This project contains 3 parts creating pre production plan as a group, recording session as a group and post production done individually. The group for this project consisted of Ben, Nick, Ryan and myself and the artists we recording were Josh as our pianist and a Natalie as our vocalist both friends of Nick and Ryan. First as a group we gathered and created a preproduction plan for the the recording process including booking the studio time and communicating with the artist. Then as a group we used the pre production plan while setting up the studio control room and live room ready to record the artists. Then finally we individually go off and create our own edits and mixes of the recorded audio to produce our own final bounced WAV files. For project we decided to create a cover of Pink + White by Frank Ocean (2017).

Once we had access to the studio the first thing we did was set up the live room. We positioned the vocalist on the left side of the room with the two rode NT1A's (2022) set up in a stereo configuration. We had the pianist positioned on the right side of the room with a gobo between them and the amplifier used for the piano. We used the gobo to try and prevent bleed from the amplifier into the vocalist microphones (Didn't go well). The SM58 (2022) was set up so the pianist had talked back to the to the control room and I had bought with me an AT2020 (2022) which Nick used so we could talk directly to the control room as well. On one of the NT1A's (2022) we chose as the primary microphone for the vocalist we had a pop filter attached to prevent plosives from hitting the condenser and causing issues in the recording. Everyone in the live room had a pair of headphones on them so they could listen to the control room for ease of communication along with being able to hear themself to help improve their performance. 

This stage was the most difficult for me as I haven't done much mixing before and don't have knowledge about it. I know the basics of compression and EQ but not enough to fully separate and distinguish different elements within a mix. I understand the basics of balancing but not how to combine everything to create a fully balanced mix. 

First thing I did was to try quantize the piano by taking the main piano recording and enabled polyphonic warping within ProTools (2021). I went through and manually re timed all of the piano notes to line up with the grid, once I had done that I went through and did the same to the baseline overdub and root notes overdub. I tried to quantize the vocals but because of the piano bleed it didn't quite turn out right. 

So what I ended up doing was just warping the beginning and ending so fit within the same time span as the piano and adding a warp node in the middle to align the middle of the tracks and that seemed to have worked quite well and it sounded alright for what it was. For the stereo overdub backing vocals I did the same thing and make sure that they were spaced to fit within the time added a centre warp to re align the centre and everything sort of just fell into place. Although the vocals and piano are more aligned now you can still hear the piano playing off beat in the background due to the bleed from the amplifier. To get around this issue using automation I went through an manually muted sections of the vocal track that had just a piano in the background. I did this by automating the volume fader for the track and then I sent the output of that track to another track to adjust its volume overall for the mixing stage.

Next I went through and played around with some EQ and compression on some of the tracks. For the piano I added some EQ I removed some of the lower frequencies and boosted some of the highs to make it a more sound more air like. The bass synth I removed all of the high frequencies and just kept the lows. The root notes I kept the low to low mid frequencies. For the vocals I added an 80 Hertz highpass especially since it's a female vocal there's nothing really below that and it's mostly just noise and bass from the piano. I also  added a high shelf EQ to make it sound more air like to emphasize the vocals. I did some simple compression on the vocals to make it sound more level instead of manually going through and adjusting the levels the compressor does it automatically.

After that I went through and set up the stereo field by panning the bass overdub slightly to the left and the root note slightly to the right because with everything being in the centre the mix sounded muddy so by separating them out just slightly made them appear more in the mix for headphones at least. For the overdub stereo vocals from the vocalist pov I panned the right microphone slightly to the left and the left microphone slightly to the right as the left microphone was facing the wrong direction so it was only picking up the room noise like the piano.

I used this to my advantage by adding reverb to both channels with a more wet signal on the mic facing the room, giving a distant stereo reverb sound to these backing vocals. After all that I went through and set the levels of everything buy first lowering the bass and the root note slightly. I kept the main vocals at 0 and tried to balance everything around them. The backing vocals I set a -10 because I wanted them to be in the background and not very present however I do feel listening to it a couple days later that I should have lowered it slightly more because the timing is still slightly off its causing a weird delay/phasing issue. I brought the master fader down slightly just so that everything wasn't clipping and the mix was bounced ready or upload.

What I learned:

For this project I learnt to do Multi-Track Recording (2022) in Protools (2022) and do an in the box mix as I didn't have access to a console after the initial recording session. I also learned more about the artform of mixing itself as up untill this point I only had some basic practise on the consoles experimenting with sample songs given to us. But to be able to mix a song that we had recorded ourselves was quite the experience. I had to learn about balancing a mix and how to separate out the different elements through the use of stereo panning and volume. Along with using EQ to help prevent the mix from sounding muddy by removing overlapping frequencies between the elements to make them stand out more in the mix. I learnt most of this from Gibson, D. (1997). The art of mixing a visual guide to recording, engineering and production and Owsinski, B. (2014). The Mixing engineer's handbook.

What Obstacles did I face:

The group work went well in the end but for me it was a little hard as I am a bit headstrong and prefer to work alone most of the time. But for this project I let go and let people do their jobs and all worked out well in the end. I'd also never worked with talent before so learning how to encourage them to do another take after another take just so that we can all be happy with the final recording was interesting. Due to the way that we had recorded some of the elements mixing was difficult in a number of ways. We didn't use a click track to record too so the timing was off for both the pianist and vocalist. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I like things to be in time so I went through and quantized the piano which then put the vocals out of sync. So I was going backwards and forth trying to fix it and ended up settling with just the piano being quantized with the vocals being roughly synced to the piano.

What failed:

I discovered while we were packing up that the stereo pair of rode NT1A's (2022) the left one had been mis-positioned so is actually facing the room not the vocalist. It's a simple mistake but it made mixing difficult as we didn't have that stereo image that we wanted so I had to adapt. I still kept it as a stereo pair but on the one that was facing the wrong way I just added a lot of reverb to make it sound like a very wet stereo mix and with just slight panning left and right for each mic I think made it sound OK in the end by itself. 

Once we had finished recording I closed Pro Tools and reopened it to make sure everything was working correctly but it hadn't been saved so there was no tracks or playlist. luckily Pro Tools records everything as separate files so I was able to go back through after the fact and recreate all of the playlists on all the tracks.

What did I enjoy and what went well:

I really enjoyed the recording process I love using the audient consoles and mixing with them. The atmosphere of the recording day was really good and I enjoyed my time there and everyone worked well together. Although I didn't know much about mixing I did enjoy the process of playing around with the mix until I got it to sound the way I wanted it too. At first I was struggling with the piano quantisation but once I learned how to warp properly in ProTools (2022) I then really enjoyed the process of re timing everything. Once everything finally fell into sync I was really happy with the result. This whole class and experience definitely does make me want to get my own console and recording room so I can keep doing this sort of thing and get better at it. 

As a group we were able to do things efficiently and in a timely manner because we all were good at the job roles that we had given ourselves. The talent was also willing to work with us to create a recording we were all happy with at the time and do as many takes and restarts as we needed due to technical issues like not hitting record or not recording on the correct track. Overall was a good experience and I learnt alot for next time.

What would I do next time:

The main thing for next time would definitely be recording with a click track to help with the post production side of things. Although it's good to work together by doing our roles separately it would have been good to double check everyone's work to make sure everything is done correctly like checking microphone placement, making sure Pro Tools is saved to the correct location along with console operations and routing.  Additional recording would be good for this project we only did one main recording which we use for the final product. Looking at it now I would have liked to have had multiple takes that we could have picked from as well as done more practise takes to make sure everything was working well and to make sure our talent was well warmed up. Because there was no warm up the take we used was the first one we took where the vocalist and pianist weren't quite warmed up. 

Listening to the final mix a couple days later I realised I should have lowered the backing vocals bit more and fixed up some of the timing as it's causing a weird phasing and or delay issue which doesn't sound right in the beginning of the song. While I was mixing it I was happy with how is was sounding but listening to it now I'm not as happy with it. There are some moments that I think sound alright but there are a lot of others I don't think sound good at all mostly due to timing. I do think if I did spend more time on the mix I could make it sound a little bit better, but I'll save that for the next project where we can learn from our mistakes moving forward.