Who would have thought it, in my role as a music technician, I do lighting as well now. The University received delivery of some new lights for St Pauls Hall and a sales consultant from Stage Electric to program them and find a place for them on our lighting desk. The fixtures in question were from the COLORado range from Chauvet, they were going to be put into the correct modes and addressed by the consultant Read more…
JDaviesAudio is moving to a new home and this means building a new studio! We have our plans in place now and its time to get going. The first lot of flightcases have been loaded in and some of the equipment has made it to its final location already. The plans currently contain a separate control room, live room and vocal booth spread over 3 floors for effect sound isolation. The live room has fantastic acoustics Read more…
I have recently started working as a technical assistant in music and media at Huddersfield University. One of my new colleagues has just brought a hang drum and so we have decided to get in the studio and have some fun with it. We took 2 DPA 4011’s and put them through some API preamps and then through an SSL924 into Protools. This was a bit of a writing session for Fred and an experimental Read more…
Whatsername was a very fun track to mix but not without its challenges. I wanted to get it across the faders of the Audient desk that I was using instead of mixing it entirely in the box. This meant that over the 2 or 3 mix sessions that I had I needed to keep tracking sheets of fader positions and EQ settings but meant that I got some extra colouration from the transformers in the Read more…
This Day we focused on getting some drum samples, we were aiming to get some particulally clean and characterful samples from a black panther snare. Our first decision was to remove as much from the room as possible; we removed all of the cymbals and toms and dampened the kick drum by putting a coat over it. We then tuned the snare and put 2 pieces of moon gell on it. This didn’t quite have Read more…
Green 2 Today we had a 2 hour recording session focusing on guitar and bass again. We tacked lead guitar, some textural guitar parts before re-tracking bass. The set up was very similar to the last recording session, using a fender telecaster in to an orange amp. For the textural parts we added in delay and reverb from DD7 and Polaris pedals respectively. The guitar signal went straight into a DI box, the output going Read more…
Green 4 Vocals In this recording session we tracked Vocals, we began the recording session at 09:30, not an ideal time of day for vocals! Because of the early time I was extra careful to be warming up my voice from the time I woke up. We began by getting a Neumann M147 – a valve condenser. We got set up in the control room with a reflection filter because I wanted to be able Read more…
Green 2 Guitar On the 10 th we went in to track most of the guitar tracks in a 2 hour session. We went in with a starting point for the signal path from our last recording session. We used a fender telecaster, going into an Orange TH30. On the floor we had a few of my own guitar pedals but for the actual tracking we used a Boss Blues Driver, a Boss DD7 and Read more…
Greenrooms 2 Today we made our first guitar takes, we have taken a look at using a fender twin but it didn’t deliver a tone that we thought was quite there, we have also looked at a marshal and a messa boogie. We finally settled on an Orange TH30 OF AMP. In this session we tracked the lowest gain guitars, the double tracked rhythm guitar. On the floor we had a tube screamer to push Read more…
In the recording session today we re tracked drums to try and capture a more aggressive sound across the board, particularly with the snare. We also set out to track bass as well at the same time. The session started at 9am and we started by discussing what we would aim to do in that session. Having already had a drum tracking session this year we were much quicker to get set up the way Read more…