Recording Instruments

              For the recording of it, I chose to record every take by making a playlist for every microphone used which helped me later on when I had to edit the track. I chose to record the band in one day at first we used the techniques I was confident with and only after I got a good sound I can rely on I went experimenting with different microphone choice and positions. At first, we recorded the piano as a guide by using a spaced pair of DPA 4090 and a room microphone at the first take we left the room microphone inside the small LRC1 live room and them I realized that I have to use an echo chamber so I choose the hallway to be my echo chamber. 

             I told Andres to play and I experiment with different positions on the small hallway until I got a decent reverberant sound, which blended perfectly. We tried the same thing with the drum kit but unfortunately the reverb tail was quite short and tended to boost the low mid frequencies which made the kit quite muddy and lacking in detail so we ended up leaving the room microphone inside the small live room for the drum kit. For the drum kit we used 2 microphones for the kick a Shure D12 right inside the kick and a U87 spaced 10’appart. For the snare we used the old SM57 the toms had a pair of Senheiser 421, one for the mid tom and one for the high tom and we used a pair of C414 for the overheads. We also added another SM 57 but a beta one this time on the overhead to try to record the drum kit using only two microphones like they did on the At Last album. I chose the Shure Beta SM57 because has a boost in frequency at around 8kHz which helped us in defining the sparkling of the symbols.

Placing cloths inside the kick drum helps in damping the ringing of it.

Here we can see the position of the room microphone

                  After using the room microphone with the drums, I left it in the same position for the other instruments. By placing the room microphone near the sealing creates a diagonal line, which increases the distance between the instrument and the microphone hopefully achieving a tape like sound, because high frequencies tend to be lost with the distance and I also thought that with the distance I will keep the dynamics of the instruments in range. 

 For the base guitar, I used the omnidirectional setting on the u87 placed on the side of the cone and I took the direct output of the base amplifier as well.

                 Having two channels on the base guitar let me room to choose between them for example the amplifier signal is heavy on low frequencies and the u87 has mote top end which gives a unique vibe to the track. If we listen to the original track the base has more detail added to it. 

                 We recorded the electric guitar in a similar way but instead of having a line output, we put a second cardioid C414 microphone on the side of the Orange amplifier cone.