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AJ Cannon
I forgot over the past several sessions to make a post to this blog. This one will be long.
In the next session we recorded Roy Hale singing and playing guitar on two original songs. Randy came back and played bass overdubs through a direct box. I handled alot of the mixing and recording on the two songs. We also used a drum machine so Roy could keep time and to add more to the songs. It sounded pretty good. We used Antares Auto Tune on the vocals and on the harmony tracks. In later sessions I have gone back and edited the mix after listening to it on different speakers. Me and Randy haven't had alot of time in the studio in the past couple weeks because of the holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and now the New Year have delayed us a bit. Also we had a sleet and ice storm in early December that set us back quite a bit. In one of my last sessions I created a hip hop loop by recording midi tracks of each component of the song. I used a kick drum, snare, clap, hi-hat, sleigh bells, a violin, a high bell-like sound, and a sub bass sound. I recorded the midi on separate tracks and then created new tracks for each of the midi tracks. Then I outputted the midi to the Motif-Rack and inputted back into the audio channels I created. Then I was able to tweak the sounds how I wanted using plugins. The next time I came to the studio I worked some more on the mix. In another session a few weeks back we set up Randy's drum set and did some experiment miking. Despite what most engineers on the internet said about using less mics or just using overheads and a room mic we decided to mic most of the components still. The toms and cymbals were controlled with 2 or 3 overheads, and then we also had the hi hat and snare on separate mics as well as the bass drum. We tried a Sennheiser guitar cabinet mic on the snare at one point to see how it sounded and while it did work, we got less bleed and a better tone with the SM57 as we predicted. We were going to record a gospel singing group a week or two ago but they ended up cancelling as Randy predicted they would. I was glad I didn't drive down there for the session! Randy had predicted that they wouldn't show up so I decided to go spend the weekend at home with my family and sure enough the next time me and Randy spoke, they had cancelled! I'm not a fan of the hour long drive to East End where the studio is. There is quite a bit of traffic normally when I drive down since my lessons are in the afternoon or evening. Even though I haven't spent a whole lot of time in the studio in the past few weeks, I was happy to be able to spend time with my family and friends over the holidays. My sister had to fly into Memphis on Christmas night to spend the holiday with us! It was a fun drive though when I went to pick her up. We got to do alot of catching up on the long ride. This evening I'll be driving down to the studio. We have a session set up to record Audrey and Rusty again. It will be a simple set up. Probably just two mics and maybe a DI channel for ukelele and a midi input for keyboards like last time. In my next post I will have lots to report on Pro Tools and my latest project with my friends Derek and Kailey! I'll remember to post again tonight or tomorrow! Gotta go for now!
