Week 2 - Posted on 2016-05-23 by Darren Fewins

This week I focussed all my energy on learning about Compressors and Limiters.

I loved this week. I find all these things so facinating. All these sometimes subtle changes can much such a difference to the sound of a song or record. Mark has some amazing equiptment here at ERA. I didn't get a chance to work on the analog compressors myself but I have tried some plug-in models that I had at home already to experiment with settings. 

I set up a drum session, created a drum bus and added some compression to the Bus. I then (just for fun) set up an aux track and experimented with some parrallel compression to bring the drums a little further to the front of the mix. I think it worked pretty well. 

I once again got the chance to set up a session for a pod cast which was cool. Learning about how things are routed in a recording studio can be very confusing but I think it's starting to sink in a little. The more I do it obviously the better. That's why even setting up for these little podcasts are important to do before tracking and routing for a whole band. 

We had a little tutorial on the differnece of Microphones. Another fun thing to experiment with. We set up a ribbon, dynamic and condensor Mic. We also played with the UA87's (condensor) polar pattern, swithing it between bi-directional and omni-directional, which was really cool to hear.

Also sat in on a Mixing session that Mark was doing with an Artist TJ. His group is called Mercury & The Architects. It was great to see the proccess the Mark goes through to make a session happen from start to finish. It made me feel good to see that there were some things I already do very similar, and of coarse lots of things I don't that is great to watch and learn from the master.

D