Other Sound Experience

For this project, I brought in my good friend and professional theatre vocalist Onyx McGilvray to sing as the lead and backing vocalist for the song Evermore from the live action Beauty and the Beast movie. All of the recording was completed in Ayrshire College's Studio 1. During this recording session, I ensured I switched on the equipment in the correct order to avoid breaking any equipment, I set up a ProTools session with the backing track and three vocal channels as we had planned to have them sing both a lead vocal and a couple of backing harmony vocals that were panned either side to give the recording a more full sound to it. The vocals were recorded with an AKG C414 microphone, and I patched in some slight compression as this style of song has a very large dynamic range, which without the compression would have made the gain either too low or high, risking too small of a signal or distortion. When we had finished recording the lead vocals, I applied some reverb to the song as it works well with this genre and Onyx's vocals, before quickly moving onto the backing harmonies as we were running out of time. We succeeded in recording two sets of backing vocals which I then hard panned left and right, applied the same reverb to them, and then saved and exported the session as both an MP3 and WAV file. Overall I am very happy with this project, it was something I just wanted to do for fun and as a challenge for myself, and I think it came out great given the fact that it was all done in 2-3 hours. If I had more time I would have really liked to do extra takes of the backing vocals, as the final note wasn't held for the same length on both of them and that slightly bothered me. This is still a project I am really proud of and look back on fondly, I would love to come back to it at some point.

As it is a duet, I was both a performer and recording engineer for this cover, this was achieved through working with a classmate, and for the sections I was singing, my classmate was working as the recording engineer and vice versa. I was also able to source the original mixed backing track from the original artist, and imported the WAV file to the ProTools session in the control room while my classmate set up the AKG C414 in the live room. This cover I spent a lot more time on, and I think it paid off, I think overall this cover is well recorded and mixed. We each had two vocal tracks each, as one was a lead vocal track and the other was a backing vocal track. For this cover we used compression and reverb while recording, worked with headphone sends and switched our microphone input between input 1 and input 2 so that we could save the gain settings that we had instead of changing them each time we swapped over. The gain was tweaked the most for recording the backing vocals, as some of them were only spoken vocals and others were sang vocals. When the recording was complete we each took the session home on USBs and mixed it on our own to our liking. Overall, I am proud of the engineering work I did on this, however I think I struggled with the performance aspect and became too much of a perfectionist when it came to having my own vocals recorded. Overall it was a really fun cover to make, as it was a song I loved, and I got to experience the studio from a performer's perspective which I think has helped me to become a lot more patient sound engineer, as I found myself insufferable. I would however like to try mixing this session again, as I think my mixing ability has improved greatly since I made this and I could add a lot more corrective measures to the vocals, which could then lead me to have more freedom to be creative with them as well, which I think I'd find really fun!

Having the opportunity to go to the RCS Open Day this year benefitted me in many ways, as it gave me many connections within the industry, leading to being able to shadow at one of their sound checks, as well as being given tons of insight as to how a theatre runs sound and all of the opportunities that studying at the conservatoire could lead me to through their many connections within the sound, music and theatre industries. It also just gave me a whole new drive when it came to working on my career, as I filled up as much of my time as possible since then with shadowing, volunteering or doing as many extra things for my college course work as possible.