Recording a 60s Band
I was approached by Rachel and asked if I wanted to help out in recording a band in the studio as I knew a fair bit about recording electric guitars and how to get a nice tone out of then, seeing as I play guitar, and decided to take the opportunity. The session was booked for Wednesday 22nd February 2017 (18:00 - 24:00) and involved recording a 4 piece 60s style band who were playing covers of different songs.
The goal was to do the recording in a way that would have been done back in the 60s to get the same sort of sound that would have been achieved back then. To do this we needed to record the whole band in the studio together by miking them all up and having them all face the centre of the room. This is useful in a recording situation because everyone in the band would feel more relaxed playing together than if they were playing to a recording and would end up getting a nicer sound out of it because they would be enjoying themselves more.
This is how old style recordings would have happened back in the 60s as they didn't have the technology we do now, so would have very few tracks to work with meaning they would need to use less microphones to capture the overall sound.
My job was to be in charge of the live room and the setup of the microphones. This meant I decided where the microphones were placed, based on the plan Rachel had sent us, to get the best sound. I decided to mic everything up separately so that the mixing process would be easier, which is a contrast to how it would have been recorded in the 60s, but it was more beneficial to us to have the ease in the mix stage.
We managed to get everything recorded that we needed in the 6 hours that we had booked, but did have a problem with headphone mixes at the start which got fixed within good time. This meant that we were not behind and managed to get the best out of the recording session we had. Rachel then took the finished recording off to mix them and sent them off to the band who said they were very pleased with the end result and would love to come back into the studio some time and record again.
The band consisted of one guitarist, one bassist, one drummer and one lead vocalist, with two backing vocals from the guitarist and bassist.
We used the AKG C12VR for the lead vocalist at first, but then realised that it was a ribbon microphone, so was bidirectional and picked up way too much spill so we quickly switched it out for another mic.
We used the Coles 4038 microphone on the acoustic guitar which gave it a really nice sound which fitted with the style of playing.
The electric guitar was plugged into an amp and miked up sing a Shure SM57 along with the bass which was also plugged into an amp and miked using an SM57.
The drums were recorded using two AKG C414s for the overheads, an SM57 pointed at the snare and an AKG D112 on the kick drum.
The backing vocals were miked up using Shure SM58s and we switched out the AKG C12VR for a Shure SM7b which was a better replacement with far less spill.
