THE PROCESS: RECORDING

Project 2: Multitrack Recording & Mixing, was definitely a challenge for my group due to the sheer scope we set for ourselves. It may have been a little too much for us to tackle this in Trimester 1. The idea of doing a podcast with instrumentals to accompany was suggested, however after the complexity of the audio book we decided against this idea. This time we wanted to scale it back a bit to something a little more achievable but also progressing and elevating the quality as so desired by Wayne. Thus, we decided we wanted to record a track with drums, bass, guitar and vocals and hone in on mixing a quality project.

We had first decided on recording one of Bryce's friend's track with band, but unfortunately the communication between his friend was very limited and after a week we decided to move onto another idea. We all jumped on Zoom and as a group we decided on the doing a cover of Bill Wither's "Lean on Me", with Fletcher doing the keys, drums, vocals and Bryce doing the bass. Next was to book recording time in the studio as soon as possible as we had already lost a week.

Luckily, we did our Zoom call at the beginning of the week which gave us time to book for during the weekdays and the weekend of that week. With each of our busy schedules this was tricky, but it wasn't unexpected as this was an issue we were prepared for after encountering it during Project 2. Kieran wasn't able to attend a session after class on Thursday but agreed for Bryce, Fletcher and myself to start the recording process without him as we were running out of time. This would have been perfect had our booking not been denied.

We got denied a couple times actually, which was not promising. After a couple of attempts we finally booked a back to back studio session on the Saturday from 9AM-1PM. The equipment we used during the recording session are as listed below:

• Rode NT1 (provided by SAE).

• 1x Pop filter (provided by SAE).

• 4x XLR cables (provided by SAE).

• Studio headphone (provided by SAE).

• Passive headphone splitter (provided by SAE).

• 2x Behringer Ultra DI-100 DI box (provided by SAE).

During the studio session we realized that we may not be able to record the cover as we failed to take into account bringing a drum kit in for the studio session. Without the drum kit, it would be of been quite challenging to record the vocals and other instruments without the recording of the drums. We were at a loss.

RECORDING THE INSTRUMENTS

Ideas were tossed back and fourth about how we were going to proceed with the remaining studio time as we didn't want to waste the studio time we only just managed to secure. The idea was put fourth that using the instruments we had, Bryce's bass and Fletcher's keyboard, we should revert back to our initial idea of doing a podcast with and introduction and outroduction of a recorded jam by Bryce and Fletcher. The topic we were going to cover was both Kieran and mine's experience here at SAE this trimester. This seemed to be the only logical solution for moving forward and not wasting our studio time.

Bryce had his bass fed through to the DI box to bring the unbalanced signal through to a balanced signal and fed it through to the patch bay with an instrument lead; Fletcher did the same with his keyboard. We outputted the instruments to channels 5 and 6 on the console. On the console I had to adjust the input gain for both instruments as we didn't want the signal to be too quiet like it was for the previous project. Bryce's bass was coming in quiet hot and that required the most fiddling with. Once we saw the wave forms coming through Pro Tools at decent level me and Kieran pretty much recorded let Bryce and Fletcher jam while we recorded and play listed the recordings. It was probably the most fun I have had in the studio to date.

We recorded around 30-45 minutes worth of jam audio which was more than enough for each of us to work with when it came to mixing down for our individual mixes. While the others were jamming Kieran and myself had come up with questions for our podcast for both of us to individually answer for the next recording session when we record our vocals.

RECORDING THE VOCALS

The last minute change of plan may have worked out for our previous recording session, but we still needed to record the vocals and we were already in the week of the submission date. This meant we could only do the vocals in one studio session early in the week otherwise we would run out of time to mix our project during the week. We chose Monday in between our two computer lab classes to record Kieran and mine vocals.

Looking back on our previous project, we did not want a repeat of the same issue we encountered where the gain of the signal that was captured was too low. To remedy this we were going to record two microphones (RE20 and the SM7B) on both Kieran and myself and then see which one sounded the best on each of our voices. Wayne had recommended the RE20 microphones as they were great for capturing vocals for podcasts.

Set up of the microphones took a lot longer than expected (almost an hour) due to the microphone stands not being able to support the weight of the RE20 microphones. Unfortunately, as Bryce was the only one in the control room and we had very limited time, we decided to just pick one microphone and just use that microphone for the duration of the recording to lessen the monitoring for Bryce..

Bryce said Kieran's voice sounded better on the SM7B but my voice sounded a lot crisper on the RE20 microphones. Although you would think for my voice we would have opted for the RE20 as it sounded more crisp, but we decided against it as we felt the sibilance in my voice may be a little too much and thus would affect the mix if we had to use a notable de-esser on my vocals. Both Kieran and myself were to use the SM7B's as our microphone. Attached below are the bounced test recordings of each microphone (clip gain was used ever so slightly to adjust the volume).

After doing a couple of test recordings to make sure that the signal was coming into Pro Tools at an acceptable level, Kieran and myself took ten or so minutes to gather our notes and points we were going to touch upon for the podcast. As mentioned previously, the topic for the podcast was our experience during our time during our first trimester at SAE and we chose that as we felt we both would have a much easier time talking about that than anything else. We also felt our flow would be better and we would be able to bounce off each other pretty well.

As we wanted to utilize the little amount of time we had left, we decided that we would do three to four full takes of the recording and pick the best one. This provided us with the perfect organic tone for the podcast as well as a decent timeframe to record the vocals. The first take went on too long as Kieran and myself kept getting derailed from questions we had written down and the second recording was not as bad but at the end I laughed which peaked my vocal. It was the final recording where we struck gold. Kieran and I agreed that instead of answering a question each, when one of us answered a question and didn't touch on something that the other wanted to speak on we would add that said point in addition and move on.

That gave us a great conversation to bounce off each other, go in-depth while also progressing the flow. You can especially tell in my vocals that I am rushing as we were pressed for time however, I think given the fact we had to smash the vocal recording in two hours before our next computer lab session and the next students who were to use the room after us, we did a pretty good job and we were happy with the quality.

THE PROCESS: THE MIX DOWN

Very similar to the previous project, we made a structured rough template mix which we were all going to use as the foundation for our individual mix in Pro Tools. As there wasn't as many different types of audio to sift through, we were able to also for ease of mind insert bus tracks for the vocals, each instrument and, a bus for the instruments grouped together. Very quickly and roughly, we selected the bass guitar and piano track we thought would sit at the beginning. We imported the vocals to play straight after and left the ending of the podcast up to the individual who was mixing to pick what bass guitar and piano track they wanted for the outro.

Starting with the introduction I wanted to create some more variety for the listener. The original placement recorded audio for the introduction was inviting but not exciting. Using the playlisted recordings, I managed to piece together different snippets of the other audio and insert them within the existing audio to create a dynamic audio. This process was long and tedious; I took almost 2 hours to complete this.

As I wanted each of these sections of play listed audio to blend with the other recorded audio, I used the grid to line up the waveforms with each other so that the bass and piano track blended well with one another. However, this started to sound too rigid. Using the nudge tool I nudged the bass guitar tracks ever so slightly behind the piano track waveforms so that it sounded more organic. Nudging moved the entire track of selected audio, so splitting and moving some of the audio was necessary where nudging wasn't appropriate.

After playing the vocals back, I realized that they went for quite a long time with nothing to space them out. Thus the idea of an intermission was born. Using a mixture of playlisted recordings from Bryce and Fletcher's jam, I pieced together a short 15-25 second intermission that helped the pacing of the mix. The intermission was short and simple so that it could give the listener a break from the vocals and provide variety to the podcast.

Now that the structure of the podcast had been laid out, the next day mainly consisted of applying the processing, time based effects and any other editing that might improve the mix. First was to tackle the meat of the mix which were the vocals. For both Kieran's vocals and my own I added a Dyn3 compressor, EQ3 7 band EQ and, a Dyn3 de-esser. The De-esser was used more heavily on my vocals compared to Kieran's due to the sibilance in my voice. These processing plug-ins were used directly on top of the vocal tracks.

Next up was processing the instruments, the bass guitar, the piano and the organ. The organ was originally part of a playlisted piece of audio from the piano recording and because they have different characteristics, both needed to be processed differently. The EQ3 7 band EQ was applied to all of the instruments as well as a Pro compressor, but only to the bass guitar and organ was the Pro limiter applied. Touching on the Pro compressor, both the piano and the bass guitar had a preset applied to them. The piano had the pressed piano preset and the bass guitar had the bass sustained preset on the Pro limiter plug-in.

The processing for everything was complete, it was time to move onto adding the time based effects on the auxiliary buses we had created at the beginning. Straight away I realized that the routing to buses were not correct. During this time I also had issues with my USB that carried the project not recognizing, saving and accessing the project from Google Drive as well as having to change workstations more than five times. This took roughly around 2 and half hours to rectify before I managed to secure Control Room E to mix in (which ended up being a great place to mix the remainder of the project).

With routing not correct and my Pro Tools session in a bit of a mess, I asked Andy from the Tech Desk to assist me with fixing my routing. Andy also showed me how to use the Dyn3 compressor to sidechain my piano to one of my other tracks. After the routing was correctly set up, I applied Reel Tape Saturation with the Bass guitar preset as well as the Black Op Distortion plug-in to give it some character. When searching for plug-ins for the piano and organ, I couldn't find any that complimented the mix so I left them without any time based effects.

All of the instruments were routed through to an instrument auxiliary track which had an AIR reverb applied along with an AIR multi-chorus. This podcast was meant to emulate a live bad space with the intimacy of a small room podcast, which is why I chose booth as the type of room and small room for the preset for the reverb on the instrument bus. Testing the reverb through the control room's studio monitors was perfect as I was able to experiment with the parameters like the room size and reverb time. From my perspective, I wanted a subtle but effective reverb which is why I left the mix parameter at a low. The chorus effect was merely a an experiment to see what else I could get out of the effects with out ruining the mix.

The last of the time based effects were placed on the vocal bus and the master fader bus. Again, the Air reverb was used for the vocals and again I used the booth for the room type only this time I dialed down the reverb time and the mix parameter as well as setting the preset to basic small. This is because this was a podcast and I wanted to keep the vocals raw however, I wanted to give a tiny touch of space in the vocals because after all, this was meant to emulate a small live setting.

REFERENCES

THE REFLECTION

This was my third and final project for this module and I definitely had more fun mixing and recording this project than I did for my previous projects. The fact that we were able to do a complete 360 and change our idea last minute and still put out a quality project, makes me feel so proud. It wasn't that I was worried that I wasn't going to complete the project on time or worried that the project completion was last minute, I was a little worried that I wasn't going to enjoy myself during the process. As I am typing now, there is just over an hour left to complete this reflection and finalize this project.

From the moment we changed the project idea to now I had planned how I was going to tackle this project every day this week. Yes, I did underestimate that there may have been technical problems which delayed my mixing process significantly, but I was prepared for it just in case. This could have been a lot longer had I not had some decent problems that I had to overcome with Pro Tools over the last trimester.

The project also benefited from having the amazing group partners I've had this trimester. Each one of them carried there share of the weight, even with all the issues we encountered. Fletcher arrived late often,, though this was due to his hectic work hours and being very ill over the last couple weeks, but he also brought his Juno keyboard to record and helped with creative ideas for the music section. Watching Fletcher and Bryce jam was definitely a highlight of this project; Kieran and myself were both dancing and encouraging them to get creative during the studio session.

Bryce initially attempted to contact his friend so he could record their band and although that fell through, Bryce helped with creating and modifying the plan as we went along. During the vocal recording session, Bryce was the only one at the console and managed to get a great clean signal from both microphone as well while also directing Kieran and myself within the time constraints. Kieran, really doesn't need any explaining as I have already talked about how helpful and generous Kieran is as my peer. When we all decided to go back to making a podcast with a live music jam, Kieran was instrumental with leading directing how we were going to tackle it.

As usual I took the photos and I also helped with deciding what Kieran and myself were going to talk about. When we were recording vocals I also helped with the set up and helping Bryce direct the recording as we really only had an hour to record the vocals. For the mix down process I also saw that my mixing skills had improved and had used techniques that were showed by Wayne like nudging, play listing and shortcuts quite frequently.

Again, time wasn't on our side this time and we did do our best to manage our time well, but between studio session booking issues and changing our idea due to us not having a drum kit we were in the end stressing about time. Even during the vocal recording session, you can hear (especially in my voice) that we are rushing to finish the recording before the end of our session is up (we had two hours). We would of probably got a better vocal recording had set up not taken 45 minutes because of the busted microphone stands not being able to hold the weight of the RE20 microphones. However, Kieran and myself were able to adapt when we were trying to find our flow and get a good recording with three takes by only elaborating on each others answers to the question and not each of us answering the questions individually. Although we did manage to get a good enough recording out of the session, I will say that during all three takes Kieran did tend to ramble off topic and interrupt me from time to time which through me off, making the recording of my vocal a little clumsy. A n issue, but only a minor one.

You could say the ever changing ideas for the project would be something negative to reflect on but I think it was actually a positive situation as it forced our problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaborative and, our flexibility and adaptive skillset. To be honest, I would go as far to say that we pretty much used every single subskill under the transferrable skills during this project, including time management. My interpersonal, intrapersonal and creative skills were definitely used. Example, when I was stuck with my routing I outsourced help from Andy at the tech desk, who in turn, showed me some neat new tips for Pro Tools. The change of project is even a great display of professional, creative and metacognitive skills.

If I were to do this project again, I would of just trusted my gut feeling about recording a podcast as it would of saved us a significant headache and time. This in turn would of given us more time to plan out how we wanted to record the vocals which also would of affected the quality of my vocal recording. Initially I was excited about recording the band or Fletcher covering 'Lean On Me' by Bill Withers, as we hadn't actually recorded live instruments yet , but looking back I am very happy that we decided to go with the podcast. Also this project has definitely cemented the fact that I need to purchase Pro Tools for home, laugh out loud.

All in all, for a final project I am so proud of my group but more importantly I am proud of myself and the mix I have produced. Like I said, this was the best project and probably the most stressful one at that as well, and I am so happy with how it turned out. Though I am keen for my trimester break, I am interested to see what next trimester has installed for me regarding projects.