We successfully recorded the guitar tracks this week, which Adam provided. He went into the live room to set up his guitar and sort out the amp to get the sound he wanted. Callum was on the desk and James Glenister was in charge of Pro Tools. I had had roles in the last two recording sessions, so for this I let others have a go. Alex and Clem were the engineers, and they helped mic up Adam in the live lounge. The mics we used are listed below:
- An sE2200aii Room Mic. We set this up far away from Adam and his amp, and set its polar pattern to Omni-directional, in order to better capture the sound of the room. We also turned on the Low Shelf EQ on the mic, helping to eliminate some of the unwanted lower frequencies.
- Two Shure SM57s, both positioned facing the amp. Alex and Clem positioned one right in the centre of the speaker, and the other on the edge. This makes for a different pickup. Playback mic at the edge sounded fuzzier, while the centre mic sounded crisp and clearer. As the mics are so close together they are in phase, so we reversed the phase on one of the mics and got a good balance of the two sounds.
Callum and James zeroed the desk and set up the necessary tracks in Pro Tools, and then we went into the live room to look at and photograph the mic set up. We disagreed somewhat with Adam’s choice of amp sound, but after some tweaking we arrived at something we all felt sounded decent. The room mic sounded nice when levelled, but the SM57s picked up quite a bit of unwanted low frequencies, so we used the Shelving EQ found on the desk to remove the frequencies below 50Hz.
The actual takes were done rather quickly. I was placed in charge of Talkback, and so relayed what Luke, and those on the desk and PC wanted done back to Adam.
We had some issues with a section of the song where a guitar fill is done, which we felt was putting Adam off his next chord slightly, so James Woodliffe went and talked to him and we agreed to drop it when recording the double-track. We had decided to double-track the guitar and vocals before, in order to give us more freedom when mixing the song individually. We also needed to re-record a couple of sections where Adam messed up slightly, but re-recording went smoothly, and we gave him plenty of time to get back into the song with 8 seconds of pre-roll.