06/09/18 – Recording vocals for an audio book. This was my first recording session as a member of the technical team for the School of Music, Humanities and Media at The University of Huddersfield. With my experience recording my line manager asked me to do make this recording then send it off to the client nice and quickly. I was also asked if some of my less experienced colleagues could accompany me; I objected to this on the grounds that the control room isn’t very large. We reached a compromise where two of the colleagues in question could shadow and assist me in the setting up of the session before the vocal actors arrived, and the remaining colleague could sit in the recording session with me.
There were four vocal actors, each of them I set up with a Neumann U87 with a pop shield, I also used a stereo matched pair of 414’s as room mics. I decided in advance to give them all the same headphone mix as they wouldn’t need variety. We used headphone satellite boxes to duplicate the signal and send it out to all four of them, this also gave each of them an independent level control. I used SSL preamps for all of the different input signals giving me a lovely clean signal.
Before the actors came I asked one of my colleagues to sit in front of each of the microphones so I could roughly set gain in order to do a headphone mix and so I could pan the spot mics into the same position as the stereo room mics. Then the actors arrived so we swapped over leaving just myself and one colleague to run the session. The actors were fantastic, amazing character in their voices, ineradicable levels of diction, captured perfectly by the microphones we chose. They recorded two eight minute sections and then listened back and made four or five overdubs of different sections that we didn’t feel were as clearly said as they could have been. Once the actors were all happy we said good-bye and they left the studio. I returned to the control room to make some small EQ changes and then print the mix to stereo. Once the print had started I went through to the live room to help de-rig. At some point in the next twenty minutes of moving equipment around and setting up studio for a drum recording in the evening my colleague went into the control room and turned of the computer. I was in shock when I found this and asked him what he had done. He didn’t log off, he didn’t save anything, he just held the power button down on the mac!
Auto save is an amazing thing, I wish it was more amazing. The raw audio files had all saved but the bounce was gone, the project with all of its cuts and cross fades at the overdubs was gone. The saved file wasn’t even close to completed. I have learned a valuable lesson here. No matter how reliable your equipment is, you can’t rule out something going wrong, human error, things do go wrong for everyone and me saving before printing would have saved me a lot of time. Here began the hard work, I collected all of the raw files and copied them across to a memory stick, this time keeping a second copy on the original machine, and went to a small stereo studio down the corridor to begin the job of putting this jigsaw together. Using the length of tracks to gather things them together into takes was the first step, then listening to each of the short overdubs to work out where in the sixteen minutes that section goes took a while but we got there. I then made some greater changes than I did first time around making the final project that bit better. All’s well that ends well. Lesson learned
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