R&R | Music

Rhyme & Reason

Recording blog

First up was recording guitars.

As I am primarily a drummer, I feel I can serve the songs better

by overdubbing drums that can be embellished to accentuate

specific sections of a song,

rather than a guitar track I am always going to play the same way.

I know a lot of people view drums and bass as the foundation that they build the song around, and prefer to record them first.

I advocate whatever process you feel works best for you and the vision you have for your songs.

As I don't have any guitar effects in my arsenal, I relied on what Massey had on offer in terms of Amp Combos to find the tone I felt matched what I wanted from these songs.

This was also a great opportunity to get a first hand experience of how these microphones differed and could offer different blending opportunities in the mixing phase.

Here is a shot of the final setup, using the patch bay in the wall to isolate the amp and play guitar in the control room:

Next up was bass.

I had been tinkering a lot with playing my bass through a nice analogue mixer I have that has on board compression, and had grown to like the sound.

Now there is a contentious point here that I should have cut all sentimental ties with the equipment I had in the shadow of the far superior equipment available in the studios.

But, honestly, what beats recording in the comfort of your own home?

Moving on to drums, here is a shot from a video in development comparing a variety of drum kit shells, skins, cymbals,

and drum mics, including: close mics, overheads and room mics

and featuring most of Pale Lady.

This helped inform my decision when setting up for the drum tracking:

In the end I decided to use a Focusrite 18i20, as this allowed me to set up anywhere (as I preferred the ADR room for its acoustic properties) and not be reliant on operating the studio consoles from between different rooms. There was plenty of opportunity for people to help, but I wanted to tackle as much of the process myself.

This also helped avoid a litany of computer and patch bay related issues

while tracking:

Finally we end with vocals.

Just like with drums embellishing guitar tracks, I feel that with vocals holding such a prominent space in the soundstage that recording them last leaves the most opportunity for embellishments that feel well suited to the track as it has been recorded.

Here we mix a bit between the ADR room and a wardrobe at my new house that I am converting into a vocal booth:

This provides great opportunities to mix between different takes that have different sonic characteristics and can be blended in different ways to create some nice effects.