BAP 160.2 - Studio Production

SCHOOL OF AUDIO ENGINEERING Dubai

UNIT BAP 160: Studio ProductionBAP 160.2 Logbook

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE BACHELOROF AUDIO PRODUCTION

STUDENT NAME: Pouria Firouzi

DUB: 10548 BATCH CODE: BAP 0610

DATE: WORD COUNT:

Pouria Firouzi DUB 10548

UNIT LECTURER: Randula Da Silva

BAP 140.1 Essay BAP 06102


Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION............................................3PRE-PRODUCTION..........................................4PRODUCTION..............................................9POST-PRODUCTION........................................11CONCLUSION.............................................19REFERENCE LIST.........................................20



INTRODUCTION

This is a report of studio production of trimester 3. Inthis trimester I learned how to use neve88, which is a good digital console. I have to record at least one electric guitar, one bass and a full drum kit. I have some friends to play for me. Mehdi Ansari is my drummer, Pouya Memarzade is my bass and electric guitar player.

“Mehdi” “Pouya”

I’m going to record a cover from Pink Floyd, the name is“Comfortably numb”. This track is going to be instrumental. I’m going to use 12 microphones for drum recording, 2 microphones an a DI-BOX for electric guitar and 1 DI-Box for bass recording.



PRE-PRODUCTION

First step is going to be drum recording. I’m going to start with kick drum. A “Senheizer-e905” microphone is going to placed at the back of the drum inside the hole And will be connected to the snake input 1.

The second microphone is going to be in front of the kick drum and it is “AKG-d112”. It will be connected to input 2 of snake box. Next step will be hi-hat. As alwaysI prefer a condenser microphone for it, I wanted to try SM81 but it was not available and I had to chose SE3, andwill be connected to input 5:



Next microphones are one “Senheizer-e902” for the top ofsnare and one “SM57” for the bottom of it. The e902 will be focused on the center of snare, you can see the exact position of the microphones in the pictures:



Snare’s microphones will get connected to input 3 and 4.Floor tom will have a “SM58” on it and will be connected to input 8:



Two “SM57” are going to be placed on the toms and get connected to input 6 and 7:

Overhead microphones are going to be “AKG-c414” and get connected to input 9 and 10:



Two microphones are remained, one sm57 to talk with my drummer and one U87 for the room microphone and it is going to placed in distance as you see in the picture:



It will not be so high from ground and will get connectedto input 11, drummer’s microphone is connected to input 12.



PRODUCTION Today is the first day of my project in the studio and Ialready spent 2 hours and a half to set up all microphones and cables and testing the signals. It is toomuch but I have reasons, First of all one of the overheadmicrophones had a problem with patterns and after 15 minutes of testing with the supervisor we finally chosen the Omni pattern, which I don’t like for overheads but noother way. The second reason for my delay was the inputs of neve88. Input 7 had problem and I understood after recording the drums. After 2 hours and a half I went to open pro-tools. Now I have a new session 24 bits, 44.1 and everything is synced with neve88. On the neve everything is saved in my name. Inputs and outputs are set up in protools and routing is done on neve. I will add a reference track to put the original music for my players, and all the inputs and the original music are sent to player’s headphone, plus a click track with threeclicks before starting the record.

Signals are set in pre-amps up to levels I want and the drummer started to play. I recorded five times and the last one is better than the others. Aldo my drummer had some mistakes and was out of click sometimes but it’s fare enough for me. This is the time that I understood myinput 7 was not recording so I only have left tom recorded. But it was not a big deal because this track doesn’t need the attack and power of toms so I can use overheads.

Second day in the studio was for recording guitar andbass and I booked studio for four hours to finish theproduction in that day. First I recorded guitar with

acoustic sound. I used two dynamic microphones, sm57 and



e906 and one DIBOX. The position of microphones are shown

in the picture



As you see the sm57 is directed into the corner of the woofer and the e906 is exactly under sm57 but directed tothe center of woofer. This way I will have three different sounds of my guitar.

Immediately without wasting my studio time we started torecord the solo for song. Same microphone technique was used for solo. For recording the solo and rhythm I neededto do the punch recording technique:

For bass I only used DI-BOX and I think it was sounding good enough for me. Now I have everything recorded just need to EQ, top and tail the tracks, add effects and thenmix it.



POST-PRODUCTION

The post-production is started with tapping andtailing the tracks. Most probably for kick andsnare. There were lots of noises that I had to cutand then fade in and fade out the beginning and theend of each transition. Because of using 2microphones for kick drum, 2 for snares, 2 foroverheads plus 1 room microphone, there are somephases in the recorded tracks, so I zoomed each twotracks together to find out which one has phase toget fixed. I found in snares and it is fixed byreversing the recorded track. Even in acousticguitar and solo guitar I had latency between themicrophone tracks and the DI and they are fixed bymoving the track. This is normal because DI recordsthe track faster than microphones. Now that thetracks are clear it is time to EQ and use theuseful effects. I used EQ in pro tools and in thedesk as a combination. This EQ in pro tools is usedfor the first track, which is kick microphoneinside the kick drum.



I used the desk’s compressor for this track:

In another EQ in desk I cut some useless lowfrequencies. For the second microphone, which is infront of kick drum, I used an EQ and compressor inthe pro tool’s:



For the snare’s bottom microphone I used this EQwith a plug in and compressed it a little withdesk’s compressor:

The second microphone for snare has this EQ with aplug in and it has the same small compression withthe desk:



For the hi hat I used an EQ with plug in:

Floor tom has these EQ settings:



Over head microphones has same EQ and are pannedleft and right:

I made a cut for low frequencies in desk’s EQ for both over heads, because they are not needed and I’m using over heads for toms as well, so the remained frequencies are good enough:



For the room microphone I used plug in for EQ:

For acoustic guitars I used two microphones and aDI, for the SM57 I used this EQ:



For E906 I used this EQ:

For DI I used this EQ:

There is another EQ used for DI and it is desk’sEQ, Same microphones and DI was used for solo but Ididn’t like the sound of DI so I didn’t use it inthe mix. For SM57 I used this EQ:



And for e906 this EQ is used:

For base I used an EQ on pro tools and an EQ ondesk:



As you see in the picture there is a compressor onthe base line to make it sound better. Equalizationis done and it just needs some effects and thenready to mix. My guitar effecter had its owneffects but for solo I preferred to add reverb fromthe reverb unit in studio, and it sounds reallybetter than the one on “Zoom GFX-8”. I used reverbfor solo, a little for acoustic, and a little forsnare. In the mix, hi hat is panned right to give anice stereo image to the track. Overheadmicrophones are paned completely left and right. Asyou hear the track you can feel it is too muchreverb used for it but this is correct because theoriginal track is even worse, I mean this is theway Pink Floyd made this song, so I prefer to makeit like him. After the mix I recorded the bouncetrack three times to adjust the master volume andavoid any clips. Finally the last one was good andjob is done here. Recording this session, I meanthe production took eight hours in studio and post-production took eight hours as well.



CONCLUSION

This logbook was done during the pre-production, production and post-production, just after each session Itried to write down everything so nothing was missed at the end. The purpose of this session was recording and mixing one of Pin Floyd’s songs named “comfortably numb” and I am almost satisfied with what I’ve done. There are some new things that I learned. First one is about production, I forgot to check if all the microphones are working so after six times recording the drums I understood my left tom’s microphone didn’t record anything which was because of mixer’s input 7, it was notworking, I had to check it. Second is my drummer. He couldn’t work on metronome and that made me not to use midi for pads of the songs. Next time I will sure force my drummer to use the metronome as well, not only the reference track. I’m almost satisfied with my micing techniques and I really have to thank Mr.Randula Silva, my teacher becauseof teaching me these techniques and helping doing it professionally.



REFERENCE LIST

1. Bartlett, B., (2006). Session Procedures [Online] Available from: http://www.deltamedia.com/resource/session_procedures.html?L+cassette+fqje749 8+1183098644[Accessed: 21.02 2011]

2. Bartlett, B., (2006). Lo-Fi Recording: How to Trash your Tracks [Online] Available from: http://www.deltamedia.com/resource/lo_fi_recording.html?L+cassette+fqje7498+118 3098644[Accessed: 21.02 2011]

3. Cripps, J., (2005 – 2007). Bullet Points of Recording [Online] Available from: http://www.asharp.com.au/resources.html [Accessed: 21.02 2011]

4. Rudolph, B., (2001 – 2007). Studio Equipment Recall Setup Sheets And Manuals [Online] Available from: http://www.barryrudolph.com/pages/recalldirectory.html[Accessed: 21.02 2011]

5. Tips on Pre-Production [Online] Available from: http://chambinator.free.fr/english/cons1us.htm [Accessed:21.02 2011]

6. World of Recall, Recall Sheets [Online] Available from: http://chambinathor.free.fr/recallus/recallu2.htm [Accessed: 21.02 2011]


BAP 160.2 - Studio Production

Documents

Transcript of BAP 160.2 - Studio Production