Recording bands in the studio!

So this week didn’t go how I said it would last blog. I never got around to recording my own music in the studio although I plan on doing that this coming week, but instead I joined Kyle in the TLA to live record one song for the Jump Doubles, a local Perth band who Kyle had offered to be recorded sometime recently.

The night before we were set to record the band they played a free show at Badlands, I met the singer/guitarist and bass player at the show after they played a killer set. I was feeling absolutely bloody nervous about the day coming up, I felt as though my knowledge in the studio was lacking and I expected we would run into many issues and not get much work done, while also embarrassing ourselves and wasting the bands time.

When the day rolled around I met Kyle at SAE at 10:00 for our studio time, Kyle had written a list of microphones we would in the days leading up to the recording session, so while we waited for the band members to arrive we booked out what we needed. The guitarist/singer and bass player arrived relatively early while the drummer took a small amount of time to arrive. Which was not an issue as it gave us plenty of time to set up the bass, guitar and vocal mic. We were going for a live recording and decided to record both instruments through a DI box just in case the bleed into each microphone was too much. The Drummer was set up in the drum booth, and we used the headphone sends to allow them to hear each other.

We were having issues with the headphone sends, (I had learned a few days after that it was because someone had plugged the wrong chords in the back, so the headphone sends weren’t going where they were supposed to) the only way we managed to properly get that working was by accident, we swapped everything onto headphone send two even though it was plugged into headphone send one. once everything was set up and ready to go the planned one song, turned into about four or five. We had it set up so the band could jam out and we would capture the jam, vocals and all with minimal bleed into the mics. I believe this was the best way to record them because it captures the live energy that makes their shows so appealing (to me anyway).

I seriously underestimated my skills in the studio, I kept a calm head and had a charismatic attitude and approach. Any issues I could not solve Kyle would and vice versa. Together we worked very well and were even told by the band that “this was the best recording experience we have ever had”. We plan on recording bands at least once a week after that session was so successful. Here is a raw recording of the session that Kyle uploaded to his sound cloud.