T4.

5 Client Recordings
The client recordings project was a completely new and fresh task to work on. Having been
producing our own work for a while, it was great to work on something that we hadnt written or
created in any way. It was also an interesting experience organising the recording times with the
performers and taking the wheel of the process as a whole. It really gave me a great insight as to
how a recording project is run in the music industry.
Throughout the project we used similar techni!ues for each song with regards "# and
compression, especially when it came to the drums. $ump It %p and &hat &ould 'ou (o are
extremely similar when it came to the drums. They were miced up the same way and then mixed
very similarly. The only difference was when it came to "#ing the )ick (rum in $ump It %p* we
boosted a lower fre!uency to give the bass drum a bigger punch in the song.
&e also triggered the kick and the snare for these two songs +with our own recorded
samples,. To get the sampled kick sound, we created a bass tunnel using the shells of old kick
drums. This means that the bass gets carried through the tunnel and creates a more subby sound.
&hen we miced the drum we used three mucrophones* one on the front of the kick +for the slap,,
one inside the first kick drum and one right at the end of the bass tunnel.
To add the triggers we had to use -udio to .core, this brought up the sound waves of the
selected audio track and marked the dominant sounds, after some fiddling we had all of the kick
drum waves selected and then we added the /I(I note of the sampled kick drum to each of these
marked waves, thus ensuring that the new kick drum sound is in exactly the same place as the
recorded kick drum0 otherwise we would get almost a delay effect on the drums.
1ooking at the vocals, we first used /elodyne to correct any notes sung that were out of
tune, and to make everything just that little bit better. &e could also use /elodyne to
reduce or increase the volume of particular notes +if the singer decided to suddenly blast
out some notes for example,. -nother great thing we found with /elodyne was that we
could edit the timing of the vocals0 so if a singer goes a bit out of time, we can move the
notes to be in time, or extend2shorten notes to make them sung at the right rhythm.
The vocals on all of the tracks were compressed. The reason for compressing
vocals is to bring out the !uieter parts of the songs, while decreasing in volume, the louder
parts of the track. (oing this takes away from the dynamic range of the vocals, but creates
an even volume of which to work with. -fter compressing, you shouldnt get any sudden
jumps in volume and so you have much more headroom in your vocals, meaning you can
raise the volume of the vocals much higher without distorting.
"#ing the vocals was important as well. &e first put on a High $ass 3ilter, at around
455H6. The reason for this is because anything bellow 455H6 in a vocal track is
unimportant and just muddies the track. Then, for a female vocalist, I add a 7 or 8 d9 boost
at around 4:55H6, this just brings out the vocals and gives them more clarity. 3or a male
vocalist the H6 level is slightly lower +around 4555 ; 4755H6,.
&ith the guitars there wasnt much needed except a small amount of "# to put them
in their space in the mix +often at around :55H6,, a small amount of compression to even
out the overall volume and to give us more headroom and occasionally some volume
automation if anything jumps out too loud.