Recording Sharks Over China
Nathan Hird ask me to help him record a band in the studio on Friday 24th February 2017.
The band was a 6 piece, up and coming metalcore band from Derby, called Sharks Over China who recorded two tracks for their EP with us.
The aim for them was to record the drums, vocals, and guitar in the studio on the 24th February as we were in the studio from 18:00 - 24:00.
We set up the studio ready to record one the drums as that is the most important part. We used 2 AKG C414s for overhead, a Shure SM57 for the snare, and an AKG D112 for the kick drum.
We tested for levels and then went ahead with the recording. We realised that we didn't have much time to get two full tracks down, so tried to get through it as quick as we could but still get everything we needed done.
We then moved on to guitars. We had several guitars with us on the day as Paul Finney brought some guitars in with him so that they could get several different sounds for the tracks. The guitarists tried out a few of the guitars until they found something they felt they liked the sound of and went with it.
The guitarist ran the guitar through some pedals before recording so that they could achieve the sound they wanted.
The setup for the guitar was a running into a pedal board with various different effects, and from that in to a Marshall amp head, and then into a Fender Twin cab.
Once the guitars were recorded in we moved onto vocals. For the vocals we used a Shure SM58. We resulted to this because we tried other microphones and they just weren't right for this kind of track. We recorded it all in and took a few takes to find the best one, as we also did with the guitar parts.
Once we had everything we needed we moved onto the second track. Luckily for us they had already recorded the drum track for the second song, so we had more time to play with than we originally thought.
We moved on to doing the guitars for the second track using the same setup as for the other song. We took a few takes to make sure we had enough material and then moved onto the vocals.
Again we used the same setup with some baffles around to dampen the sound help dampen the sound and reduce the room reverb.
This was a much better result and we wish we had done it for the first track, but we ran out of time.
Nathan collected the tracks and took them off to be mixed.
Overall the session was a success as we got everything done that we needed. The band still had some more to ass to the sonfs ad came in at a later date with Nathan to complete them.