Recording Cameron Sinclair Harris
On Friday 10th February 2016 Nath Hird asked me if I would help record his singer song writer friend. The recording session was to be booked for that evening from 18:00 - 24:00. Cameron (the artist) wanted to record two of his own tracks of which Nathan would then take and mix before sending them back to him. The tracks would then end up on his EP.
We arrived at the studio at 18:00 and setup for an acoustic guitar and vocals. Cameron said he would rather play the guitar and sing the vocals separately so we did one at a time. We set up the acoustic guitar with two AKG C414s, one pointing towards the 15th fret and the other towards the sound hole. This meant we could get the highs and lows form the guitar for easy mixing later on.
We recorded the guitar part for the first track a few times until we were all happy with the take.
We then moved on to the vocals.
For the vocals we used an AKG C12VR valve mic.
This microphone has a very nice warm sound to it, so we thought we would try it on the vocals to see how it sounds and we were very pleasantly surprised.
We recorded the vocals in until we were happy with the take before moving on to the second track. It took us a few attempt to get it how we wanted it, and we did a few overdubs along the way to add something extra to the track.
The second track consisted of both acoustic and electric guitar, followed by vocals. We recorded the acoustic guitar part first with the same setup as for the first track, and then moved onto the electric guitar.
We ran the electric guitar through a Multi FX pedal before running it out into the Vox AC30 guitar amp.
We then miked up the guitar amp using a microphone on each speaker, one using the AKG C414, and the other using a Shrue SM57. This meant we could get two varying sounds for the guitar and mix them together if required.
The last thing to do was record the vocals in for this track and doing any overdubbing that was required.
Once it was all finished, Nathan collected the recording to mix them later on. He later sent the tracks on to Cameron who said he was very pleased with the outcome and would add them to his EP.
Overall the recording went well and we got everything done in the time with some time left to spare at the end, which is always a good thing.