Side Project and learning Live Mixing

Side Project Week 4 Blog 1

On Tuesday Phil and l went into the Neve Studio to lay down some bass guitar tracks for a song l wrote called, Foolish Ole Me (Ok the song title may be changed later). To get the feel for the song, (as I'm a guitar player). I'm recording the Bass Guitar first as the 2 disciples (Guitar & bass guitar) require different skill sets to pull off a solid performance.

Phil and l decided to use 2 microphones and a DI Box, so we could capture the bass guitar sound and have a blend of different sonic sounds to pick from that would suit the song.

The microphones we used were the.

• Shure B52A

• Sennheiser MD421

We also used a DI Box to capture a straight sound from the bass guitar.

Here are some pics of the session below.

Setup for the day.

The tuner l used is called the Snark.

A pic of me playing bass guitar.

Started editing Bass Guitar and Drums. As you can see Phil's drumming was right in time with the click track. My bass work needed some adjustments made.

If you're wondering why l have the bass guitar sitting on my left leg, it's because it feels more comfortable, as l use to play classical guitar 30 years ago and it still feels the right position. l don't think it will ever change, the habit of sticking guitars on my left leg puts my mind in the zone of sitting for classical guitar exams (game on).

The recording session went good and we manage to quickly get some good bass guitar tracks that we can use. It was done and dusted within 2 hours, A big thanks to Phil, who was watching over the Neve console and making sure that the levels were recorded without any distortion bleeding through into the DAW, alright.

The Black Hole Project

After the recording session, we had a chance to work on the Black Hole Project, we were lucky enough to book the Neve studio to do our project in. Then Phil and l spent some time researching sounds that we could use for the project as well as using plugins on the foleys we had created the week before. Here are a couple of pics below of the Black Hole Project session.

Creating a light switch flickering sound.

Adding more plugins to get the light switch flickering sound.

It's a real challenge to duplicate an analog sound and mimic it with a digital DAW sound.

Live Sound Mixing

Wednesday was our first class into learning how to mix bands and artists in a venue or stadium as a front of house (FOH) or monitor audio engineer.

Lecturer Conor Roberts talked about how the live industry ran, and what the industry expected from all people associated with putting a show on and the standard of professionalism which will be expected from all concerned. It was great, just plain facts and the expectation of what an employer wanted. He also explained how the industry worked and how many hours you can be expected to do and how much money people received due to the position they held.

I managed to grab a pic from the lecture.