Having been to Studio Production 3 times already I was not as sure-footed as I thought I’d be as I arrived at the studio this morning with Adam. Gareth had shown us some basics of the studio, where to patch things, how to get a mic signal and record through the chill room and some basic microphone techniques. All bravado I may have had quickly faded as I got back in and I felt like I was trying to read the Matrix code.
Here's the Patch Bay
The first obstacle we encountered was getting the foldout mic to work, we could see there was a signal coming through the ISA 828-2 on the 8th channel but had forgotten how to get the sound to come through Pro Tools. After adding a mono audio, and a mono aux track onto the arrange we phoned Matt Hollis who’d booked and used the studio before for some advice. He told us to select B8 from the inputs section in the arrange and then voila, sound.
Turning on the phantom power
The next task was patching the headphones and microphones through to the chill room. We were going to close mic a clean guitar track with the Marshall so we used the AKG C4142 condensor microphone and turned on phantom power for channel 1 which we were to then patch the cables through. We sent out the headphones channel from the ISA input 13 and output into the chill room channel 3 I could hear Adam’s voice and instructions coming from the studio as I set up the mics in the chill room, wearing the headphones. We could now hear the condenser mic in the studio and the foldout mic in the chill room, success.
Adam testing out the gain levels from the studio
We’d learnt some interesting mic techniques in our lessons like NOS and MidSide Technique but decided just to close mic the amp and play the guitar through the clean channel. I played guitar while Adam manned the studio and we recorded some noodlings to take readings of various styles and how the sound was picking up with an eye on the peaking. We noticed from playbacks on the recording that the acoustics of the room were not complimentary to the dry clean guitar sound we wanted.
Microphone placement in vocal
We decided to relocate the amp and mic to the vocal recording room to make the guitar sound closer and narrower in the stereo field, given the smaller size and isolation from subsonic rumbling we’d picked up in the chill room. We patched the headphones into the vocal room as well as the microphone and had another go at recording. With a reduction in bass on the amp itself and the attenuated rumble in the room, the guitar sounded much crisper and cleaner. You could still detect the studio feeling in the recording however which makes me feel more likely to re-record using DI next time.
Here are some pictures of the techniques we tried
Recording guitar in the chill room
Me playing guitar in vocal booth
Here is the result of our second attempt at recording guitar in the vocal room in the studio.
With all technical hurdles ironed out of the picture I feel we’re ready to record for our planned songs next time.
