AUS230 Post Mortem Reflection

Ethan Reynolds
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read
Beau shredding away

For this trimesters major project I decided I would work on my own to record, mix and master 4 tracks for the psych rock band Apollo’s Son. I had never worked on my own in the past and knew as my time was coming to an end at SAE I should get some solo work experience in there before I left. The project overall went okay, there were a few things that went very wrong however I still managed to get some decent results considering.

Overall this project has been plagued by poor time management. There have been many issues that could have been rectified if only I had left myself more time to do so. For example, in the second last recording session I had before I had to start mixing my musician didn’t bring his amp in saying, “don’t worry we’ll just re-amp it” which was easier said than done because I didn’t have the time left to do that, so the only option I had was to record two DI signals, a wet and dry one before and after his pedal board. For majority of the project I used the wet DI with all of his effects, using the amp simulator Sansamp PSA-1 worked wonders in boosting the quality of tones. There were a few occasions where the wet DI was over saturated and I had to use the dry DI, along with various modulation and reverb plugins to replicate the intended tone.

Typically when recording bands I would live-track them, as I found it to be a better method at capturing the energy that is unleashed when a band plays live. My artist wanted to have many different guitar harmonies and layers in certain areas of the song, so we decided that multi-tracking would be the best method to get a tight recording that wasn’t muddy and cluttered in any way. I have only briefly multi-tracked before and never done it on my own so I was weary at first but I knew this band would greatly benefit from multi-tracking.

Beau’s pedal board

I first recorded all the drums to a click, and then came in to record the bass to the drums, where we found out at some points the drummer had gone out of time, so we recorded the bass to a click track and had to re-record the drums to the bass track/click, and then overdub all guitars and vocals. The guitar recording process was a very positive one. I got to play the roll of a producer at points because I had the guitarist set up in the control room playing straight into the desk, when he was coming up with harmonies I would advise him on guitar tones, and what pedals he should and shouldn’t use. It was a new experience for me as all bands I have worked with in the past have been in the recording studio away from me and my suggestions. There were points where I would suggest playing an ambience track underneath the rhythm, adding another harmony to a certain section, or overdubbing auxiliary guitar sounds, such as strumming the strings above the nut of the guitar, or hitting muted strings to ensure they would cut through the mix.

Recording Drums with Room Mic and Omni-Directional Dirt Mic directly behind Jack

As this was my first solo project I found managing a band and recording session all on my own was daunting at first, but as I persisted I found there was much to be gained by working on my own. I have become much more proficient at session management in and out of the studio and I have also greatly improved my drum recording techniques. Also due to having nothing but DI guitars I found using amp simulators weren’t as hard as I thought, they can be quite versatile and pleasant unlike I had originally thought. I had never worked with wet DI signals before, always capturing the dry signals and finding no use for the wet because I would be recording the amplifier.

I was inspired by other psychedelic rock bands for some of the guitar tones such as The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Tame Impala. Originally I planned on experimenting with different recording techniques on the amps that I had never used before, one for example was facing a mic towards the back of the guitar cabinet to capture more low end for a larger sound. Because my musician didn’t bring his amp in to record I wasn’t able to experiment with guitar recording as much as I had hoped. This affected my ability to replicate some of those famous guitar tones but in a way I am thankful for it. I realized it was more important to work on guitar tones that serve the song, rather than those that are synonymous with the genre of music the band is playing.

Willow playing guitar

there were many things during this project that changed my original plan for better and for worse. My artist had not written lyrics for all of his songs by the time we were ready to record vocals, luckily he had written them for one song which I was able to record and use for my 5.1 surround sound mix, and when we booked the session to record the rest he didn’t come in, saying he was sick. This meant my plan changed from recording 4 full band songs, to 1 full band song and 3 instrumentals. Luckily though the band’s instrumental work is very layered and textured so it still stood on it’s own as an interesting piece of music without vocals. This problem was a direct result of poor time management, and the way to fix this issue would have been to start working earlier than I had, the same can be said about not getting any amp recordings and working only with DI. I was also planning on delivering the band a logo designed by a student from outside of SAE and that is coming along nicely, should be finished within the next few days.

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