Unfortunately being part of an underground rock band does not warrant a free pass to take a day off work and so most of the OXY band members were unable to attend the majority of the recording sessions that we had scheduled. Luckily, lead singer Brandon knew his music back to front and could play pretty much all the instruments involved in the song. Our recording sessions so far have taken place in the SAE Icon studio using the standard Protools as our DAW and making use of the various amplifiers, pre-amps and microphones on the campus.

With two successful recording sessions under our belt Brandon and I returned to the studio to undergo a 5 hour session aiming to record bass guitar and the lead vocals for their song The Wasp. We started by auditioning some microphones for the vocal and made a decision on using the TUL FET which gave a lovely bit of body to his voice that we felt the other microphones lacked. This was no surprise to me as for those who don’t know about the TUL, it’s design is based on the famous Neumann U47 FET and is an all round great sounding microphone that we use on a huge variety of instruments at SAE.

In the Icon studio I decided to run the signal through the SPL which has a tube built into it, my idea was to try and distort the signal a little bit and get a bit of a dirty sound going on with the vocal. It took us a little while to get our levels right before we started recording, half way through the second verse I began having second thoughts about the tremendous amount of distortion on the vocal and so I dialled it down a bit. After a few good takes I though it might be a good idea to crank up the distortion all the way and maybe get some more recordings and use them to layer on top of the lead.

Once we were all done with our vocals we spent the next three hours in the Neve studio where our last task was to track the bass. After, performing the rhythm guitar, lead guitar and singing the vocals for the song, Brandon brought out his bass guitar and wired it up to the tie which was sent to an Ampeg BA110 bass amplifier in the live room. The amp was being captured by a Sennheiser E90 microphone which I was using for the first time, as well as an SM57 which were coming in hot through the Neve and into protools. Immediately we got a nice, full bass sound humming through the monitors and there was minor tweaking on the amp before we started tracking. Brandon played consistently well and within an hour we were happy with what we had captured in the session.

The recording is finally complete and is sounding like it will turn out to be a great track for the band to release.

After my previous recording session with OXY we met up again on the 21st of May to track some drums for their song The Wasp. I arrived half an hour before to mic up the drum kit to make sure we could get started as soon as possible. Unlike the last session, I had access a variety of different microphones and used about 9 of them in total.

The setup was as follows; Inside the kick drum was a Lewitt DTP RTX kick microphone while on the outside about a foot away was a TULL FET. The snare was rigged up with both top and bottom microphones, these being the trusty Shure SM57‘s. Clipped on to the mid and high toms were tom microphones from a set of AKG drum kit set that SAE have on campus. An AKG C451 pencil microphone pointed at the high hat, of course bleed can be a major issue, especially in the high hat signal so extra care was taken ensuring the microphone was angled away from the rest of the kit. Two AKG C414’s towered over the kit as as overheads and lastly a TULL FET placed about 13 feet away captured the room sound.

The session took place in the Icon Studio again, using Protools. The drum kit was provided on the campus , however, the drummer brought with him his own snare as well as a Zildjian cymbal and high hat. The drummer preferred not to play to click and so it turns out our well thought out plan of recording the guitars first was for the better, as the guitars could be used as a tempo reference and feel more natural for him to play to.

The signals from the drum kit ran through two different pre-amps, the C414 overheads passed through the Neve 8801’s

While the rest of the kit, through a fairly transparent Octopre pre-amp. Adjusting the levels of the kit while the drums were played took about 10 minutes and a friend of mine helped with adjusting the microphones that were not sounding quite right, one of these being the kick drum which seemed impossible to fix.

Once the time had come to begin the recording we broke the track down into sections, focusing on one section at a time. Within an hour we had a full take and began going back and identifying parts where we could improve the timing. The drums inevitably added a lot more life and energy to the song in comparison to the samples I had arranged for Brandon to record the guitars to. The high hats seemed a bit brittle when it opened up but this seemed to be down to the tone of the actual hat rather than a microphone issue. The tom hits are scattered rather scarcely throughout the track but have a pretty good sound when they do hit and the overheads seemed to sound pretty good as well. After battling with the kick drum we decided to leave it and if it cannot be improved in the mix, sampling it out and replacing it, although not ideal can still be an option.

Over all, it was a successful afternoon and before moving on to the vocals and bass the task of editing the drums awaits.