Nusic Future Session with Hashtagobi
13th February 2017 - Organising the session
On Monday 13th February 2017, Paul Finney asked me if I was available to help with a Nusic session as Nathan Hird wasn't able to attend.
Thursday 17th February 2017 - Running the session
I was told to arrive between 17:30 and 18:00 in order to setup the studio before the artist arrived between 18:30 and 19:00.
17:30 - Arrive at EM
I arrived around 17:30 to meet everyone on the team and get settled in in the studio. I talked to everyone the find out what sort of equipment the artist would be bringing to see what I would need to mic up and feed through into the mixing desk.
I was informed that it was going to be a recording of a rapper and a guitarist. We were not too sure if he was going to bring a backing track or have a DJ in the room with him, but it ended up him bringing a DJ with him to play the backing track.
18:00 - Setting up the studio
We went into the studio to setup the basics, including a vocal mic and setting up a speaker so that they could all hear what they were playing in the studio without the use of headphones. The headphones wouldn't have looked very nice in the video that Nusic were making, so we tried to stay clear of them as best as possible.
We used a Shure SM58 for the vocal mic and DI'd the guitar from the guitarists pedal board. This meant that we could mix it easier in post given that we could add any guitar amp sound and were not constricted to the sound we recorded in the studio.
The DJ's CDJ gave us a few problems as the only output on it was an RCA port. The problem with this was that we didnt have any working RCA-Jack cables which we could make use of in the studio. We managed to get around it by taking the output fro the headphones using a balanced jack cable and take it into the desk. Luckily there were two headphone port on the CDJ so the DJ could still listen to it through headphones.
19:00 - Camera setup and sound testing
Once we had setup the audio equipment we got the artists in to do a sound test and for us to set levels while the studio was mostly empty. This didn't take long so shortly after we could move the camera crew in to set up their lights and camera gear in order to video the session from inside the live room.
19:45 - Run through with camera crew and audio
Now that everything was setup we made sure that everything was ready by doing a run through with the artist to see if the lighting was okay for the camera crew and the levels were okay for the recording.
20:00 - Record the performance
Everything was ready to go, so we communicated with the camera crew and hit record and let the artist do their thing in the studio.
We did 3 takes of each song and then moved on the the interview part.
22:00 - Moving all the audio gear out the way and setting up for the interviews
Once the recordings were done, we had to move all the audio equipment out of the live room in order to setup for the interview which was going to take place with the artist. We cleared the room and moved baffles into place for the interview.
We connected the Lavalier microphones for the presenter and musician and prepared to record.
22:30 - 23:00 - Recording the interviews
The interviews with the artists did not take very long as Nusic do it every other Thursday so know what to ask the artist and are very professional about the process.
23:00 - 23:30 - Packing down
Once the interviews were done the last thing to do was pack down the live room and reset the desk in the control room. This didn' take long and was a very quick process.
