Part 2 – Jazz Wind Quintet:
Just remember, if you vote Liberal...or Labor (even by accident through preferences) you're dead!This was an incredibly different recording experience. The way I set up the group (in a long line of isolated booths, kind of like election day) did compromise their performance somewhat. However, the separation did achieve its desired end, and many of the rhythmic discrepancies it caused due to instrumentalists not being able to see the current conductor have been repaired as a result. The cost to me was a considerable amount of time.
I feel I have done a reasonable job of capturing the character of each instrument present from the brass family. I would have loved a few more U-87 mics though (the NT5’s on the trumpets sound a bit thin by comparison). Either way, managing a session like this was a steep learning curve (the dynamic range of these instruments is huge), and I’m glad to have reached the other side relatively unscathed.
Click here to link to online folder containing pre/post production and recording documentation, extra photos for this session and MP3’s of the mastered tracks.
Reference:
Grice, David. 2008. “Audio Arts Major Project.” Project undertaken and supervised at the Electronic Music Unit (EMU), University of Adelaide, 12th of May to the 26th of June 2008.
posted by David J Dowling @ 7:15 PM
8 Comments:
I listened to your Afronaughts recording. Nice separation achieved in the mix - it sounds as if the guitar parts were tracked with their own amp-based spring reverbs, or did you record them dry and add reverb afterwards? The sax sits nicely in the mix too... in hindsight I may have mixed my own saxophone tracks a little too "up front". Your kick sound is quite compressed, although it certainly tightens up the lower frequencies... maybe I have skimped a bit in this area.... my mixes can tend to get a little bass-heavy. What compression plug-in did you use?
The reverb on the guitars was of the fender twin variety - definitely from the amps themselves. I used a very subtle amount of the Waves IR reverb in mastering and a little D-verb on the snare and sax as well. I'm glad you noticed the kick's 'tightness', it took a lot of EQ and duplication to polish that one up...
I used the MC2000 for mastering, but I don't think I used compression anywhere else in the tracks. I did do alot of normalising of peaks in the kick drum track though, so as to bring the overall level up.
Normalising of peaks? Eh? I am wondering how one can normalise the peaks? Normalising is an all or nothing process.
Er...select the region time frame containing the peak and reduce its amplitude via the normalisation processor in the Pro-Tools audiosuite...
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Oh ok. So you just really took the long way around to compress/limit something. Limiting or normalising, either way the transient gets shoved down into the program material. Just wondering what you meant by "normalising of peaks." Now I know. :)
Indeed, in hindsight I could have routed the kick tracks to an auxiliary track with a compressor inserted (I was already using all insert slots on the tracks themselves for various EQ's etc) but in the past I've found that reducing a handful of spurious peaks to enable raising the overall level of a region , while temporarily tedious, is more foolproof than using a digital compressor plug-in (it also means one less plug-in to process in real time)...
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