Week 4 - Intensive One Done!

So week 4 is done and dusted and that means i've finished up my music production intensive in the Neve. I'm going to do a bit of self reflection on the whole process in this blog.

Firstly, in week one, one of my group members had a riff and song structure already prepared. It was a Pop punk song layout, along the lines of Violent soho etc. So we worked some scratches out in the rest of the class and basically had the barebones of the song layout.

In week two we recorded the Drums, with Fletcher in our group laying down the drum track. We got to play with a sweet set of mics, and we got a decent drum sound. I personally still struggle with tracking drums, and aside from getting everything at a good level, and getting the stereo tracks in phase, i don't know what i'm looking for with the sound. I assume it just comes with practice.

Here's the drum mic list we used that day. We didn't use too much outboard on tracking day, just the Fatso to crush the rooms, and the 2A on the snare, very lightly.

After Drums, Matt tracked his guitar parts properly through his setup, just using an SM57 on the cab. All in all the day went pretty well, we took quite a while to get the drums all setup and running as we were mucking around with mic placement, and also using the Neve was and has been a bit challenging at times. Definitely need to practice and improve my chops in there!

Now to week three. In between weeks two and three, i tracked the bass and a few leads at home, just to save time. I Di'ed the bass clean and duplicated it, ran the duplicate through a mesa boogie amp sim, as i noticed a big part of the sound in the reference tracks we were using was very gritty fuzzed out bass. I then did some filtering of the distorted and clean bass, and a bit of compression to glue them. As for the leads, this isn't the style of music i make, but i do know arpeggiated guitar leads are popular in this sort of music. So i basically just did a few delayed arpeggiated stuff, to fill up the sound.

Now to the actual recording session. Bit of a nightmare, a few of us in the group and been trying to get someone to come in and do vocals, with no luck, for the last two weeks.. So we ended up going in there with no vocalist planned at all. Luckily one of our friends at Uni, Brayden, stepped up and put his studies aside for an hour to come in and track a song he'd never heard in a style he had never done. So mad props to him for coming and doing that.

We recorded Brayden on a U87, we didn't have a huge amount of time i think he was only in there for about an hour, laid down a few takes. We comped them and then had a Melodyne session just to clean up the comped takes. It was the first time i'd used any kind of vocal tuning plugin and it was a really good experience, correctively and creatively i can see a massive amount of fun you can have with that plugin.

Week four and it's time for the Mixdown. These are my favourite part of the studio intensives, we get to learn heaps mixing on a desk with a lecturer in the room giving you little tips and pointers for obtaining certain sounds. And this sessions was no different.

We used a fair bit of outboard on a bunch of different things and i've already harped on for a while so i won't get into it to much. We also used alot of the desk EQ, because it sounded awesome! No particulars to mention other then that!

So that's it, the end of the studio intensive. Learnt a fair bit, battled a desk and all round had a good time! One thing i should work on is developing more passion for a project even if it isn't something i might be in to musically.