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Diego Pacheco
12:00-11:00pm
I was on my 3rd lesson when K Watkins, brother of TBoz from TLC walks in studio A and starts to talk to Donny about tracking an instrumental. He produced the track for TLC and wanted to lay everything down with real instruments and real drums with musicians. They discussed the song and what particular sound he wanted to go with. They also discussed the budget they had to work with and to pay the musicians which was interesting to hear. When an artist has a label and if the artist is good (obviously) they have as much budget they can get. He reserved the studio for the whole day, Donny already had certain musicians he wanted to contact, mainly because they are really good at what they play but most importantly their professionalism. The whole discussion I think took about an hour or more, I wasn't there for the hiring of the musicians. For me this was a great opportunity to just listen in on how a producer would approach an engineer when it comes to the business aspect. I was really pumped and excited to be able to just listen to their conversation let alone be invited on the actual tracking of the song the next day. At this point I am really excited about the program and all that it has to offer. I get to Studio at 12:00 on Sunday and the drums were already set up and mics were also set up. This was the first step to tracking any song, the acoustics. From my understanding the drums are essential to track first because of the dynamics that take place in the overall sound and feel of the song. At this point I'm not too familiar with micking techniques when it comes to the drums but i was attentive as to where they were placed and how far. I also was not too sure about all the compressors they used, limiters and what mics were hooked up. TBoz walks in at this point while they are checking levels and she makes a suggestion. "I want it sped up" she says. Donny finds her desired tempo as she sings the chorus. Tempo is set levels are good and they begin to track the drums. I was impressed, the amount of time it took Dan (I believe is his name) to lay the drums was phenomenal! He had a good ear and a tight sound. When he listened back to the track he knew exactly what to fix. The lead guitar was next, unfortunately I can't remember the name of the guitarist but watching it being tracked definitely opened my eyes and ears to how they captured the desired sound. Again I learned that much more when it came to tracking the lead guitar, a couple of mono layers and a few or more stereo layers panned left and panned right. This process took a little longer because of the feeling that they wanted to capture. As far as the drums went I knew I had more to learn. Unfortunately there was not enough time to track vocals. Eleven hours later the session was wrapped up. We had listened to the song in comparison to the instrumental, one word..WOW! K Watkins had the session bounced to him and he said he would do more to the drums at his studio. It definitely was a long day but really didn't feel like it at all.
