To start of my fourth trimester at SAE, I’ll be beginning with the studio-intensive. Which I’m possibly most excited about, as, for the whole time I've been at SAE I've been busting to get into the Neve room and use it. Hearing about the project we will be completing in this intensive is another reason I'm keen to get into this intensive as I rarely get a chance to record other people in a fantastic studio.
Some things I hope to get out of this intensive would be even more experience tracking live drums, something I rarely get to do. I really want to get into some more complicated drum recording techniques, seeing as though I feel like I've got a pretty good handle on the basic kick, snare and overhead setup by now. Some things I want to try out with the equipment we now have access to, setting up multiple room mics to get an explosive sound, also I would like to use as much outboard gear as possible on the way into pro tools.
In the studio profession, there are a lot of notable people that inspire me to do more in this field: Andrew Schepps, Joe Barresi, Tchad Blake, but one who stands out the most to me would probably have to be Steve Albini. Steve’s approach to recording is unique in that he refuses to implement any modern techniques into his workflow, sticking with the tried and true method of going straight to 24 track tape. Although I don't see myself ever using this method, knowing how good modern computer recording is now, his self imposed restrictions have forced him to create new methods of processing and tracking which I find extremely interesting. One technique that immediately comes to mind would be the way he records a bass drum, in particularly the beater microphone that he implements. What this is, is a lapel microphone hanging in front of the beater side of the bass drum, just above where the beater makes contact with the head. The purpose of this microphone is to capture the attack of the bass drum without the boominess of having a microphone inside the drum. This technique seems to fair well for him except for the unflattering bleed that is picked up from the snare drum, being so close to it. Whereas in the digital world this would be an easy fix with iZotope de-bleed or something in a similar form, Albini’s analogue fix for this is to have a compressor on the lapel mic side-chained to the snare microphone, so that every time the snare is hit the compressor engages, in turn, ducking the snare out of the lapel mic. To trim off any extraneous noise left over from the ducking effect Albini then runs the signal from the lapel mic through an expander so that all you’re left with is the clean attack sound of the bass drum. This processing works much better than just gating, in my opinion, a gate tends to make the sound too clicky and takes too much away from the desired sound. Another aspect of Steve’s recording and mixing process which makes him so unique is that so much of his processing (EQ, Dynamics, artificial space generation) is done in the tracking phase, which often leaves him just to set levels and any small EQ adjustments in the mixing phase.
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