Overall, the tracking and mixing for project #1 went really well. Both steps -- the recording and the mixing -- were super fun and went off with little trouble.
The one main trouble was finding a time to record. Weekends were hard for our group since a lot of us worked on the weekends, and then it was hard to find a client that would want to come in to record really late at night on Tuesday or Thursday. Thankfully we were able to get in to the studio at a decent time on Tuesday the 15th around 6pm. Right when we got in we were introduced to our client who was going to play some guitar for our recording. We got right to work setting everything up. All of us in the group did a little bit of each step, so we all contributed to a lot of stuff. Thankfully I still had my notes on signal flow I took from the demonstration so we were able to get sound into protools with just a little bit of work and a few small obstacles. The headphones took a little more time and brain power to set up. However, with enough experimenting, we were able to get the sound in the headphones up and running and by then we had the loops all chopped up, the click powered on, and ourselves ready to record.
The actual recording went very smoothly. The mics sounded great and in about two and a half hours total we were able to take away our recording for good. The main thing I would have done differently was to record more takes, as became evident in our small group time that what we recorded sounded a bit off. But as they say, hindsight is 20/20, so it was a good lesson to learn and will definitely help me with any other future recording projects.
For the mixing, the first step was trying to fix the timing on our tracks that we recorded. It was a process that hurt my brain a bit; sometimes it sounded too fast, sometimes too slow, but in the end I think my efforts helped a bunch to make it sound more in time. I think that even with a lot more time the mix might still be off by a bit, and definitley reinforced the lesson that you need to record multiple takes and make sure they sound PRISTINE before you shut down the recording for good.
The actual mixing after the editing was a lot of fun! Especially the EQ. For this mix, I tried to go out of the box and throw caution to the wind. Some of the drastic things I tried sounded awful, but a few sounded great and showed me how to create very specific, amazing sounds. I tried to boost the mids on a lot of the guitar to give it more sound, and for my special effect I put a bit of distortion on the mono guitar track that I ended up loving even though it really changed the sound of the piece.
Over these past few mixes I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the EQ and love touching up a sound to make it sound really awesome. However, what I still need to work on is compression. I've been looking at some of the presets on the plug-ins and been learning a bit more, but the concepts sometimes still go over my head and the reasons and settings don't quite click in my head yet. My main thing this semester is going to be trying to wrap my head around the whys and hows of compression so my mixes can sound even better.
The one main trouble was finding a time to record. Weekends were hard for our group since a lot of us worked on the weekends, and then it was hard to find a client that would want to come in to record really late at night on Tuesday or Thursday. Thankfully we were able to get in to the studio at a decent time on Tuesday the 15th around 6pm. Right when we got in we were introduced to our client who was going to play some guitar for our recording. We got right to work setting everything up. All of us in the group did a little bit of each step, so we all contributed to a lot of stuff. Thankfully I still had my notes on signal flow I took from the demonstration so we were able to get sound into protools with just a little bit of work and a few small obstacles. The headphones took a little more time and brain power to set up. However, with enough experimenting, we were able to get the sound in the headphones up and running and by then we had the loops all chopped up, the click powered on, and ourselves ready to record.
The actual recording went very smoothly. The mics sounded great and in about two and a half hours total we were able to take away our recording for good. The main thing I would have done differently was to record more takes, as became evident in our small group time that what we recorded sounded a bit off. But as they say, hindsight is 20/20, so it was a good lesson to learn and will definitely help me with any other future recording projects.
For the mixing, the first step was trying to fix the timing on our tracks that we recorded. It was a process that hurt my brain a bit; sometimes it sounded too fast, sometimes too slow, but in the end I think my efforts helped a bunch to make it sound more in time. I think that even with a lot more time the mix might still be off by a bit, and definitley reinforced the lesson that you need to record multiple takes and make sure they sound PRISTINE before you shut down the recording for good.
The actual mixing after the editing was a lot of fun! Especially the EQ. For this mix, I tried to go out of the box and throw caution to the wind. Some of the drastic things I tried sounded awful, but a few sounded great and showed me how to create very specific, amazing sounds. I tried to boost the mids on a lot of the guitar to give it more sound, and for my special effect I put a bit of distortion on the mono guitar track that I ended up loving even though it really changed the sound of the piece.
Over these past few mixes I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the EQ and love touching up a sound to make it sound really awesome. However, what I still need to work on is compression. I've been looking at some of the presets on the plug-ins and been learning a bit more, but the concepts sometimes still go over my head and the reasons and settings don't quite click in my head yet. My main thing this semester is going to be trying to wrap my head around the whys and hows of compression so my mixes can sound even better.