Musings from a Matchbox

Having worked on this task as a piece called “Whisper Not”, I ended up with an unsatisfactory result, in that the takes that I had recorded could have been better and required a lot of chopping and changing, which would degrade the quality of the finished project. In this event, I decided to start again with a new piece. I recorded a gospel choir, accompanied by piano, contrabass and drumkit. Firstly, I recorded the intstruments, as a basic starting point and as a guide for the vocals to be added later. This I did by using Rode NT1As, an SE Z3300As, 2 Oktava MK-012s, and Shure SM58s.

After the instruments, I recorded the choir using 2 SE Z3300As in Blumlein configuration, two Oktava MK-012s in AB and the soundfield microphone suspended from the ceiling. 

I have included diagrams on paper with my CD. 

The mixing mainly involved Equalising and balancing the many different signals together. I stripped the silence out of the vocals and kick drum, as they had picked up other sounds such as the headphones and the snare. I then compressed many of the tracks through submixes and put an overall reverb on the master track.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Production & Recording For Musicians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.