Thursday, February 6, 2014

Studio Chronicles.

Written by Zongxu, 6th of Feb 2014

Coming back from the 5th week of our Studio Recording Techniques classes, we were told by our lecturer to begin doing regular reflections on previous topics covered in class.

To begin with, it is the 1st time I contemplate the signal flow pattern in out college's own studio, and how this reflects the industry's probable similarities. 2 weeks ago, me and 2 of my classmates booked the college studio to attempt setting up a Pro-Tools session from scratch without any supervision form our lecturer. The objective was to a 3 channel drum mix into session, 1 on the kick drum, 1 on the snare and a mono overhead. We spent 1 hour troubleshooting and understanding how the studio's patch bay worked, and recording 2 of the same take, one through the saffire audio interface pre-amp, and one through the analogue mixing board pre-amp. We all took back a copy of the session to compare the difference.

Last week, we learnt multiple ways to mic and record an acoustic guitar, and how listening from different positions will give us a preview of how it'll sound like in the recording if we placed the mic in that position. We also learnt that simple overdubbing and compression can change the the tone of the performance.

Just yesterday morning, we recorded 3 vocalist using a coincident pair stereo miking technique, doing multiple takes with the vocalist singing similar parts but in different distance from the mic. The final combination of all the tracks created a wide stereo like spread with audio implications of something that of a choir rather than just 3 people. For me, this was rather interesting, as it also seems possible for instruments such as strings and wind instrument, instruments usually found in larger ensembles, can be recorded with lesser people while achieving a recording similar to recording an actual full ensemble.

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