Guitar & Vocal Recording Studio Session
During the week a few of us arranged a recording session in one of the university studio rooms, Das played the electric guitar, Bethany on vocals and myself covering the audio engineering. The recording setup we used consisted of an sm57 for the vocals, with a pop-filter to prevent unwanted noise, positioned with a mic stand and connected to the input 1 on the focusrite audio interface via an XLR carrying a balanced signal, this being a dynamic mic it did not need phantom power however it did require some pre-gain to bring the level up to an adequate loudness. The guitar was hooked into input 2 on the interface and required pre-gain to just shy of where the mic’s sat, monitoring through headphones connected to the interface I found these pre-gain settings balanced the two together well and got a full sound for the recordings, with the warm tone of the dynamic mic adding decent warm timbre to the recordings along with the louder low-end response of the studios acoustics.
With the audio interface connected to a laptop via USB, using the digital audio workstation Logic I armed the recording on two tracks I had created to record each of the two signals (in1 / in2) onto. Doing a last quick soundcheck at full volume from source of the guitar and vocals made sure no clipping would occur during recording. During the recording Das and Bethany performed two tracks, these were recorded with some takes, which I then processed with software effects within the DAW.
To the vocals adding long tailing reverb with some slight EQ to roll off some low-end and to reduce the presence by around 0.5dB in the 2kHz range to balance the highs out in louder sections of the tracks, this was then compressed slightly to tighten the dynamic range of the vocal tracks loudness. This was placed at the end of the signal chain after the reverb and EQ units to maintain the louder more dynamic reverberations that would be generated from the original dynamics of the vocal recording with the full reverberations, as the vocals peaked in volume, could then be maintained and brought forward in the mix by the compressor.
For the guitar the dry DI signal was also processed firstly with EQ again to roll-off low-end rumble, then compression to help match the dynamics of the signal and bring up it’s volume closer to where the vocals sat on the levels. The signal was then bussed to an auxiliary to double-track the signal, where the double then processed through the same reverb unit / settings as the vocals to further help mix the two inputs together in a balanced sound. This second track was finished with a tape delay unit utilised somewhat like a saturator, spreading the signal into the full stereo width and boosting the tone through the 0 delay time and 16% feedback parameters. To finalise there was some tweaks to the volume faders between the two tracks recorded as one was a higher-energy and required a little dip in volume next to the other. Overall the recording session was a fun success, attached is the two audio files of the mixed tracks performed and recorded : Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks and an original piece, In the Evening.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZDLLaFZZ0rQ4_tZk3bEmtiEhOJG4nMS-/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1joWOivLXx5FGel7ZGVCSkvAu-upi_BFt/view?usp=sharing
