Sophia Shaan's Blog

Mixing in general I started off by listening to the drums first and then I flexed the time on the tracks that are needed to be in time. After that I started placing the tracks into summing stacks because I can place plugins to tighten the sound on the stack itself in the later stage. I then add a gain plugin on all of the tracks with mono on. Gain settings on the instruments are -4.8  on the drums and strings, -8.2 on the guitars and -2.7 on the second lead vocals. After that, I added noise gate on some of the tracks (Except the bass, strings and midi) to get rid of some of the bleeds. The threshold are around -42 to -60 and the hold at around 0 - 30ms.  Instrument plugins (Bus 1) Drums - Gain , noise gates, eq , compressor   (Bus 1 ) Bass - Gain , Bass  amp, channel EQ, compressor (Bus 5) Guitar - Gain, noise gate, eq, compressor , enveloper  (Bus 6) Strings - Gain, eq, compressor, pitch correction  (Bus 4) vocals - Gain , eq, compre...

Recording a full band For starters, we contacted a band called SOAP (Son Of A Policeman) an indie band and we recorded three songs for them. We managed to set a time and recorded them all in one night. We came early for the session and took about two hours to set up a 7 member band before the set time. During the recording session we provided refreshments for the band as well as marking where they should stand and face to eliminate any confusion and ease the flow of recording. Studio Setup There are no E Guitar 3 for this song. The drums is a 8 mic set up, we decided to use the AKG instead of the MD421 which we planned on using but because of its large diaphragm and we wanted to minimise bleed as much as possible so we decided to switch it out. We also changed out the overheads from the AKG C414 to the AKG 451 B because we wanted a small diaphragm instead. For the musician's mixes, we used two audio interfaces because there weren't any power cables left so th...

OVERALL CONCLUSION  Drums (10 mic Set Up) For our drums we wanted to minimise bleed also obtain clarity by figuring out the proximity and placement of the drums. MICROPHONES USAGE AND PLACEMENT (Final) Overheads  - Two sets of AKG C414 XLII - AB technique - Input 13 & 19 (Phantom Power) Bass Drum In  - One dynamic AKG D110 - Off Axis - Input 17 Tom 1  - One dynamic Sennheiser md421 ii - Input 16 Floor Tom  - One dynamic Sennheiser md421 ii - Input 20  Snare Top  - One dynamic Sennheiser md421 ii - Input 15 Snare Bottom  -  One dynamic SM57 - Pointing towards the snare wires - Input 14 Hi-Hat  - One MXL 993 pencil condenser - Pointing away from the drum set towards the edge of the hi -hat - Input 12  Room Mic  - One Ribbon Mic - Facing the middle of the drum set - Input 21 (Phantom Power)  - All toms and snare microphones are pointed towards its focused areas, especi...