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Christian Voegler
Recently, I finished up with my first set of sessions with me as the lead engineer and my mentor acting as my assistant. It was a fun and enlightening experience.
To go about finding the band, originally I was going to post flyers at a few music stores and maybe something in the Musicians section of Craigslist, but Hollis warned me against doing that. Doing a "cattle call", as he said, would certainly attract attention but it might not necessarily be from a group I was interested in working with. So I searched on Craigslist and found many people offering recording services but no one looking to be recorded. I found another website, Bandcamp, where musicians could showcase and sell their music as well as post info on upcoming shows. You can also contact bands through there. I listened to a number of groups and narrowed it down to 4 groups and ranked them in the order I wanted to work with them. The first, Zeitgeist, was a female-led punk group, but it turned out they had broken up two years ago and just had left the page up to sell their old songs. The second, Horehound, was a sludgy doom metal group with vocalists of both sexes, and they had posted that they were getting ready to record new material. Sensing a possible opportunity, I contacted them via Bandcamp with my name and details about the free recording offer, as well as links to my Soundcloud page, Recording Connection, and some information on Google about the studio to show the authenticity of what I was saying. Having been an aspiring pro musician myself at one time, I can understand how cautious one needs to be when presented with offers that may sound "too good to be true". A member of Horehound replied, thanking me for the offer but they had already found someone to work with. He suggested contacting another band they're friends with, Jake the Hawk. I checked them out on Bandcamp and their stoner/psychedelic sound grabbed me right away. I contacted them and they accepted my offer.
On the day of the first tracking session for the drums, I got to the studio a little later than expected (traffic was terrible and I had a near-miss with a pickup truck whose driver decided it was OK to straddle both lanes to get to the turning lane), but fortunately the drums had already been set up from a previous session. It turned out I had neglected to get the full details about the drummer's setup, but he replied to my text asking him pretty quickly. I decided to set up the guitar amps in the two isolation booths at the back of the main room to avoid bleed into the drum mics. For the rhythm guitar amp, I chose the Electro-Voice RE20 to add a little extra low end. For the lead guitar amp in the other booth, I used the Shure SM57. Since it would only be a scratch take for the bass, I decided to use a DI box straight into the board. I thought I had everything covered, but then Hollis informed me that some things were missing. Scratching my head for a moment, I thought maybe we just needed to set up the headphone interfaces. That was one of the things, but it wasn't the most important thing. I scratched my head a bit more, and he dropped a few hints, one of which was that someone was going to be singing. Apparently, I had forgot to plug in a cable for the scratch vocal mic! I facepalmed at my own stupidity for overlooking something so obvious. I took care of fixing that and the other more minor issues, and shortly thereafter the band arrived. As they set up, I asked a few icebreaker questions , like what part(s) of the city are they from, how long have they been playing together, etc. The song they decided to record was a bit complex, so their de facto frontman jotted down some notes for me as to how the song was arranged. It was a really good song, loose enough to rock but tight enough to sound professional. After taking a quick smoke break (for them), we decided to run through a another song, but for the project we chose to focus on the first one.
For the second session, we did the instrument overdubs. I had planned to use the same setup as before for the amps/mics, and Hollis showed me all the preamp inputs. When the band arrived, the guitarists threw a wrench into the machinery; they were both going to record their respective parts using the same amp. I wasn't sure how to handle this, so I sought my mentor's advice. He told me I just needed to route all the guitar tracks to the same input. We ran through the song, but then it turns out there was something that slipped by us all when listening back during the first session (and something I really should've noticed in editing); the drummer was late coming into a slower part near the end of the song. So that meant we had to spend extra time doing multiple takes and combining the parts so they aligned properly with the late timing.
Finally, the vocal session. A large diaphram condenser mic had been set up in the main room from a previous session, and Hollis suggested I just use that. Originally the band wanted to do their vocals part by part, but I told them it'd be easier for me if we just record the main vocal straight through from the beginning of the song. They obliged me, and we did a few takes of the main and the backup vocals. One of the parts was a whispery bit, so I had to crank the gain on the mic preamp to the point where the vocalist's breathing was audible, as if he was in a space or deep-sea diving suit. On listening back to everything, I apparently had the ratio too low on the compressor because the vocal levels on the main vocal were all over the place. Thankfully, we have volume automation to fix that.
In the end, it was an enjoyable and eye-opening experience overall. As I sat monitoring the first take with the drummer, I nodded to myself and thought, "Yeah, I could get used to this." The group's banter - some of which I joined in on - was fun to listen to. They were patient and understanding when I made a small mistake like having the wrong track armed for recording or had to stop and ask my mentor something; after all, just as this was my first time leading a session, this was their first time recording in an actual studio. I fully intend to learn from what I did wrong during the sessions, and like someone very special to me is fond of saying, "Live and learn!"
