In the pre production plan we decided to have each instrument in its own corner, we had the drums in the top right, the vocalist in the top left, the guitar and amp in the bottom left and the bass was recorded though DI. This way everyone could see each other including into the control room. In Week 7 we had a whole class dedicated to setting up and micing a drum kit along with a brief overview of how to mix the kit together. One of the helpful things we learned was where to position the overheads making sure they are the same distance from certain elements like snares and cymbals if you want to make those sounds stay in the centre of the mix. 

We planned to use studio 4816 B as it has 16 channel recording capability but on the day of the recording session the extra eight channels weren't working due to an interface malfunction. To get around this issue we decided to downmix a few of the microphones to free up some channels so we can record everyone simultaneously. The room mic was matrixed into both of the overheads and we decided not to record the toms as they would be picked up by the overheads anyway. This gave us three extra channels which we used for the vocals,  guitar and bass. There was an issue with bleed into the vocalist microphone so we decided to do an overdub recording of just the vocals by themselves along with another overdub of the guitar as a solo. 

Mixing was a fun yet long process that took me two weeks to do because I would finish a mix and bounce it, listen to it for a few days and go back and re edit the pieces I think needed to be changed. Then repeat the process over and over again until I was happy with the final result which was revision 5. Throughout all of the revisions the one thing I kept wanted to change was the vocals as they didn't quite sit right in the mix. They were either too loud or too quiet and if I added compression it didn't like how it sounded. So there was a lot of back and forth making them quieter and louder until I was happy with where where in the mix. I decided to keep them slightly louder as it gives it that live impression where the vocalist is the lead.

The third revision is when we added the ramps which I decided to just hardpan the bass right and re-amp left and hardpan the guitar left and re-amp right. I had some automation throughout the track starting with the vocals at the end I reduced the amount of reverb so it sounded more cleaner and a bit more intimate and added it back at the end to add to the intensity of the outro. 

I had to adjust the levels of the guitar solo in the middle of the song to bring them up because it as too quiet with nothing else around it. I ended up creating bus tracks for the drums, bass and guitar and the vocals were just on their own track. This allowed me to mix multiple tracks down to 1 to make overall mixing easier along with soloing instruments is now one click instead of several. We were told with mixing to aim for -18dB on the master fader using classic protools metering which I initially did by lowering the master fader until the average was -18dB. I had to adjust this over the course of the mixing sessions as adjusting the different elements change the overall volume. 

I used simple effects onto a number of the tracks i.e compression and EQ. The vocals had a slight bit of reverb on them and I didn't go too hard with the compression of the EQ I mostly use them just to tame and shape the sound so the elements would worked around each other. Because we had re-amped the wrong guitar track the timing was very slightly off but with only a couple warp pins I was able to bring it back into time with the rest of the tracks. I initially didn't want to use the ramps as a liked the song as it was initially but because we had to use them I decided to just do the hard pans which I think sounded alright in the end.

The bass re-amp had a lot of high end sound to it compared to the original which I removed using an EQ to try and make them sound spatially balanced as it was much brighter and louder on one side compared to the other. Same with the guitar I had to EQ some of the high end off because it was just sounding too loud on one side. Because we had to downmix the room mic into the overheads it meant we had no control over it in post over which meant we were stuck with how they were recorded. I think the overheads ended up sounding alright in the end. The kick I left in the centre but I had panned the snare slightly to the left and the hi-hat slightly to the right, I know that's not how the instruments were positioned but it's what I found sounded best within the drum mix with the overheads. 

The original vocal track that we had recorded was unusable due to the amount of bleed from the other instruments into. Which is why we recorded an overdub of the vocals which we did in two parts the first half and second half track. Some sections of the vocal track I manually adjusted the gain of as some bits were too quiet and while others were way too loud and although a compressor would have done the same job I didn't want to have to compress everything just for the quiet pieces that's why I did some slight manual compression. 

The EQ's throughout all of the tracks are all based off of presets from the default seven band EQ plugin within Pro Tools (2022). For instance the snare I went through all of the default snare presets and picked one that sounded the best and then slightly modified it when needed. Same goes for all the other instruments I just picked the best preset for the sound I was after. During the middle of the song where there's a guitar solo initially the drummer was hitting the snare to keep time for everyone which they asked for us to mute in the mixing process.

Both the guitar and bass re-amps we're out of time, the guitar was out because we had grabbed the wrong take by accident when recording and the bass was out due to an issue of importing the files in to the main session. The bass was easy to fix by using warp pins I only had to pin the beginning and ending and it realigned however the guitar being in different take had slight differences. Meaning I had to manually re warp multiple sections of the track and the end was too far out of time to be usable so I dropped it.

What I learned:

For this project we had to improvise a fair bit for instance with the second interface not working we had to decide there and then what mic's we were and weren't going to record or which ones we could mix together to free up channels for the other instruments. Working with artists and getting their feedback and being able to work with them to create a recording that we were both happy with. While setting up for recording I had a moment where I forgot there was a live band playing because it just sounded perfect and that  made me realise that this is what I want to do, I want to be a recording/ mixing engineer. Although it took me 2 weeks to finalises the mix I enjoyed every moment of it. I enjoyed working the different elements and trying to make it do what I wanted it to do and learning how to position instrument in a mix. I also learned about VCA tracks and how they are used instead of bus tracks and that it's better to mix using all the faders instead of just the bus and master faders.

What Obstacles did I face:

Not being able to record all 16 tracks simultaneously was more of an annoyance than an obstacle as we could have recorded the drums by themselves and just overdubbed the other instruments. However because we wanted it to be a live band recording we had to sacrifice some drum elements to free up space for more important things like the vocals and guitars. With re-amping it would have been ideal to record directly into the main project file but due to an issue we couldn't debug we had to record in a different project file and then re import into the original. This made the timing off on top of the fact I had taken the wrong guitar take. I had a talk with David about my mix and pointed out that me mixing with the bus tracks was technically cheating. So in the beginning it was a little hassle to go back and remix however I'm much more happy with the final result now both audibly and visually the project file looks a lot better and is a lot more easier to mix too.

What failed:

I wanted to spend more time on a mix due to my slight OCD I just couldn't get it right. Every time I listen to it I could think of something that I could change and then every time I change one thing it would change another and it would keep going and going. And although I was happy with it there was always something I could point out as an issue that I wanted to change. The pre production plan was half right because on the night of recording I had to go to the tech office over seven times to collect different things that we had forgotten to grab the first time.Things like extra patch leads, XLR cables, microphones and connectors. Although it was out of our control another thing that failed was the extra audio interface and with the limited IO on the imac's its always been an issue.

What did I enjoy and what went well:

I really enjoyed the recording and mixing process I love the atmosphere around recording a band. There was a moment where I was standing at the console trying to fix an issue with the second interface and the band was all set up and ready and had started practising/ warming up. It go to a point I'd forgotten that there was a live band in the other room because it just sounded like it was just playing off of Spotify or e. Although I spent a long time with the mix I did enjoy the process and it really makes me want to get a console so I can start a small home studio so I can do more of this. I liked learning about automation in Pro Tools and learning about using VCA tracks because it will definitely help me in the future. Being able to mix an actual band that we had recorded gave me a certain level of pride with the end result. Compared to all of the mixes we have done so far of bands I know nothing about being able to mix one that I had actually recorded myself with something different.

What would I do next time:

Next time I want to make sure there's time to do reamping within the recording session. That way we can get feedback from the artists so they have more input compared to what we did which was recorded after the fact without any of the artists approval or input. If I had the extra tracks available to me to record I would have liked to have been able to record proper DI tracks for both of the instruments on top of their processed outputs. Now that I know the proper way of mixing using all of the faders instead of just the bus tracks next time I will definitely be mixing correctly from the beginning. And finally when it comes to this project I would have liked to have taken more photos of the day of the recording and of the setups it was one of the things we forgot to do.

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