About a week back now I had the opportunity to work alongside my peers and lecturer Adrian Carroll at SAE Institute Brisbane to record and produce for the singer-songwriter Eddie Gazani and his band of merry men and women. This blog will talk a little about my experiences recording for Eddie and what I learned from the session.
For this session, I ran a few things over the course of my 2 or so hour stint helping out. By the time I arrived, setup had been done and we were at the stage of overdubbing for our conga’s and other instruments including the vocals, saxophone and trumpet. In the time I was there, I played the roles of;
- DAW/Session Engineer – Once I got to the studio, Riley was currently operating Pro Tools for the band and I was to be taking over soon after. Therefore, I spent about 15 minutes before my stint familiarising myself with the signal flow, inputs and outputs and how the session was setup etc. The input list along the Neve desk really helped me with this. I don’t have a super clear photo but you can see that each channel is named in the photo below. Overall, my spell running the session went relatively smoothly. I recorded the last few overdub takes of the conga and then helped Adrian and Eddie do a rough mix of these within the whole track. I had a little trouble with some shortcuts and understanding directions, but overall I believe my time in the spotlight went relatively smoothly.
- Band Coordinator – After running the session for a little while, I stepped back to let Carter have his go. I then went and made sure that the band were enjoying themselves and had everything they needed. This included liaising with the trumpet and sax players, and offering my feedback on the mix itself to members of the band.
- Live Engineer – I was also in charge of the live room for a little bit. As the equipment had been set up, this only really included changing over the headphones from the conga player and positioning microphones correctly and making sure that the lead guitarist was comfortable with his setup.
Over the course of the planning, recording and now mixing of the band, it became obvious where my flaws lay and just how big of a process recording a whole band canbe. Below is a list of all the microphones we used, what channels they were put through, the mic stand needed for each, an alternative microphone for potential use, the instrument that the mic was recording, and the name of the person playing the instrument.
This planning process took the better half of 2 hours to complete on its own and it is obvious that thorough planning is needed in order to complete the recording session effectively. We also drew up a schedule outlining a timeframe which we would try to keep to in order to make the day run smoothly.
Overall, I had a great experience with everyone and learnt a lot about processes, planning and recording a band in general!
Connor 