Over the past few weeks I have had the privilege of coordinating the recording of an underground rock band in Cape Town that perform under the name OXY. OXY are a four piece band featuring a fairly standard instrumentation of rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drums, bass and vocals.

After hearing the band perform live at a local pub I linked up with lead singer and guitarist Brandon Winaar and arranged a few studio sessions to track one of their songs that I really enjoyed which I later found out to be called The Wasp. The track consists of three versus, and three choruses in which the lead guitar is the main feature.

Unfortunately, the drummer was unable to attend the first session and so to ensure that we could still get some tracks down I programmed some drums the previous night as a tempo reference.

Our session took place in the Icon studio at the SAE institute and on the day of the recording we started off tracking the rhythm section using Brandon’s electric guitar and a Line 6 Spider IV 120 amplifier provided on the campus. The sound was captured using a Shure SM 57 and an AKG C451.

The Spider IV has a variety of different tone and texture with a lot of crunch and distortion so it served as a great amplifier for the music that we are recording. My intention was to pair the SM57 with a Tull FET or a similar microphone but unfortunately resources were limited at the time and so we took it upon ourselves to experiment with what was available. Brandon sat in the control room with us and his guitar was sent to the amp in the the live room through a tie, from there the signal came out the amp, into the microphones and ran through the two cherished Neve 8801 pre-amps. During the recording he made very few mistakes and his timing was spot on, thanks to this we managed to get the tracks down fairly quickly and had the freedom to experiment with the sound of the amp.

Brandon was very open to suggestions regarding his playing style and the different tones I wanted to try, overall the session ran smoothly and we moved onto recording the lead section of the guitars.

Using the same amplifier and microphone combination the next step was to find a sound for the lead guitar. Through some trial and error we determined that the tones that worked best with the guitars we had already tracked were settings that provided a cleaner, less distorted effect – this seamed to retain the definition of the transients in the lead riff and paired well with the other more heavily distorted guitar. The tracking ran smoothly as before and after playing back what we had captured over the session it sounded like our hard work was paying of and the song was starting to take shape, leaving us excited for the next session.