Recording Sarah Hughes
On Wednesday 9th November 2016 Paul Finney asked me if I would help record his singer song writer friend. The recording session was to be booked for Wednesday 16th November 2016. He said she wanted to record three of her own original tracks which were simply acoustic guitar and vocals. This would be an easy task as I had recorded singer song writers a lot in the past and know techniques which work well to keep away the spill from the guitar mic and vocal mic.
Wednesday 16th November 2016
I arrived at the studio for 18:00 where I met Paul to setup the live room before Sarah arrived.
We setup the studio with two AKG C414s for the guitar where one would be positioned at aorund the 15th fret, and the other near the sound hole. This meant we could mix them together and get a good mix of the high and low frequencies for use in the mixing stage.
We set the microphones to a figure-8 polar pattern so that the vocals were not picked up on them and were out of the range. We then decided to use a Shure SM7b on the vocals, which is a very good vocal microphone and has very good isolation
We had some issues with Pro Tools during the setup process with the I/O not being picked up, so we called the technician in to resolve the problem and then got on with the session again. This problem took up a good hour at least as we needed to reboot the whole system and go through a lot of troubleshooting. Once we had fixed the problem we moved on to the recording.
The recording went very smoothly and with very few faults. We did a few takes of each track she had to record, but resulted to only recording two of the three tracks she wanted to do because time was against us.
Paul took the tracks off after the session for mixing and sent them on to Sarah. She messages Paul saying that we did a very good job and she is pleased with the result, so posted them to her Facebook page.
Sarah Hughes - Oh Hughes. Credit: Paul Finney
