Studio Unit Project

For the next 5 weeks I will be spending some serious time in the studios at SAE... For my major project I've planned to record and mix 3 songs for the band I currently play guitar for; "Nautical Mile" and release them on Bandcamp. We have recently released a 4 song EP that was recorded with programmed drums, and guitars with plug-in amp simulators. It sounds good, but my goal is to keep these recordings more real, with more of a live feel.

I will record one song that has been previously released and two new songs. Demos of these songs were made far in advance.

I will be recording live drums, and I have already recorded most of the guitar and bass parts in the TLA studio at SAE. The guitars have been recorded by miking up my Peavey 6505 head and cab. I used 3 microphones and a dry signal for each track. I'll be recording drums some time within the next few weeks and leaving vocals until last. The reason I want to record drums after guitars is because I like to spend studio time tweaking the guitar parts a little bit and seeing if there is any way they can be improved. I don't want to record drums and then decide to make small changes to the song afterwards - it is a lot easier to quickly change a riff or something than it is mic up a kit and re-record the song. We record guitar to a scratch drum track made with MIDI.

I have quite a few recording and mixing ideas in mind for this project;

For guitars, I have recorded both the dry signal and the amplified signal for each track. When I mix guitars, I like to use elastic audio in ProTools to quantise the guitar tracks and move the transients to be exactly in time with the drums. The 6505 is quite a high-gain amp so the waveforms end up being quite squashed and ProTools has a hard time accurately placing the transient markers in warp mode. My idea is to assign the dry and wet guitars to a group, and use the dry guitar track to determine exactly where the transients are and use it purely as a guide to where I should warp the transients to.

I am well aware that doing this may eliminate the "human" feel from a lot of music; I just think that really tight and perfectly in-time guitars works well for this style of music, and it is the way I personally want to produce music in the future. I think that really overdriven guitars need to be really tight for the listener to hear exactly what is going on.

I am going to use beat-detective on the drums pretty heavily although I am sure it will also involve a lot of manual drum editing. Our songs rely on a very prominent kick and snare drum so I will definitely experiment with some sample enhancement (not replacement, I want to try and keep the original ones in there if I can).

As for vocals, I will record A LOT of harmonies. I mean a lot. I am going to aim to have at least two vocal harmonies throughout most of these recordings. I will also experiment with either Waves Tune or Izotope Nectar to auto-tune the vocals to achieve near-perfect pitch in all the tracks. The vocalist of Nautical Mile is a pretty good singer so I will be using auto-tune to enhance the vocal tracks rather than fix them. I don't want it to be too noticeably processed.

From this project, I just hope to achieve more skills in the studios and a better understanding of mic placement. In previous group projects I have always let someone else make final decisions on mic placement and mix techniques, so I chose to do this project on my own because I want to force myself to experiment with mic placement and recording techniques and come to final decisions by myself rather than leaving that responsibility to someone else.

I am pretty confident that this project will be successful. I have already made a pretty big dent in the recording process having all of the bass and most guitar parts already tracked so with some hard work it should all go relatively smoothly from here.